The Art of Post-Dictatorship

Ethics and Aesthetics in Transitional Argentina

Vikki Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317975588
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Since the end of the last dictatorship in 1983, Argentina's visual artists and art-activists have been central to campaigns to demand the criminal prosecution of those initially granted amnesty and to a variety of commemorative projects. In The Art of Post-Dictatorship: Ethics and Aesthetics in Transitional Argentina Vikki Bell examines this involvement and intervention. She argues that the problematics that arise within the aesthetic realm cannot be understood solely through an art-historical approach; instead, they must be understood as a constitutive part of a broader collective endeavour. In this sense, the 'art' of post-dictatorship is not something that belongs to art or the artists themselves, but is about how the subjectivities and imaginations of new generations are constituted and entwined with questions of response, ethics and justice. It concerns how people align themselves between the past and the future.

This book will be an invaluable resource for those studying the law, politics, art and sociology of contemporary Argentina as well as those concerned more widely with transitional justice and the politics of memory.

Chapter 1 Introduction

Between past and future, the art of post-dictatorship

DOI: 10.4324/9781315871394-1

The idea of transitional justice rests on the premise that it is necessary to attend to the past in order to progress into a future in which the past has been ‘dealt with’, which is to say, simultaneously understood – or at least documented – judged and thereby escaped. Indeed, in societies emerging from periods of violence it is frequently implied that unless the force of the past is confronted, it retains the potential to flood the future with its determinations. By collective effort, the hopeful argue, that force can be resisted or reoriented.¹ Insofar as this attention to the past is undertaken in view of an improved future, one might argue as does Hannah Arendt that it is the force of the future that necessitates our battles with the force of the past (1963a: 10). Caught between the force of past that may overwhelm to the point of determining our future, and that of the future that insists we attend to that past, human existence dwells, as she put it, ‘in the interval between past and future’. In so-called ‘transitional’ societies, dwelling within this interval is keenly felt. Pressures and responsibilities arise because there is precisely the chance for ‘the beginning of a [new] beginning’, for actions that may cause the forces of past and future to ‘deflect … from their original direction’ (1963a: 11).

This return to the past takes the form of a promise, therefore, and is a performative that entails the risk of failure.² Indeed, one might say that these returns have a spectral quality in both directions. Transitional justice mechanisms in their various guises attend to voices and ghosts from the past, inviting them to appear, while also conjuring up the future. ‘[T]he thinking of the spectre, contrary to what good sense leads us to believe, signals toward the future. It is a thinking of the past, a legacy that can come only from that which has not yet arrived – from the arrivant itself’ (Derrida, 1994: 196, n39). In fact, at least two possible futures are conjured up, that which we must avoid (the repetitive future, which repeats past mistakes and violences) and that which we attempt to bring about (the desired, peaceful future). And here is the threat, for to launch the promise of another future is to engage in a strategy of risk. ‘The performative of the promise, directed toward other possibilities of the past and future, is thus unavoidably linked to a threat to this promise itself and thereby to the effacement of this performative’ (Hamacher, 2001: 163).

In 2006, following the shocking disappearance of Jorge Julio López, a key witness in the trial of the former Director of Investigations of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police, Miguel Etchecolatz, Argentina’s then President Néstor Kirchner spoke in such abstract terms. ‘El pasado no está derrotado ni vencido [the past is neither defeated nor won]’,³ he said, figuring the past as an undefeated force in the present, one with which, he wearily suggested, Argentina had still to do battle. Even at the site of law, and at the beginning of the process of trying those who had escaped imprisonment for crimes committed in relation to the violent repression of the last dictatorship (1976–83), the process of transition had provoked a return of the violent practices of a past from which the country had been attempting, for decades, to emerge. Rather than being confined to history, the practice of ‘disappearing’, the dictatorship’s principal repressive strategy, had been employed once again in what appeared to be an orchestrated warning to those who were giving evidence as part of these legal processes of what has been termed ‘belated justice’.⁴ The incident led to widespread protests, with demonstrations demanding the return of López in the same way that the Madres de Plaza de Mayo began their famous campaign during the dictatorship. The crowd shouted: ‘Julio López: aparición con vida ya! [Julio López: appearance with life now!]’ This now familiar yet still peculiar demand has been a key slogan. Long associated with the Madres, who demanded the return of their disappeared children ‘alive, as they were taken’, it signals the social body’s refusal to be pacified. But the addressee of the demand is unclear. At first blush addressing those who are guilty of the act of disappearance, calling on them to deliver the missing persons, the demand can also be heard as a call to the disappeared themselves. In this sense, the call toys with an impossibility, conjuring up the spectral quality of the category of the disappeared that is invited to haunt the present, to lend its ‘seething presence’ to the making of a present sociality that is ‘tangible and tactile as well as ephemeral and imaginary’ as Avery Gordon put it (1997: 8, 201). It is a call, moreover, that enlists those spectres as it raises its sights to justice. Its repetition expresses solidarity and even an optimism borne of that solidarity, while simultaneously remembering how historically such demands have met with indifference. Indeed, printed on banners and vests worn by demonstrators marching in Buenos Aires on the first anniversary of López’s disappearance, that history was remembered: ‘No a la impunidad de ayer y de hoy! [No to the impunity of yesterday and of today!]’

As the disappearance of López so appallingly emphasised, although Argentina’s experience of ‘transition’ is frequently cited as exemplary within legalistically oriented discussions of transitional justice, it has by no means been smooth. No homogeneous ‘collective memory’ has arisen in the post-dictatorship period, and in the tension between collected and collective, battles of how to understand and judge the past continue to be fought (see, e.g., Arfuch, 2008: 77–89).⁵ The adoption of the notion of memory by the rightwing ‘Complete Memory’ group is an example of how the concept does little to rearrange prior antagonisms (Salvi, 2011). Likewise, the debates sparked by the letter by Córdoba-based philosopher Oscar del Barco (2007), who argued – drawing on his own experiences of militancy and articulating them in part through the language of Levinasian ethics – that the left needs to assume responsibility for its own use of violence in the 1960s and 1970s, indicate the deep fissures that mark the contemporary politics of memory in Argentina.⁶

The Art of Post-Dictatorship begins from the observation that in contemporary Argentina, questions of justice relating to the last dictatorship are approached within a broad spectrum of engagements. Not only in the courts and on the streets in large gatherings like the demonstrations calling for López’s return or those on the anniversary of the coup (24 March), but also, as numerous scholars have shown, across the arts. In film, theatre and literature and beyond, in creative and often hybrid forms, the continuing force of the past and its implications for the present are explored (see, e.g., Feld & Mor, 2009; Hite, 2011; Macón, 2006; Taylor, 1997, 2003; Werth, 2010). The ‘art’ in this book’s title does not refer to the artistic productions that result in the post-dictatorship period, however, so much as the ways in which the attempt to live mindfully in the gap between past and future is itself an art, an ‘aesthetics of existence’ (Foucault, 1985: 12), if you will. I borrow this term from Foucault’s discussion of the ‘intentional and voluntary actions’ that individuals undertake as ‘techniques of the self’ (Foucault, 1985: 10–11) that are always, however, in conversation with the prevailing norms of present political configurations. That is, I would wish the term ‘art’ to subtend a critical and collective engagement with the political arrangements of life (more so, that is, than it does an attention to one’s own exemplarity in Baudelaire’s sense). In other words, one must remember that Foucault’s attention to the ‘aesthetics of existence’ was bound up with his interest in how people are able to adopt a critical attitude within and despite the ways in which power structures their lives. To attend to this critical attitude is to attend to how people relate to their realities through their modes of thinking and feeling, their ways of acting and behaving, which at one and the same time, he argued ‘[mark] a relation of belonging and present [that practice] … as a task. A bit like what the Greeks called an ethos’ (1997b: 309).

Even during the bleak years of the last dictatorship, artists continued to make and exhibit work that constituted a challenge to the dictatorship’s practices, reflecting and critiquing the various deformations that were occurring around them (Bell & Di Paolantonio, 2009; Ramírez, 1999). The making of artefacts and the practice of critique were inseparable for these artists. Moreover, numerous political protests have involved aesthetic practices centrally. To name only a couple of the most well-known examples, the paper silhouettes used in the 1983 demonstrations in front of the Casa Rosada were clearly intended to make critical use of an impressive aesthetic impact (Longoni & Bruzzone, 2008). And photo-journalists’ images of the Madres such as those by Daniel García and Marcelo Ranea played a significant role in promoting the communication of their situation and demands in relation to the disappearances that were unacknowledged by the State at that time (Gamarnik, 2012). My argument here is that continuing into the post-dictatorship period in Argentina, numerous interventions seek to reflect on the ‘long present’ (Bell, 2011) not as mere illustrations of the history of the country but in ways that make such interventions fully part of that history, constituting a key mode by which people have marked and remarked on the task of belonging to this period. At this level of attentive reflection on the gap ‘between past and future’, profound questions arise that exceed any request to or response by elite State actors.

So while some of the chapters here focus on aesthetic artefacts produced by those who reflect on the task of belonging to a present which is, in their estimation, by no means ‘done with’ the past, it is the ethos, the entwining of ethics and aesthetics as modes of critique, that guides the attention given to the photographs, paintings, sculptures and spaces considered in these chapters. All are understood as what Mike Shapiro has termed ‘ethico-aesthetic enactments’ that ‘seek to provide a frame for reflecting on the meaning and value of events and arrangements in the face of either competing and incommensurate value commitments and/or alternative perspectives’ (Shapiro, 2013: 54). These reflections repeatedly grapple with the most difficult questions of response to events of the past, raising crucial issues of responseability. These are issues, moreover, which, by their very nature, resist absolute closure. To use Levinas’ (1969) term, they belong to the realm of the infinite, and therefore involve questions that are forever searching, irresolvable and aporetic. For him, the ethical is situated in such a realm, one of ‘non-indifference’ of one to another, by which he meant that ethics concerns ‘a responsibility of one for another … before the reciprocity of this responsibility which will be inscribed in impersonal laws’ (1998: 100). Within this necessarily asymmetrical relation to the other, one is exposed. For to consider one’s response to the other is to call into question one’s practice of freedom. The absolute exteriority of the other ‘unseats me’, makes me ashamed and limits the (theoretically) unlimitedness of my possible response (De Boer, 1986).

The halting images created by Gustavo Germano are a beautiful example of recent artworks that create a frame for reflection, as Shapiro called it. Working with the terrible simplicity of the absence left by State violence, these interventions reproduce an old photograph and create a new image to hang alongside it in which the first scene is recreated but with the loss of the disappeared relative now achingly apparent (Plates 1, 2, 3 and 4). If artworks are uniquely poised to reflect on absence and presence, since they always implicitly pose questions of creativity – why create art? why these particular choices? etc. – in the context of State violence in which dis appearances became the State’s strategy against its own people (Calveiro, 2006), the task takes on a specific intensity. Germano’s images ‘unseat’. And if they manage to provide a frame for reflecting on the legacies of that history, they do so via gentle visual insistence and subtle forms of exposure.

For Levinas, the exposure that occurs in the realm of ethics is interrupted by the realms of law and politics, realms of rendering-calculable, decision making and totalities. The point is relevant insofar as the ethico-aesthetic considerations at stake here always at least potentially concern questions that are broader than law and the institutions of the political, precisely because they are both prior to law in Levinas’ sense and, by the same token, remain after and beyond any attempt to grasp them via formal transitional mechanisms.

This book is premised therefore on the argument that Argentina’s post-dictatorship period is a story that is only partly grasped via the role of law and legal decisions, the privileged site for transitional justice scholars. Rather than allow law to ‘speak for’ and provide accounts for ‘the community’ (Douzinas & Geary, 2005), it seeks to consider the creative modes by which people ponder issues of response and responsibility, by which they practice their freedom, beyond the legalistic mechanisms of transitional justice. The ‘ethico-aesthetic’ practices at stake remain practices of the nomos, however, even if they performatively suspend or defer legal judgments and decisions in favour of more ruminative practices. This is an approach that does recognise the importance of law, therefore; it understands its privilege and its special ability to record the assertion of judgment over the past in such a way that, without binding it absolutely, the future must take note.⁷ But the law’s role is decentred within a wider perspective closer to that of socio-legal theorist Robert Cover, whose concept of the nomos points to the normative worlds in which people come to understand themselves. This they do through all their concerted activities, including the aesthetic, such that the formal institutions of the law, ‘are but a small part of the normative universe that ought to claim our attention’ (Cover, 1993: 95). In order to approach the richness of the nomos, one must give consideration to the variety of ways and activities through which people consider what is and what ought to be, in which they consider and raise questions regarding their shared lives. Cover speaks of the construction of narratives and myths, and argues that it is these that enable a people to establish ‘a repertoire of moves’ or a ‘lexicon of normative action’ (1993: 101). In The Art of Post-Dictatorship, there will be less emphasis on narrative forms, and a broader sense of how and where the nomos is constituted. But the book shares the insistence on the importance of these alternative sites at which people consider their worlds against their yearnings and their hopes for the future. ‘Our visions hold our reality up to us as unredeemed’ (1993: 102), Cover wrote. In these activities, law is not necessarily either rejected or affirmed; it may be positioned in multiple ways. It can be suspended, or it can become a ‘resource in signification’ (1993: 100) by which people for example, take distance, ironise, or reaffirm their normative commitments; variously law ‘enables us to submit, rejoice, struggle, pervert, mock, disgrace, humiliate...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• List of plates
• 1 Introduction: between past and future, the art of post-dictatorship
• 2 On Fernando’s photograph: biopolitics, aparición and the demands of the disappeared
• 3 Writing to the General and other aesthetic practices of critique: the art of León Ferrari as a practice of freedom
• 4 Re-turning the past: the ESMA trial and affective architecture at the ‘Space of Memory’
• 5 Missed appointments: ethics at the Parque de la Memoria
• 6 The invitation to imagine: addressing photography in Córdoba
• 7 Absence and vigilance: the artwork of Diana Dowek and Lucila Quieto
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index