In the 1960s, a time marked by radical experimentation
and growing questioning of the limits of art, some artists renewed
the tactics of the avant-gardes in a series of gestures of destruction
of their own works and their meanings. This repertoire of ludic approaches set out to revitalise art, both at the start of that decade, obsessed as it was with cultural modernisation, and in the years
that followed, when authoritarian governments and dictatorships were the order of the day. From that period of transformation emerged works reflecting not only on the vulnerability of objects, bodies and symbols but on their capacity for resistance.
With pieces from the Museo Moderno’s collection strongly present, particularly those from early on in its history, the exhibition brings together works by some of the most emblematic artists of the period. The ambivalence between play and anger is the main feature of these great creators’ relationships with their artistic objects. Like toys
in the hands of children, they take on lives of their own and explode. Juguetes rabiosos [Mad Toys] was conceived with the participation of guest artist Joaquín Aras (Buenos Aires, 1985),
who delved into the 1960s film archives in search of affinities with the materials and sensibilities of the works on view here. In collaboration with the museum’s Conservation Department, Aras also produced
a piece combining different strategies from experimental film to reflect on the work of restoration and the transcendent meanings of matter
and memory in art collections.
Text from curator Patricio Orellana
Artista interlocutor invitado: Joaquín Aras
Curaduría: Patricio Orellana
Diseño museográfico: Daniela Thomas, Felipe Tassara e Iván Rösler
Producción: Julieta Potenze
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