do c uM En t / In t r o d u c tIo n

IntroductIon to FEl IPE EhrEnbErg’S
“In SEarch oF a Mod El F or lIFE ”

KarEn BEnEzra

Felipe Ehrenberg’s “In Search of a Model for Life” provides a schematic
overview of the autonomous, experimental art movement known as Los
Grupos (the Groups) based largely in Mexico City during the mid- to
late 1970s. The Groups can be characterized by their critical attitude
toward the academicism and burgeoning experimentalism of the coun-
try’s state-run art institutions, their emphasis on the collective process
of artistic production, and their critical reappropriation of the revolu-
tionary and postrevolutionary traditions of open-air workshops, public
art, and artists’ syndicates in Mexico.

Born in 1943, Ehrenberg began exhibiting his work as an artist
in 1963 in Mexico City, in a long and varied career that has made its
own contributions to the currents of conceptualism, mail art, Fluxus,
performance, and neographic art. While in political exile in Britain
between 1968 and 1974, Ehrenberg took part in a number of collab-
orative projects including Beau Geste Press, an artisanal publishing
house, and the collective Taller Polígono (Polygon Workshop) with
the Austrian artist Richard Kriesche and the Mexican photographer
Rodolfo Alcaraz.1 Upon returning to Mexico, Ehrenberg cofounded

Issa María Benítez Dueñas, “Reconstruir el vacío y recuperar el espacio: Ehrenberg con-
ceptual,” in Felipe Ehrenberg: Manchuria país periférico (Mexico City: Editorial Diamantina,
2007), 24.

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KarEn BEnEzra

one of the earliest Groups, Proceso Pentágono (Pentagon Trial), together
with Víctor Muñoz, José Antonio Hernández Amezcua, and Carlos
Fink, officially taking shape in 1977 after several years of collaboration
between its members and those of other early and politically oriented
artists’ collectives, including Tepito Arte Acá (Tepito Art Here), the
Taller de Arte e Ideología (TAI) (Art and Ideology Workshop), and TACO
(Taller de Arte y Comunicación) (Art and Communication Workshop).
In a tone representative of this early wave of the Groups, Proceso
Pentágono described its task as one of artistic investigation and experi-
mentation, positioning itself in explicit opposition to the state’s bureau-
cratic administration of culture and the formal conventions and liberal
ideology it supported.2 The proliferation of politically engaged artists’
collectives beginning in the late 1960s emerged both from within and as
a response to the Mexican state’s violent repression of the 1968 student
protests and its dirty war against the radical left over the decade to fol-
low. As fine arts students at Mexico’s highly traditional academies at the
time, Generación 65 (Generation 65), for example, participated directly
in the production of graphic art for the student movement, while other
protagonists cite the more general crisis of political representation as
the impetus behind the Groups’ critical stance.3 Though they formally
organized as Groups only in 1977, a distinctively critical approach to
the visual arts pervaded the spirit of these early artists’ associations, an
approach that would also characterize the Groups movement a few years
later. This is particularly notable in the integral role played by journalists,
writers, and theorists: TACO worked directly with the employees’ union
at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in producing
its own literary journal, while TAI grew out of Alberto Híjar Serrano’s
aesthetics lectures at UNAM, strongly influenced by structural Marxist
approaches to ideology and artistic production.

Though in their statements from the late 1970s Proceso Pentágono

often cited the irreparable chasm that separated it from the state-
sponsored academies and salons of the Mexican art world at the time,
it is important to remember that the Groups’ brief history as a cogent

Grupo Proceso Pentágono, “De lo frío a lo caliente,” in Frentes, coaliciones y talleres: Grupos
visuales en México en el siglo XX, ed. Alberto Híjar Serrano (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional
para la Cultura y las Artes, 2007), 319–22.
The fall of 1968 also witnessed the first Independent Salon just a month after the mas-
sacre, as a form of protest against the criteria and format of the National Institute of Fine
Art’s own annual artists’ competition. See Dominique Liquois, De Los Grupos los individuos
(Mexico City: Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, 1985), 11.

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movement was also strongly punctuated by its institutional appear-
ances. Indeed, it was the call to exhibit in the Latin American section at
the X Paris Youth Biennial in 1977 that spurred many informal artists’
associations to define themselves more definitively as Groups.4 The
biennial’s ultimate censorship of allusions to Latin America’s military
dictatorships and the opportunity for the four participating Groups to
duplicate and exhibit their work simultaneously in Mexico City helped
to further consolidate the movement, giving rise to the short-lived
Mexican Front of Cultural Workers’ Groups in 1978. Set against the
backdrop of the Sandinista offensive in Nicaragua, the Front would
emphasize the solidarity with proletarian struggle and its recupera-
tion of control over the means of production and circulation of art that
already subtended much of the Groups’ activity. It would also go on
to organize several exhibitions of national and international public
and graphic art.5 The novelty of these shows lay less in their outright
rejection of the art institution than in their internal opposition to both
the academicism of the National Fine Arts Institute (INBA) and the
growing commercial market for experimentalism within the national
context at the time.6 Indeed, the INBA’s First (and only) Annual
Experimentation Section, 1978–79, has often been seen as the Groups’
culminating experience and, perhaps appropriately, the academic estab-
lishment’s first official recognition of nonobjective art broadly speak-
ing. The organizers’ purposefully marginal placement of the Groups’
works, in contrast to that of less politicized pieces, and the utter lack
of publicity or public response were perceived as a definitive parting

The sculptor Helen Escobedo, then curator of the Museo Universitario de Ciencias y Arte
(University Museum of Arts and Sciences), was charged with putting together the Mexican
pavilion for the X Paris Youth Biennial. Escobedo’s decision to select from among the
burgeoning scene of mostly informal artists’ collectives, ultimately sending Grupo Proceso
Pentágono, Grupo Suma, Grupo TAI, and Tetraedro, helped to mobilize the definitive
constitution and public presence of the Groups as collective actors and producers. Many
thanks are due to Felipe Ehrenberg for his very generous and meticulous revision of this
translation and introduction, and, in particular, of the chronology of the Groups movement
presented here.
These exhibitions include Muros frente a muros (Walls against Walls), Arte y luchas popu-
lares en México y América Latina (Art and Popular Struggles in Mexico and Latin America),
and América en la mira (America in Sight). See Liquois, De Los Grupos, 33.
Like the Institutional Revolutionary Party, the INBA was, in the mid-1940s under the
presidency of Miguel Alemán and amid the ferment of national industrialization via import
substitution, giving way to what is often recognized as a postwar period of purported politi-
cal stability. See Héctor Aguilar Camín and Lorenzo Meyer, In the Shadow of the Mexican
Revolution: 1910–1989 (Austin: University of Texas, 1993), 159–70.

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of ways between the Groups and the quickly growing market for and
official administration of contemporary art in Mexico.7

The ideological, professional, and organizational disputes that

would dissolve the Front and the apparent triumph of a depoliti-
cized approach to experimentalism at the Annual Experimentation
Section play a central role in the teleological narrative about the
Groups espoused in De Los Grupos los Individuos (From the Groups,
Individuals), the exhibition catalogue to which Ehrenberg’s “In Search
of a Model for Life” appeared as one of three external appendices. This
retrospective of the Groups was held from June to August 1985 at the
Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil in Mexico City.8 The catalogue’s history of
the Groups ends by posing their fate in terms of an artificially forced
choice: they could either live on a professional “subsistence” diet and
remain independent or promote their works in the market, the “inevita-
ble” choice of any oppositional artistic movement that must place itself
within an established system.9 Against the exhibition’s own unabashed
cynicism, Ehrenberg describes the Groups’ collective form of work in
terms of a model, but for life, in line with the universal concerns and
broader efforts at socialized labor beyond the realm of art.

I would suggest, however, that we take pause before assigning
the critical value of Ehrenberg’s text too quickly to the Groups’ pur-
ported transcendence of the visual arts and their institutions. The
Groups’ formal experimentalism and critical attitude toward both the
Mexican School of Mural Painting and the individualist interiority of
the so-called Generation of Rupture that followed cannot be thought
of as “mere” responses to the social rupture of ’68. On the contrary,
Ehrenberg’s text allows us to glimpse a movement that dared to lay bare
the ideological and economic grounds of the visual arts in contempo-
rary, neoliberal Mexico: the transmutation of artistic conventions from
academicism to experimentalism and the complicity woven between
a repressive state and a liberal, intellectual elite through new forms of
cultural and educational patronage. The Groups were born not only of

César Espinosa and Araceli Zúñiga, La perra brava: Arte crisis y políticas culturales (Mexico
City: UNAM, 2002), 47–53.
The Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil was founded in 1974 through the donation of Álvaro
Carrillo Gil’s private collection of modern Mexican art to the federal government. Despite
functioning under the auspices of the state, the museum became known as one of Mexico
City’s independent art spaces in the 1990s.
Liquois, De Los Grupos, 48.

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the 1968 protests and their repression but also of the new and more
tolerant face it adopted under the administration of President Luis
Echeverría Álvarez, bolstered by the rapid influx of petroleum profits
in the 1970s. If, as TACO’s Araceli Zúñiga and César Espinosa have
observed, the Front was meant to combat the state’s integrationist
policies and apparent sympathy for contemporary art, the difficulty of
theorizing its relationship to the institution of art arises from these same
conditions. Thus in lieu of posing the Groups in relation to theories of
the avant-garde and their detractors, a renewed critical approach to the
scene of the 1970s should begin by taking Ehrenberg at his word.10 If the
Groups’ effort at collectivization was to have transcended the world of the
visual arts at the level of its production, then the more detailed analysis
of its specific works and exhibitions must begin by inquiring about the
unique value, if any, of artistic labor in this context.11

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10 Espinosa and Zúñiga, La perra brava, 60–61.
11 Many thanks to Cristina Híjar for the generous access she allowed me to her documen-

tal archive of Los Grupos at the Centro Nacional de Investigación, Documentación e
Información de Artes Plásticas.

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do c uM En t

In SE arch o F a M odEl F or l IFE 1

FElipE EhrEnBErg

By the beginning of the 1970s, the previously agitated currents of the
visual arts had calmed and once again began to flow placidly, inter-
rupted only by this or that polite, lukewarm polemic. Apart from some
honorable exceptions, the artists who had once stood out and excelled
had been tamed and weakened by circumstances beyond their con-
trol. Concentrated in the capital and trapped within an increasingly
organized society, these artists decided to isolate themselves from the
problems that moved the country as a whole, and they were lulled by
the interested caresses of the country’s powerful groups.

Suddenly, from within the channels guiding the flow of art, there
developed something that surprised even the more progressive think-
ers. It was a kind of reef, which forced the currents to swirl around,
break up, try and destroy such a hurdle: a number of artists were chal-
lenging the established order in an unexpected way. Reinterpreting
the order of public art that had been so vehemently rejected by the

Originally published in Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil. 1985. De los grupos los individuos: Artistas
plásticos de los grupos metropolitanos : Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, junio-agosto 1985. Ciudad
de México: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. An online Spanish version can be found at
http://bibliothequekandinsky.centrepompidou.fr/cataloguedoc/fondsphoto/cgi-bin/image
.asp? (slides 96-101).

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EhrEnbErg | In SEarch of a ModEl for lIfE

previous generation, they sought with an unusual sense of urgency to
make direct connections with the man on the street and confront the
conflicts imposed on him by our societies.

For these artists, it was evident that the orthodoxy of traditional
painting restricted the possibilities for achieving their objective. It was
also clear to them that solutions could be found neither in fits of indi-
vidualism nor in sponsored gigantism. And so, ignoring the rules of
the game of High Art, these largely young painters armed themselves
with an arsenal of extremely novel material and formal resources to
help them develop their ideas.

Beyond these artists’ undeniable contributions to the enrichment

of the visual arts, what will endure as their greatest achievement are
the steps that they were able to take towards the collectivization of the
artistic practice.

Conceived nearly a decade after the beginnings of the movement,

the exhibition “Los Grupos, Los Individuos” (sic) acquires a special
meaning. It calls not only for a revision of what has happened, but
also for comparisons with the current backward-looking panorama
of the arts. The high caliber of the collection demonstrates that the
act of coming together to create (and to distribute) does not annul
the freedom of the individual (as critics like to repeat), but rather
enriches his work in unforeseen ways. Even more important, the
confrontation between collective and individual productions under-
lines the need to encourage research that will help to explain the
processes that led to collectivization. This knowledge is indispensable
for locating the complex interrelation of elements that have impeded
the development of collectivization and which dominate in all creative
manifestations.

The artists, ever since coming together in the first groups, man-
aged to surprise and amaze for many different reasons; among others,
for their unusual vigor, for their professional maturity, for the eclectic
variety of their proposals, for the consistency of their achievements as
a whole, and for their repudiation of the prevailing values and ritu-
als of the world of high art (although, at a later date, circumstances
debilitated the positions maintained by some of the artists). They also
surprised with a not-insignificant gesture, which highlighted their
break even from previous anti-establishment rhetoric: without excep-
tion, the recently formed groups refrained from launching the typical
manifesto that would announce them as a school or tendency. Without

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the traditional guidance of such declarations, no one seems to have
been capable of gathering the information needed to offer a global
vision of the movement. It thus tends to be described as a “phenome-
non,” instead of being recognized as a step forward consistent with the
development of our visual arts.2

Seen from within, the construction processes of each one of the

groups were highly stimulating and, at the same time, distressing.
As our discoveries eroded concepts that had been instilled in us since
childhood (the power of individual vision, solitary work habits, the cult
of alienation, formal restrictions, etc.), possibilities for alternative social
landscapes unfolded. In these landscapes, emulation would replace
competition, and artistic work—a result of group effort—could coher-
ently form a part of the struggles of the majority, as one more weapon
in the fight for the liberation of our people. What the groups sought in
the collectivization of art, perhaps without consciously recognizing it,
was a model for life.

There are things that should be said with clarity and without
reserve. What we began a decade ago, as a group of some fifty artists
and intellectuals, was not the product of a solitary utopianism. Rather,
it was one of the most revolutionary proposals to have ever come out of
the global artistic sphere.

In the diversity of proposals made by the different groups during
the seventies, we can find numerous, highly valuable contributions to
contemporary art. There is, for example, the “turn” that is offered in a
natural way to the old ally of postmodernism, or the clear propositions
made—this is the work—to rearm the aesthetic jigsaw puzzle whose
configuration was based upon the institutionalized, transnational com-
mercialization of the artistic product.3 What is most moving, never-
theless, is that in the accumulated inventory of collectively developed

For want of a definition consistent with the occurrences of history, the word “phenomenon”
could, in principle, be operative. However, given the meanness of journalists and critics
who could not or did not want to carry out their complementary functions, there exists the
danger that such an insufficient description could be used to minimize artistic achieve-
ments and contributions. This misuse would serve the purpose of isolating such efforts
from the development of the culture promoted by the conservative sectors to legitimize
their vision of the world.
Today, the concept of “ugliness” (“feísmo”) grows as an antithesis to previous ideas of
exquisiteness (“esquisitismos”), post-conceptualism once again takes up the object, and the
art markets, agonizing in their prosperity, return to extol the myth of alienation as the only
possibility for the salvation of the West and the Free World. The binomial art and politics,
however, returns with zeal to international discussion forums.

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concepts, we can find the seeds of larger ideas that transcend the world
of the visual arts. These ideas are related to projects that span the ejido,
the kibbutz, the koljoz, and the cooperatives of production and distribu-
tion, and they underlie universal concerns about education, culture,
and social welfare.

Recounting those moments still so near to us should never be
considered premature, but rather a part and consequence of the process
initiated by the groups as a whole. Although their initial impetus has
lost some of its force (for reasons beyond the control of the partici-
pants), the groups’ achievements should be considered in conjunction
with the previous efforts that helped to configure the rich panorama
of our visual arts. This recollection should be as impartial as can be
permitted by our own conviction that what we have done is valuable in
the here and now, and that it can transcend time and borders; it should
not be affected by circumstances (which are the same ones that worked
to dissociate the groups and their members).

These affirmations may sound pretentious to those who insist on

defending the culture of the elite or supporting the status quo that in
our time has taken root and continues to prosper. It is even possible
that some colleagues who participated in the struggle of the groups or
sympathized with them will consider my words excessive. Doubters
might agree, were there to be “expert” opinions to back my ideas. The
problem, I insist, is that there are no opinions to be found whatsoever,
and this is our own collective fault, which stems from constant belittle-
ment of ourselves.
While the groups managed to largely monopolize the panorama
of the visual arts for more than five years, there is limited information
on this period, and the documentation that does exist is invariably defi-
cient. With neither a minimum base of information nor the support of
a theoretical corpus, it is easy to understand why the movement is often
dismissed as outrageous, why the members of the groups are consid-
ered to be “savage” and without importance, and why their enormous
artistic efforts are viewed as inconsequential. But the embarrassing
incompetence of the critics and journalists by no means reduces the
significance of the groups.

As with everything, the appearance and the development of the
groups, in both their initial strength and their current decline, follow pre-
cise, locatable historical determinations. The groups did not begin to form
until the moment was ripe, and their current outcome (which includes

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glimpses of the past, like the exhibit that concerns us here) should be
seen not as a demise, but rather as a repose prior to a new vitality.

The collective movement was never the product of the imagination

of charismatic leaders or visionary teachers, but emerged from a more
generalized feeling. National and global events converged to establish
the foundations for a new awareness among Mexican visual artists.
The profile of collective practice was configured almost simultaneously
among the majority, and even among those who considered themselves
to be less politicized. In this sense, the movement began to take shape
at just the right moment.

The announcement of the Tenth Biennial of Paris was the detona-
tor of the new concept.4 With the political and very important aesthetic
success of the Proceso Pentágono, Suma, TAI and Tetraedro in that
international forum, the groundwork was laid for further development
of the collective project in Mexico. Upon their return, the participants
of the Biennial, alongside other emerging groups, devoted themselves
to the task of putting together the multiple components necessary for
collective work; this is first and foremost a technical kind of problem,
complicated by considerations of an emotional nature. (In collective
creation, anonymity is not synonymous with obscurity, as the first term
assumes a vision of man and the universe that is alternative to that
which controls us.)5
With the foundation of the Mexican Front of Cultural Workers’
Groups in 1978, there emerged a new awareness of the key importance of
collectivity (“lo colectivo”) in forging connections with society. And it was
also from within these very groups that the movement was distorted.
Even at the first Mexican Front reunions, I can remember con-
frontations between two opposing conceptions of artistic practice, both
responding to leftist concerns. On the one hand, there were those who
insisted on taking up and developing proposals made by politically
active artists from past generations; these proposals had been valuable
in their day but were questionable in the present context. On the other

4
5

See “Expediente: Bienal X” (México: Editorial Libro Acción Libre/EGP, 1980).
Grosso modo: As with any type of work, collective creation requires specific and very concrete
systems of organization. Despite some obvious differences, these systems could be com-
pared to jazz or Afro-Caribbean musical groups, where previously accepted structures serve
as a framework for improvisation. They are different from systems based on teamwork,
with respect to the ways in which tasks are distributed and valued. When there is an objec-
tive to fulfill, the first type of system requires coordination, while the second type depends
on direction.

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hand, there were those determined to develop techniques and work hab-
its that diverged from processes determined by the pictorial tradition.
The members of the first group had a difficult time thinking of
ways in which to distribute their work outside the confines of the gal-
lery, state sponsorship, or involvement with political parties. The sec-
ond group, aware of the progress made by avant-garde collectives from
other countries, proposed the simultaneous development of a new type
of production and a corresponding infrastructure for distribution.6

The first group was primarily composed of theorists and teachers;
they were undoubtedly committed cultural workers, but they were not
producers of visual art, as they did not deal with the technical problems
faced by painters. In the second group, there were more artists that
sought, as visual experimenters, to surround the gallery system, while
at the same time developing new plastic languages to serve their ideals.

To complicate the situation, there were defenders of both sides of

the conceptual divide who confused the concept of the guild (“lo gre-
mial”) with that of the group (“lo grupal”), viewing their participation in
the Mexican Front as an opportunity to present themselves in a public
and unified way. This led to a highly complex struggle to reconcile the
concepts of the union, which covered the development of infrastructure
and ideology, and the group, which sought to replace individual (and
associative) production with authentically collective production.

For diverse reasons, the scale was tipped towards the concept of
the union, and the Mexican Front opted to discard the word GROUPS.
Henceforth, the movement was stricken with the illnesses of exag-
gerated solidarity (“solidaridiasis”), excessive declarations (“declara-
tionitis”), and severely personal attacks, until it fell into the virtual
paralysis that limits it today.

Analyzing the movement’s process of disintegration, we discover

that the revolutionary artist cannot distribute his product—which is
a cultural good—in circuits that are not elitist, if the very production
of such goods serves to reinforce the lines drawn by capitalist culture.
The artistic object created in accordance with old guidelines can only
be efficiently distributed (that is to say, benefiting the customer while

The left traditionally repudiates avant-garde movements, arguing that they are decadent and
mere manifestations of markets hungry for novelty. In countries like Mexico, where cultural
workers are almost always anti-establishment, experimentation and the search for new
forms and languages should be accepted as another mode of contributing revolutionarily to
transformation.

130

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artmargins 1:1

rewarding the producer) through channels developed within capital-
ism: galleries, museums, auctions, or specialized magazines.7 It is
in the incomprehension of this truth that we can detect the visceral
reactions of indignation that were a handicap to the association. We
can translate the infantilism of the left—with its inexplicable desire
to register “firsts,” its use of collective prestige for personal ends, its
lack of professional respect, its simple-minded rivalry, or its thirst for
profit—into a lack of historical perspective, which inevitably leads to
fragmentation and division.

Once the Mexican Front was reduced to a mere letterhead, the

resulting creative vacuum was opportunely seized by the established
system. Without the infrastructural support that had been crucial to
their initial development, the groups were forced to gravitate towards
other spaces to continue their work. Many groups disappeared, while
others were formed; at all times, however, the individual participants
increasingly benefited from this enormous experience, as can be seen
in their most recent work. Art never stops flowing.

Art, beyond what it represents or signifies in its interior, is a faith-
ful reflection of the everyday occurrences of the societies in which it is
produced. While the efforts we made to collectivize its production and
distribution have been interrupted, they will be recovered in time as
another one of Mexico’s contributions to the socialization of the com-
mon good and to the creativity that such socialization should favor. It is
up to us, the protagonists of such efforts, to ensure that the historical
function of Los Grupos is properly valued and considered within our
culture as a whole.

F e l i p e eh r e n b e r g

San Jerónimo, Mexico City, 1985

Translation by Elizabeth L. Hochberg

The recently celebrated First Biennial of Havana is a good example of the contradictions
that the visual arts face as they try to respond to the changes demanded by socialism. In
Cuba, literature, music, dance, film, and theater were integrated (in almost this order) into
the needs of the revolutionary process long before the visual arts, which would have to wait
twenty-five years for its “event,” the Biennial. The collected works were judged twice, by the
official jury and by the public. The fact that the results of the public survey have not been
disseminated attests to the extraordinary confusion that encircles this branch of creation.

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