> contents / In Memoriam Edgardo Antonio Vigo (1927 - 1997) / Clemente Padin /

A text about Vigo´s proposal to a new poetry, from the book "Art and People" by Clemente Padin.

Chapter 6.

Poetry To And/Or Realize Within the panorama of renovation and questioning of the foundations of artistic activity that emerged at the end of the 1960s one should separate out this tendency of the Argentine artist Edgardo Antonio Viga, called "poetry to and/or realize." Vigo, outstanding recorder and an artist fully involved in avant-garde activity, was preoccupied beyond measure with the partipatory aspect of modern art. Commercial art imposes the rules of contemplative consumption that reify, in spectators, the attitudes of passivity and submissiveness so necessary to the eternalization of the system. Thus, works are constrained to satisfy the ideological imperatives of the regime to the effects of pergueñar an ideal world, one without contradictions, immutable, that hides social wounds beneath an "veil of static signs." As the Mexican critic Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez puts it, "... art thus commercialized comes to consecrate the conception of art as production of unique objects, like creative activity itself of exceptional individuals, but, definitely, they only come to the spectator by passing necessarily through the market in order to excite in it the passive, contemplative characteristic of traditional art." (De la crítica de arte a la crítica del arte)

Against this art that alienates individuals and separates them from their kind--an instrument of subjection that reproduces unjust social relations--some, the few, who "generously donate their work to humanity" and others, the many, who should "enjoy it thankfully," is joined the work of Vigo that tries to rise above the contradiction operating in its creation and consumption. In his essay "From process/poetry to Poetry to and/or realize" (La Plata, Argentina: Diagonal Cero, 1970), he analyzes the great changes that are occurring in the consumption of the work of art. First "conditioned participation:"

... In its beginning, participation was conditioned by a ruler (the artist) who countered the traditional line of contemplative stasis, looked for and found a reactivation of the bases of the art work that were no longer presented as an "untouchable object, full of admirable mysteries and outside of the contact of our senses." We are then in the stage of conditioned participation, full of proposals but with "uncompleted intentionalities." The consequences of these limitations were seen rapidly and, in an accelerated form, the "artist" tried to concretize--via technology--objects that for their formal and technical characteristics would permit an expansion of the domain of participation.

After analyzing diverse experiences around the phenomenon of "reading" and "participation," he goes into the contribution that, in its concept, developed "Process/poem:"

... one of the most activist and abrasive movements of poetry, where we meet up with a taking of conscience before this phenomenon, unleashing poetic images mediated by codes (words, visual images, objects) that permit the addition of other heterogeneous elements or the removal of some of the same by an active participant who passes from recreator (interpretation of the thing) to creator (modifier of the image). A poetic object of Wlademir Dias-Pino, Hugo Mund, Jr., Neide and Alvaro de Sá basically counts on a series of elements whose final disposition, with no previous scheme (generally the elements come wrapped in a bag, jumbled up without respect to any constructive composition whatsoever--sense of freedom--respecting no established chronological or compositional order--closed order--) should be "composed" by the public who are incited to remove or add elements not included--but yes computable in the final result--by the poet.

The next formal step, "Poetry to arm," is defined as work in which the "observer-participant" must realize the work but following the "concept--somewhat tyrannical center of the thing." When "poetry to arm" is mentioned. . . "we are limiting the conduct of the participant. We should not forget that he is conditioned in a certain way, from which he cannot escape. There exists the construction of a poetic-object or of a brand-new poem determined by a programmer of process or of the poem to arm." Finally, as fruit of all these successive advances, "Poetry To And/Or Realize:"

Valid and accessible procedure that is based on the solution of an active participation to arrive at the MOST PROFOUND ACTIVATION OF THE INDIVIDUAL: the REALIZATION FOR HIM OF THE POEM. The support of the given elements (process/poem), the necessity of a prior stage (poem to arm) gives way before the project of an idea that creates the abrasive so that each one in turn on receiving it constructs a poem that will arrive at converting itself into "his" poem. This property acquired by the free development then of the reception of the abrasive-idea, puts us before a "creator" and not a "consumer ". . . The possibility of art is not already only in the participation of the observer but in his constructive- ACTIVATION, an ART TO REALIZE. And from this a total art: "In it we arrive at the conquest in which the CONSUMER passes over into the category of CREATOR."

Vigo arrived at this conclusion from the previous stage (around 1968) of the "Signs," with which it was proposed, according to his own words:

... not to construct more alienating images but TO SIGNAL those which, not having aesthetic intentionality as a goal, make it possible. An abrasion so that the "depersonalized" individual who constructed it becomes "personalized" by this construction being signaled. A turn to daily life as activation of society towards the aesthetic process. It is proclaimed: street as refuge of the object as sign presents to humanity's regular aesthetic structures the possibility of being present in our daily transit and not being protected. . . The collectivity of their life, the demographic is a factor that art must not leave out of the eckoning. They are signs that mark an epoch. However, these should not "REPRESENT" but rather "PRESENT" ... In consequence, people must arrive at mental communication through the weighty baggage of the possessive concept of the thing to be an active participant-observer of a daily and collective signaled element.

("MANOJO DE SEMAFOROS," proposal to "observe" a street light at a crossing of five streets in La Plata, Argentina, October 19, 1968, with the goal of discovering the esthetic possibilities of this urban object buried by habit and its apparent lack of meaning.)

These "public poems" as Néstor García Canclini calls them return to artists the "real" space of life; that is to say, they take art out of its "security zone," the galleries and museums, and return it to its primary meaning, making it burst with significations in the space of social life. Thus, then from this long development, Vigo sets forth his "Projects to Realize," of which we shall see two examples: "A VISUAL STROLL TO RUBEN DARIO PLAZA" was realized in Buenos Aires in 1970. "A large card indicating a MINIMUM CODE and an element (that can be substituted) invites us to realize an act that we can simply modify for another. Based on his reading, the realization of our OWN ACT. Let us explain: to take a chalk, to mark a cross (or whatever other geometric center or not), within this center, or around it, to make a turn of 360 degrees (that can be lesser or greater), to sum up a variable respecting the horizon that we can vary on placing ourselves on tiptoe or squatting (why not descend and support our body literally on the floor?), with whatever of these possibilities and its exercising you have realized A VISUAL STROLL TO RUBEN DARIO PLAZA." ("LA CALLE: scene of current art," E. A. Vigo, OVUM 10, #6(March, 1971), Montevideo, Uruguay).

"DEMAGOGIC POEM" was realized in the framework of the Exhibition of Avant-garde Publications, Hall of the University of the Republic, Montevideo, September 30, 1970: "MATERIALS: a ballot box, or similar, with circular opening (3 cm. in diameter) and a circular with the following instructions: 'Locate, maintaining its anonymity, a phrase, phoneme, symbol, or visual sign (etc.) which is indispensable for you in a poem, in the white space of the present. Make a tube and introduce it into BALLOT BOX number 1. You will receive the certification of your vote in the form of a large card that must be hanged on the lapel. Thanks.' Beneath this text there will be a rectangle about 15 x 10 cm. where the 'creator' will leave his work. Then the participant must INTRODUCE HIS VOTE INTO THE BALLOT BOX, RECEIVING A VOUCHER OF HIS ACT." ("The New Poetry III," Clemente Padin, OVUM 10, #6 (March, 1971)

The multifaceted contribution of Vigo to the Latin American avant-garde has still not been completely valorized. Although one may not be in agreement with his particular claims, above all his interpretation of Process/poem, there is no doubt that his ideas and realizations have been a dynamizer of multiple tendencies in contemporary art, from the visual poetry he cultivated with special delicacy, to the "signalings" with which he tried to recuperate the "urban-aesthetic," to the "project to realize" that turned us into creators, to mail art of which he was one of the most important practitioners, etc. without failing to credit the promotion of his ideas through his publications Diagnal Cero or Hexágono 70 or the organization of one of the strongest exhibitions realized in Latin America: "INTERNATIONAL EXPO OF PROPOSITIONS TO REALIZE," in the Center of Art and Communication of Buenos Aires in June, 1971. The most representative artists were invited to this exhibition, complemented with the realization of round tables on themes of Latin American avant-garde art which were attended, among others, by Wlademir Dias-Pino and Joao Felicio dos Santos from Brazil, Guillermo Deisler from Chile, Elena Pelli, Luis Pazos, and Vigo from Argentina, and Daniel Accame and Clemente Padin from Uruguay.

Copyright © 1997 by Clemente Padin - clepadin@adinet.com.uy.