Christine Filippone

My book project Systems and Utopias of Process in Conceptual Art argues that the scientific concept of open systems fostered political utopias of process, collaboration, and social justice in art of the late 1960s. For the performative artwork Tucumán Arde, artists allied with sociologists, economists, workers, and unions seeking liberation from authoritarian structures of power. Open systems, characterized by interrelation and interconnectedness, gave rise to radical forms of institutional critique in Latin America that circulated to the US. Art historian Alexander Alberro describes examples of institutional critique as those “that provocatively linked previously unconnected spheres of public experience together in unexpected knots, in unexpected combinations of trajectories.” In fact, open systems are defined as the connections between various spheres of social experience. First theorized in the 1930s, an open system is a complex of interacting elements that is open to and interacts with its environment.

The primary objective of the process-based performance and installation Tucumán Arde undertaken in the Argentine cities of Rosario and Buenos Aires in 1968 was to open closed disinformation mass media circuits set in motion by the authoritarian military dictatorship. The radical scope of this months-long, storied project was so profound, it left a life-long impression on American critic and curator Lucy Lippard who met several of the artists in Argentina in September 1968, in the midst of the project. She declared in 1969, “I returned belatedly radicalized by contact with artists there, especially the Rosario Group, whose mixture of conceptual art and political ideas was a revelation.” This book argues that the concept of open systems was central to the development of art as social action in Tucumán Arde, and was a progenitor for radical institutional critique globally in the late 1960s.