Policies of the line of vision

ARGENTINE MANIFESTOS
By Rafael Cippolini-(Adriana Hidalgo)-534 pages-($ 48)

The subtitle of this book of the ensayista, booklover and educational Rafael Cippolini (also publisher of the art magazine Ramona ) clarifies its essential intention: Policies of the line of vision, 1900-2000. This is, to compile the texts that unfold the intimate history of the stages crossed by the plastic Argentinean in the century last, from initial obedience to the European figurative tradition to the loosening of that matrix - visual and ideological -, in years twenty, to arrive at the present tendencies.

This compilation is not a mere exercise of file. It tends to as much confirm the basic notion of which the manifesto is, as an expression of desires, a tool and a weapon of political nature. A close kinship unites, in effect, the manifesto of aesthetic intention with the pre-electoral speech of a candidate, or the platform of a party. In both cases one is to persuade the adressees of the message of which, from this one - and if it is obeyed to his premises, naturally -, everything will change for good, the old vices will be exiled and the new virtues will shine for always.

Only one of the transcriptos manifestos in these pages recognizes heir of a tradition: the famous White Manifesto, signed in 1946, in Buenos Aires, by the students of Bright Fontana in the ephemeral Altamira factory: "Who sign the manifesto admits to have an origin that precedes them. To be a step, to continue a movement ". Same Fontana did not seal that text, but without a doubt it was his inspirador and perhaps his editor. It is - the writing of an Argentine plastic artist emphasizes Cippolini- "who has more reproduced so much in Histories of the Art of the entire world like in the contemporary theoretical repertoires". And it concludes: "the White Manifesto was transformed into Canon. Of course, one is not than an exception more. Perhaps the only one ".

Because from the reading of so many declarations of total renovation of the arts a restlessness arises: which was the concrete consequence of as much rhetoric, how many of these documents they managed to really modify the technical procedures and the perception of the public, how many of them they had lasting consequences? It agrees to clarify that the book of Cippolini not only reunites to manifestos but also reflections of the artists on its art and its work, Newspaper interviews, fragments, allusive presentations of samples, poems, et cetera. The amplitude of the criterion thus allows to include a panorama very vast - a century, nothing less, and the one of the most vertiginous changes anywhere in the world, in the art and the technology and, for that reason same, unequal. When the prosa of the editor is, as in the case of Tomás Maldonado, of singular elegance and precision, the persuasion works exactly. But what to say of the considerations, quite unconnected, of Fernando Fader, for example, or of the wanderings - admirable of Alberto Greco being literarily contemplated the big toe of its left foot?

However, it is in this variety, this unforseeable revelation of complex and opposed personalities, where it resides much of the wealth of this volume, so necessary. Its Introduction, in special, will be from now on an essential material for the students of the history of the Argentine art. Another one of its virtues is the one of the humor, slightly ironic, that sublies in many of its pages. To say, for example, that the local artists had "a delayed reception and cants, particular, of the Italian futurismo" is to condense, skilfully, which to others would take many pages to them to explain. The cover of this beautiful edition also condenses, in its impeccable design, the sense of the text.