Norberto Puzzolo: ‘60s Experiments and Structures
“There are artists who start movements and there are movements that breed artists, or at least wake them up.”
Hugo Parpagnoli, Rosario 67, Buenos Aires, Museo de Arte Moderno, September 1967.
“The term ‘minimal’ (…) became fashionable in 1965 (…). The trend – also known as reductionist art, ‘cool art,’ ‘ABC art,’ or primary structures – turned into a style of sculpture in which the different forms are reduced to minimal states of order and complexity from the standpoint of morphology, perception, and signification. It developed especially in the United States, and has also distinguished the group in Argentina.”
Simón Marchán Fiz, Del arte objetual al arte de concepto [From Object Art to Concept Art], Madrid, Akal, 1997, p. 99.
After showing his Pirámide virtual con visión exterior e interior [Virtual Pyramid with Outside and Inside View] at Rosario 67 at the tender age of nineteen, Norberto Puzzolo rapidly gained a profile as one of the youngest experimental artists in the country. He was part of an adventure that began in Rosario among a group of artists – between seven and twenty years older than him – who were restless to discover new modalities for art, in keeping with the dizzying changes that the Sixties demanded. These investigations led him to to take up, in an extremely short time, various languages: from abstract gesturality, the rigors of geometrical abstraction, and the expanse, half sculptural and half architectural, of minimalist structures, to the immateriality of conceptual projects. In line with this, and with increasing commitment to reality, he participated in 1968 in the collective that created Tucumán arde [Tucumán Is Burning], one of the most complex and intense esthetic undertakings in political art not just in Argentina but in the world.
The group of pieces currently on view correspond to this burgeoning yet also definitive moment in the history of contemporary art. Sketches, descriptive memos, drawings and original plans of primary structures bring out the importance of planning in this kind of work, the basis for its material concretization. A creative and at the same time documentary kernel, they are in some cases the only historical instantiation of works such as Estructura I, III y IV, which in their day were ultimately not made and, in other works, were a starting point for others that, although they did take on physical form – Pirámide and Estructura II, for example –, did not survive the passage of time and were recreated only later on.
The minimalist trend, enshrined in this country in shows such as Estructuras primarias II [Primary Structures II], presented in September 1967 during the Semana del Arte Avanzado en la Argentina [Week of Advanced Art in Argentina ], encouraged a reductionist conception that spawned works such as Estructura II, included in the above-mentioned exhibition, based on elementary geometrical forms, structured into large modular corpuses displayed as installations.
Even while immersed in these ideas, Puzzolo turned toward other conceptual proposals, which found expression in 1/4 del volumen total [A Fourth of the Total Volume] and 1/8 del volumen total [An Eighth of the Total Volume], whose meaning is resolved, through receptive collaboration, in the viewer’s imagination. Also in 1967 he made La línea [Line] and Situación real [Real Situation], in which he used, respectively, an industrial material like nylon thread and signs with texts urging the public to take the lead in activating the work. A similar mechanism can be found in Determinado lugar de la sala y los espectadores que Ia habitan [A Set Place in the Room and the Viewers Inhabiting It] – a Project presented at the Instituto Di Tella, also not executed at the time – in which a transparent glass placed in the middle of the exhibition space subtly led viewers to look at one another.
Finally, in the installation known as Las sillas [Chairs] – inaugural event in the Experimental Art Series created in Rosario by the Avant-Garde Art Group in 1968–, the artist set up seating from which each viewer could look at the street through a glass partition while passers-by were able to contemplate, inside this space, the group of chairs and their momentary occupants. For this work Puzzolo used the circular exchange of roles beween the work and its receiver, achieving the dematerialization of the sculptural object at the same time that he achieved one of the decade’s ideals: identification between art and life.
This exhibition of projects, objects, and reconstructions is complemented by sets of photographs and documents that testify to the work of an original creator who emerged from the fertile, controversial decade of the 1960s, committed from the start to experimentation in the most current of languages.
Adriana Lauria