This article observes how the new understanding of art which was introduced at the end of the 1960s by pop art influenced groups was pursued and radicalised in the second half of the 1970s, in a period generally referred to as the weakening of the avant-garde. It focuses on the texts by Leonhard Lapin, promoting art as a means of creating a new living environment. Taking Lapin's text as a framework, the author analyses the intervention in the official exhibition of monumental art in 1976.

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.