s p e c i a l s e c t i o n / i n t r o d u c t i o n

Artists’ Networks iN LAtiN AmericA
ANd eAsterN europe

Klara Kemp-Welch and cristina Freire

Latin America and Eastern Europe have yielded an abundance of inde-
pendent artists’ initiatives since the 1950s. The dynamic marginal art
scenes that developed under Latin American military dictatorships and
in late socialist Eastern Europe were often characterized by their commit-
ment to free cultural exchange and networking. To the extent that direct
exchange was controlled from above, its significance, from below, increased
in inverse proportion. From the peripheries of the Cold War, a marginal
cultural intelligentsia sought creative ways to inhabit countercartographies
and an alternative sense of belonging. If networking offered a model of
collective action with clear appeal to left-leaning artists in Latin America,
it also appealed to many Eastern “bloc” artists, if often for different rea-
sons, despite the general erosion of the idea of the collective in the con-
text of “actually existing socialism.” In both cases, artists’ investment in
networking was an alternative to local forms of state and military repres-
sion that also sought to circumvent the triumphalism of the official
Western account of artistic individualism and subjectivity. Networking of
the sort that peaked in the 1970s was conceived of as a passage from the
logic of identity to the logic of identification. In some cases, artists were
able to meet and share their ideas directly. In others, carefully compiled
lists of global addresses became the means for initiating dialogues and
friendships, and finding out about developments abroad. Alternative

3 3

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kemp-welch and freire | special section introduction

artistic proposals were circulated directly among producers through the
postal system in vast quantities and across vast distances, albeit occa-
sionally intercepted and confiscated by censors of various persuasions.
“Latin America” and “Eastern Europe” are, each in their own way,

both historically dystopian and utopian cartographical projections that
rhetorically unite countries with distinct political and cultural chronolo-
gies, bound together by shared experiences. Despite their distinct histori-
cal relationships to capitalism, communism, and colonialism, artists
working in the countries united beneath the umbrella terms Latin America
and Eastern Europe experienced similar degrees of marginalization from
the North American and Western European art historical narratives that
came to dominate histories of twentieth-century art—constructed in rela-
tion to the frameworks dictated by the Cold War. Recent research has
revealed, however, that this politically motivated experience of marginaliza-
tion, far from limiting dialogue, often had the opposite effect: left-leaning
artists in Latin America and their disaffected anticommunist or reform-
communist colleagues in the Soviet satellite countries exchanged artistic
propositions and views that often flew in the face of the political bina-
ries that hindered productive cultural exchanges between the so-called
East and West in the official arena of the Cold War.

This special section is devoted to “networking” at the grassroots
level, examining artists’ complex motivations for engaging in ephemeral
intermedial practices, local dialogues, and transnational networks. Latin
American and Eastern European artists went to great lengths to escape
the provincialism to which they had been consigned by history, geopoli-
tics, and economics, by establishing contacts with like-minded artists at
home and abroad. Networking tends to be classed as a strategy of sub-
version—a “tactic for thriving on adversity”—but we should be wary of
constructing any artificially uniform, heroic narrative. One of the urgent
tasks we face today, as a delayed audience of these artistic initiatives, is
the need to foster a sense of the subtle differences at play in a range of
contexts in diverse political situations. The traffic between Latin American
and Eastern European artists in the Cold War period reveals that the ter-
ritory of artistic practice served as a site for the development of common
languages that scramble “top-down” approaches to history characterized
by the rhetoric of cultural polarization. But there is little that is univocal
about them, despite their shared commitment to artistic freedom,
exchange, and dialogue. What is perhaps most extraordinary about the

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experimental artists’ networks of the 1960s and 1970s is the spectrum
of political persuasions that the networks were able to embrace—from
more or less fervent revolutionary communism, to reform communism,
to anticommunism.

Nowadays, we increasingly view the development of an international

art field as a fait accompli, sullied by the ambivalence of globalization.
But it is worth pausing to reflect on how the emergence of an international
artistic field is not solely a triumph of the “free market,” but was also, in
part, the product of the painstaking and often dangerous endeavors of
many alternative artists over the course of several decades. A crucial shared
characteristic of the alternative economies of cultural exchange that devel-
oped across Latin American and Eastern European experimental art scenes
was their emergence and operation outside of any market structures.
Paradoxically, from today’s perspective, it may precisely have been the
absence of a market framework that paved the way for artistic practice to
become a powerful alternative zone of contact. As we continue to experi-
ence the exponential thirst, worldwide, for recuperating formerly invisible
artistic practices, we do well to remember that a side effect of this enthu-
siasm has been the rapid commodification of Latin American and Eastern
European art and archives since the 1990s. We have to continually negoti-
ate the responsibility for the fact that this trend, which now appears increas-
ingly irreversible, often runs counter to the historical aims of the artists
themselves. Thus, if, in view of canonical history’s tendency to include
only those names recognized by the market already, we feel the need to
continue to point outward to less well-known artists, absent from the “offi-
cial narratives” of international, and, in some cases, also even local, art
histories, we are complicit in feeding the eternal desire for the “new” in
neoliberal societies. The potential ambivalence of our desire to recon-
struct this alternative history, today, was brought into sharp focus by one of
our contributors, who categorically refused to sign the copyright agree-
ment required by the press for the publication of her text. For her, the idea
of copyright is a stark negation of the ethos of free exchange that charac-
terized the networks we seek to foreground in our section.

Andrzej Kostołowski and Jarosław Kozłowski’s NET Manifesto, sent

from Poznan´ in Poland to over 350 artists worldwide in 1972, is an
early example of this new framework for artistic exchange, beyond the
limitations imposed by political or economical restrictions. It proposed
a map of connectedness that ran counter to official narratives of isolation,

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kemp-welch and freire | special section introduction

drawing together artists in distant places within a system of artistic
exchange that has been likened to Foucault’s ideas of heterotopy.1 In
Kozłowski’s words, the NET came together

in semi-shadow, there were other artists at work, artists who were
not interested in careers, commercial success, popularity or recogni-
tion: artists who devoted more attention to the issue of their own
artistic, and therefore ethical, stance than to their position in the rank-
ings, whether the ranking in question was based on the highest
listing on the market, or the highest level of approval from the author-
ities. These artists professed other values, and other goals led them
onward, they were focused on art, conceived as the realm of cognitive
freedom and creative discourse.2

The artists’ networks discussed in this section consisted of individuals who
saw sharing their ideas as a key aspect of their work, and deployed the
strategy of multiplication as an act of solidarity. Precarious periodicals,
artists’ books, postcards, stamps, and other low-tech reproductions cir-
culated through the ever-expanding networks developed via a constant
exchange of address lists, along with photographs, records of actions,
visual poetry, and other experimental documents and proposals. So-called
assembling magazines were another innovative form that proliferated
thanks to the mail art network. These were publications organized by
artist-editors or groups of artists, whose print run was determined by the
number of participants who sent in their work—in a format and quan-
tity previously arranged—in response to a letter of invitation. Many of
these works, consisting of loose sheets in envelopes or plastic bags—
clipped or spiral-bound—conveyed the precariousness of these types of
production. Artists engaged in these networks soon found themselves
accumulating substantial archives, which they soon began to share with
friends, or, in those cases where this was possible, a wider audience.

One early example of an exhibition devoted to communication and

the exchange of artistic information was Creación/Creation, organized

See Luiza Nader, “Heterotopy: The NET and Galeria Akumulatory 2,” in Fluxus East: Fluxus
Networks in Central Eastern Europe (exhibition catalogue), ed. Petra Stegmann (Berlin:
Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2007), 111–25.
Jarosław Kozłowski, “Art between the Red and the Golden Frames,” in Curating with Light
Luggage, ed. Liam Gillick and Maria Lindt (Frankfurt: Revolver Books, 2005), 44.

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artmargins 1:2–3

by Julio Plaza at the University of Puerto Rico in Mayaguez in 1972. Plaza
was to go on to collaborate with Walter Zanini, at the Museum of
Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo, a public museum that
became a lively enclave of freedom at a time when many North American
and Western European museums were considered sites of economic and
artistic elitism. As Director, Zanini collaborated with artists to turn the
museum into a laboratory for participation. Its exhibitions/statements on
contemporary art were seen as unique opportunities for animating, rather
than escaping from, social reality, often under the most difficult circum-
stances. Mail art and visual poetry flourished in Brazil, with important
contributions from Paulo Bruscky, Daniel Santiago, J. Medeiros, Falves
Silva, Regina Silveira, Gabriel Borba, and Mario Ishikawa, among others.
Clemente Padín, from Uruguay, has operated in various guises on the

threshold of art and activism for the past forty years in an effort to over-
come canonical forms of artistic creation and circulation, and the limits
imposed by the military dictatorships that devastated the Latin American
continent in the years 1960–70. Among the collaborative magazines he
edited and circulated were Los Huevos del Plata (1965–69), OVUM 10
(1969–72) and OVUM (1973–76), Participación (1984–86), and Correo
del Sur (2000). Padín’s archive bears witness to a period in history
marked by alarming events and violent clashes. Information about atroci-
ties circulated in the mail art network throughout the 1970s: the forced
exile of Chilean artist Guillermo Deisler, following Pinochet’s coup d’état;
the torture and imprisonment of the Uruguayans Jorge Caraballo and
Clemente Padín; as well as the disappearance of Palomo Vigo, son of the
Argentine artist Edgardo Antonio Vigo, to name just a few. The release
of information about abuse committed by the military regimes in Latin
American countries, conveyed through the mail network, caused strong
public pressure and, in some cases, even the review of lawsuits against
artists persecuted by the dictatorships. Key participants in the mail art
network in Argentina were Edgardo Antonio Vigo, Horacio Zabala, Carlos
Pazos, and Juan Carlos Romero. Graciela Gutierrez-Marx, who worked
with Edgardo Antonio Vigo under the pseudonym G.E. MarxVigo, and whose
personal testimony is included in this section, stands out as one of the few
women participating in this alternative circuit.

Among those in the Eastern bloc to develop the strongest dialogue

with Latin American artists was German Democratic Republic–based
Robert Rehfeldt. Together with Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, he developed the idea

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of “contact culture,” and the pair became central figures in the global
mail artists’ network, thus overcoming the relative cultural isolation of
the GDR in the late socialist period. Robert Rehfeldt’s motto “Your ideas
help my ideas,” printed in the graphic pieces that circulated beyond the
Cold War information blockade, became the principle powering his “art
letters.” Clemente Padín and Brazilian Paulo Bruscky were among those
who sought to meet Rehfeldt when traveling to Europe. Carl Friedrich
Klaus was also extremely active in the network, as was Klaus Groh, who
headed an organization called the International Artists’ Cooperation
after 1969, and was author of the internationally distributed IAC-INFO
bulletin. Working in Oldenburg, he soon developed extensive contacts
across the Eastern bloc, and used his lists to author a number of pioneer-
ing publications bringing together for the first time the work of Eastern
European experimental artists within the framework of the same book
projects, many of whom had, until then, been largely unaware of one
another’s parallel activities.3

Political exile also frequently provided an impulse for alternative
editorial projects. Paulina Varas’s essay for this issue is devoted to
Guillermo Deisler’s unique contribution to Latin American and Eastern
European mail art exchange. After leaving Chile, Deisler lived in exile
in Bulgaria, before moving to the GDR. His editorial projects, particularly
his magazine UNI/vers, are testimony of the role of graphic artists in the
network. Visual poetry has also featured strongly in mail art exchanges
since the 1960s, serving as a universal platform of sorts for forging con-
nections that went beyond “translation” to explore deeper, subjective
modes of solidarity that were often particularly precious for those artists
living in exile. While living in Amsterdam in the 1970s, the Mexican
Ulises Carrión created a personal and artistic enterprise, a mixture of gal-
lery, archive, and editorial house, in order to disseminate artistic projects.
Mexican artists Felipe Ehrenberg and Martha Hellion, exiled in England,
created the Beau Geste Press, discussed in Zanna Gilbert’s essay. Both
Carrión and the Beau Geste Press developed lively exchanges with Eastern
European artists. Through their efforts, and those of others, the Netherlands
and the United Kingdom were among the many vital external staging

His earliest publications, in particular, were central to the development of contacts among
artists in Eastern Europe. See Klaus Groh, If I Had a Mind . . . (ich stelle mir vor . . .) Concept-
Art, Project-Art (Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1971), and Klaus Groh, Aktuelle Kunst in
Osteuropa—CˇSSR, Jugoslawien, Polen, Rumänien, UdSSR, Ungarn (Cologne: DuMont
Schauberg, 1972).

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posts for the relay of information internationally on behalf of artists in coun-
tries such as Czechoslovakia and Hungary, where forging direct links
with one’s neighbors was closely monitored by the secret police and censors.

An examination of the Hungarian and Czechoslovak issues of the
magazine Schmuck, published by the Beau Geste Press, illustrates the
diverse approaches to networking that characterized the Eastern European
1970s artistic scene. Milan Knížák, in Czechoslovakia, took advantage of
the invitation to edit an issue of Schmuck to present, to an international
audience, the activities of the experimental group Aktual, of which he had
been a leading figure since its founding in the 1960s. The fact that Knížák
did not opt for an overview of the contemporary Czechoslovak scene in
1974 may to some extent be symptomatic of an individualistic, locally ori-
ented engagement with the network. But this in itself may also be symp-
tomatic of the abnormality of the Czechoslovak art scene in the era of
so-called normalization following the Warsaw Pact troops’ invasion of
Prague in 1968, and the intensive cultural repressions that followed,
continuing throughout the 1970s.

An overview uniting the experimental scenes in the former Czecho-
slovakia would doubtless have included key figures such as Petr Štembera
in Prague, Jirˇí Valoch and Jirˇí Kocman in Brno, and Alex Mlynárcik and
Stano Filko, among others, in Bratislava, all of whom actively pursued
international contacts and featured very prominently in the performance
art, conceptual art, and concrete-poetry networks of the period. Paradoxically
such artists tended to be better connected internationally than they were
with their peers in other parts of Czecho slovakia. Even Jindrˇich Chalupecký,
the Director of the important avant-garde Václav Špála gallery, which
hosted a legendary Duchamp exhibition in 1969, was unable to make
these sorts of links, although he played a unique role in fostering direct
exchange between artists from the Soviet Union and their Czechoslovak
colleagues as of the late 1970s, with the support of Maria Slavecka,
whose marriage to Viktor Pivovarov enabled the Moscow conceptualist
to become an exile in Czechoslovakia, putting pressure on the almost
invisible chinks in the armor of pre-perestroika Soviet isolationism. This,
in turn, paved the way for an, as yet little studied, Czechoslovak/USSR
network that saw a number of key Moscow conceptualists visit and meet
artists such as Valoch and Kocman for the first time, in the early 1980s.
László Beke and Dora Maurer, arguably the most important interna-
tional networkers in 1960s and 1970s Hungary, meanwhile, responded
to the Beau Geste Press’s invitation to edit an issue of Schmuck by present-

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ing an inclusive overview of the Hungarian unofficial art scene as a whole,
inviting a wide range of artists, working in different ways, to contribute
documentation of their work. The exercise was one that Beke repeated in
1974, on the invitation of Jorje Glusberg, director of the Buenos Aires–
based Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC), which hosted a major
festival of Hungarian art, accompanied by a folder containing reproduc-
tions of the documentation displayed as part of the exhibition.4

Glusberg was a global networker of considerable means and traveled
extensively in Eastern Europe in the early 1970s, developing contacts. In
addition to the Hungarian Festival, his trips bore fruit in a little-docu-
mented Polish exhibition at CAYC. The Argentinean’s visit to Poland made
a marked impression on a generation of artists emerging in the 1970s,
for whom the colorful CAYC bulletin, published and distributed in unprec-
edented quantities, particularly in view of the precariousness and small
print run of most contemporary publications of its sort, was a precious
source of information about artistic developments abroad. Among those
in Warsaw to be graced by a visit from Glusberg was the self-taught artist
and poet Andrzej Partum, who welcomed foreign visitors to what he
called the Bureau de la Poésie, his narrow one-room apartment whose drab
walls were covered with mailed poems and artistic propositions from
all over the world. It was at Partum’s that Glusberg met the artist duo
KwieKulik, whose apartment, like Partum’s, was a key meeting place for
alternative art and its documentation from the 1970s onward. The Studio
for Activities, Documentation and Propagation, as they called it (the
PDDiU), played host to artists such as Jirˇí Kovanda and Petr Štembera from
Prague, and Yugoslav artists Tomislav Gotovacand Goran Trbuljak, among
others. Such meetings were lively and rare opportunities for artists who
had hitherto met only through sharing the pages of international publica-
tions to exchange artistic thoughts and propositions in person. Poland
undoubtedly served as a hub for Eastern European international exchanges
throughout the late socialist period, and, by the late 1970s, the number
of spaces that might be called, after the definition offered in the NET
Manifesto, “points of the NET” became so numerous that we cannot do
justice to all their activities here. György Galántai and Julia Klaniczay’s
apartment-based independent space Artpool in Budapest, founded in 1979,
also remains a crucial point in the global net, and operates to this day as

See Annamária Szöke and Miklós Peternák, “Tomorrow Is Evidence!” in Subversive
Practices: Art under Conditions of Political Repression, ed. Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler
(Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2010), 121–79.

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artmargins 1:2–3

a living archive for experimental and mail art networks (discussed in
Jasmina Tumbas’s contribution to this section).

In addition to the Hungarian and Polish exhibitions, CAYC in Buenos

Aires also hosted an exhibition of work by artists from Yugoslavia. Sur-
prisingly, but perhaps symptomatically of the specificity of the Yugoslav
context, Yugoslavia was represented in Argentina by officially sanctioned
artists whose names, today, are less familiar than those of their experi-
mental colleagues who went on to achieve considerable recognition in
the international field after the collapse of Yugoslav “self-management.”
This anom alous episode is indicative of the powerful vicissitudes engen-
dered by state intervention in international artists’ networking, and sig-
nals the impossibility of establishing clear-cut distinctions between official
and unofficial artistic spheres in some situations, as well as the bureau-
cratic obstacles foreigners often confronted, in the late socialist context,
in seeking to navigate a variety of local scenes and establish contacts
with marginalized groups. If Yugoslav socialism was characterized by a
far greater degree of openness to the West than the Soviet-style social-
ism of the satellite countries, not to mention the Soviet Union, which was
uniquely isolated until the 1980s, the state’s successful performance of
openness, and Yugoslav citizens’ relative freedom to travel, did not trans-
late into an open ticket for experimental artists to represent the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia in an international arena. Ivana Bago’s essay
analyzes the peculiarities of Yugoslav experimental artists’ predicament
with reference to two artist-run initiatives: the Galerie des Locataires,
founded in 1972 by Ida Biard in Paris, and Podroom–The Working Com-
munity of Artists, active in Zagreb in the period 1978–80.

Artists’ networks of the 1960s and 1970s continue to inspire contem-

porary art workers today. As Zdenka Badovinac has observed, fighting
back against Eastern Europe’s historical “lack of self-confidence which at
times borders on servility to the West” has entailed becoming “produc-
ers of our own knowledge.”5 For “local bodies of knowledge, including the
genealogies of local avant-gardes” are “a precondition for establishing
any planetary negotiations.”6 Seeking to redefine the aims of the contem-
porary art museum after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Badovinac and
Igor Zabel learned from “the experiences of artists and small non-insti-
tutional spaces that had, especially in the eighties in Slovenia, developed

Zdenka Badovinac, “Contemporaneity as Points of Connection,” e-flux Journal 11 (December
2009): 5–7.
Ibid., 5–7.

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kemp-welch and freire | special section introduction

parti cular strategies for self-organization, alternative networking, and
operating internationally, and that were significantly more successful at
doing this than the official cultural policy was.”7 But while the artists’
networks discussed in this issue represent powerful instances of cultural
solidarity, we ought, perhaps, to be wary of claiming them as antecedents
of today’s Internet-based social networks, for the 1960s and 1970s idea
of the “network” stands in marked opposition to the neoliberal idea of the
network as a competitive tool in the technocratic environment: on the one
hand, we have the globalization of the art market; on the other, the pos-
sibility of Internet-based activism. Arguably, we can trace the germination
of this ambivalence in some of the practices discussed in this issue.

The special section in this issue of ARTMargins emerged from the

editors’ shared interest in artistic exchanges within Eastern European
and Latin American art, and between the two. There are strong resonances
between Cristina Freire’s exhibition and museum-based research proj-
ect Alternative Networks, on the one hand, and Klara Kemp-Welch’s project
Networking the Bloc on the other.8 And ARTMargins Online has been a key
site for forming links between national art histories within a translocal
framework since its inception in 1999. Additionally, there are a number of
international collaborative initiatives that rhyme strongly with the aims
of this issue: the international archive-sharing project Internationale, and
Rede Conceitualismos do Sul, an international network and thinking plat-
form created by researchers involved with conceptualism in Latin
America, and concerned about the current neutralization and obliteration
of the political issues involved in the field. One of its concrete projects
includes actions to secure public access to a series of important artists’
archives in Latin America, including that of Clemente Padín, in Monte-
video, at the Universidad de la Republica.9 We also acknowledge a number
of other pioneering research projects, including Vivid [Radical] Mem ory

7
8

Ibid., 5–7.
Cristina Freire’s Alternative Networks was one of a series of exhibitions curated at the
Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo as partial results of the long-
term research project Conceptual Art and Conceptualisms developed at the Museum of
Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo since the mid-1990s. See also Cristina
Freire, Poeticas do processo. Arte conceitual no museu [Poetics of the Process. Conceptual Art in
the Museum] (São Paulo: Iluminuras, 1999); Cristina Freire, Paulo Bruscky: Art Archive and
Utopia (Recife: CEPE, 2007); among others.
It is important to note Museo Reina Sofia’s (Madrid) sustained support of Rede Conceitualismos
do Sul initiatives. A recent alarming phenomenon has been the migration of such collections
and archives, exiled and sold to museums and metropolitan collections.

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artmargins 1:2–3

(Barcelona), the exhibition Subversive Practices (Stuttgart), and Meeting
Margins (United Kingdom), on whose initiatives we seek to build.10

Rather than defining a closed network, the testimonies and texts

gathered here are intended as a means to expand the diversity of
approaches to the networks pursued by artists in Latin America and
Eastern Europe, proposing new methodologies. We highlight the
need to continue this work, signaling past, present, and future fields of
international exchange.

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Further information on these projects can be found online: Vivid [Radical] Memory, “Radical
Conceptual Art Revisited: A Social and Political Perspective from the East and the South,”
accessed April 4, 2012, http://www.vividradicalmemory.org/htm/project/project.html;
Subversive Practices, accessed May 14, 2012, http://www.wkv-stuttgart.de/en/programme/
2009/exhibitions/subversive/; Meeting and Margins, accessed April 4, 2012, http://
www.essex.ac.uk/arthistory/meeting_margins/Default.htm.

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