The present dossier compiles brief responses to the anonymously published “Art, Society/ Text: A Few remarks on the Current Relations of the Class Struggle in the Fields of Literary Production and Literary Ideologies” (1975), from five scholars working in the fields of philosophy, literary theory and Marxism, as well as Latin American and Asian studies. First published in the Slovenian journal Problemi-Razprave (Problems-Debates) and first translated in an excerpted form in ARTMargins (October 2016), the text and its responses raise a series of questions about the specificity of art and literature as signifying practices in the wake of modernist autonomy; the form assumed by class struggle within the authors' structuralist framework; and the possible consequences of such theoretical issues for the critique and historiography of art since the 1960s.

This article examines the rise and reception of conceptual art in Argentina. Against dominant readings of the 1960s' and 70s' visual avant-gardes in Latin America, I reconsider the stakes of art's so-called “dematerialization” and its unique claim on ideology critique in the work of the Grupo Arte de los Medios [Media Art Group], a collective of young artists led by the philosopher and literary critic Oscar Masotta. Arguing for a re-historicization of the 1960s avant-garde as one that emerges as a self-reflexive reaction to the novel articulation of late capitalism in Argentina, I trace a critical continuity between the Grupo Arte de los Medios and the avant-gardist claims on the fusion of art and militant politics among its immediate successors. I suggest that the Argentinean avant-garde defined its radical political stance through a reflection on the immanent relation of structural cause to symbolic form, probing and pointing to the limits of the operation of estrangement.

“In Search of a Model for Life” traces a brief history of the autonomous, experimental art movement known as los Grupos (the Groups) in which the essay’s author, Felipe Ehrenberg, played a central role. Based mostly in Mexico City in the late 1970s, the Groups critiqued the predominant academicism as well as the burgeoning support for commercially viable experimental work in Mexico’s state-run art institutions. “In Search of a Model for Life” first appeared as one of three external appendices to the catalog for the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil’s 1985 retrospective of the Groups, De los Grupos los individuos (From the Groups, Individuals). Ehrenberg’s essay challenges the teleological narrative that the catalog’s text traces, from a collective movement of rebellion to the individual insertion of the movement’s members into the art market. In doing so, “In Search of a Model for Life” begins to theorize the conditions for a critical and emancipatory art practice beyond the complicity of state and market.