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Lot Essay
A foundational and iconoclastic figure in the development of conceptual art in Latin America, Ferrari redefined the boundaries of art, activism, and language across his career, advancing new and dissident modes of resistance. For more than fifty years, and long in the shadow of the Argentine military junta, his work bore critical witness to his ethical engagement of art as political praxis, uncompromising in its commitments to aesthetic and ideological freedom. Ferrari received the Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007.
“I do not know the artistic value of these pieces,” Ferrari wrote in response to public outcry over an early exhibition at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, for which his infamous and oft-censored piece Western Civilization and Christianity (1965)—featuring a nearly life-sized Christ crucified on an American fighter plane—was prepared but ultimately withdrawn. “The only thing I ask of art is that it help me, as clearly as possible, to devise visual and critical signs that will allow me to condemn Western barbarism in the most efficient way. It is possible that someone may show me that this is not art. I would have no problem, I would not change my course, I would only change its name: I would cross out art and call it politics, corrosive criticism, whatever” (in A. Giunta, “León Ferrari: A Language Rhapsody,” Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009, p. 52).
Ferrari abandoned traditional painting over the decade that followed, directing his work more explicitly into the political sphere. “Many things happen in life,” he reflected years later. “There is a pretty field of flowers, and all of a sudden there are scores of dead from a bomb dropped by the Americans.” Blindados evokes a comparable scene: forty-three toy tanks methodically encircle a bouquet of white flowers, tracking along a spiral roadway flanked by pockets of trees at each corner. The closed, continuously looping road—with no on- or off-ramp—also appears in Autopista del Sur (1980), part of the Heliografías series made during Ferrari’s exile in São Paulo (1976-91). Here, the design suggests a metaphor for the historical repetition of violence, whether in the name of Christianity or Western civilization, that Ferrari has long decried. “The axis of the West is religion’s threat to those who are different: intolerance taken to the extreme,” he explained. “Such intolerance is embedded in our culture” (in C. Sredni de Birbragher and I. Pini, “León Ferrari,” Art Nexus 6, no. 67, 2007, p. 91).
“Art will be neither beauty nor novelty,” Ferrari declared in 1968, his words resounding across a long and polemical career. “Art will be efficacy and perturbation. Successful art will be the one with an impact somewhat equivalent to a guerrilla attack in a country that is freeing itself” (“The Art of Meanings,” in León Ferrari Retrospectiva: Obras 1954-2006, exh. cat., Pinacoteca do Estado do São Paulo, 2006, p. 439).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“I do not know the artistic value of these pieces,” Ferrari wrote in response to public outcry over an early exhibition at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella, for which his infamous and oft-censored piece Western Civilization and Christianity (1965)—featuring a nearly life-sized Christ crucified on an American fighter plane—was prepared but ultimately withdrawn. “The only thing I ask of art is that it help me, as clearly as possible, to devise visual and critical signs that will allow me to condemn Western barbarism in the most efficient way. It is possible that someone may show me that this is not art. I would have no problem, I would not change my course, I would only change its name: I would cross out art and call it politics, corrosive criticism, whatever” (in A. Giunta, “León Ferrari: A Language Rhapsody,” Tangled Alphabets: León Ferrari and Mira Schendel, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2009, p. 52).
Ferrari abandoned traditional painting over the decade that followed, directing his work more explicitly into the political sphere. “Many things happen in life,” he reflected years later. “There is a pretty field of flowers, and all of a sudden there are scores of dead from a bomb dropped by the Americans.” Blindados evokes a comparable scene: forty-three toy tanks methodically encircle a bouquet of white flowers, tracking along a spiral roadway flanked by pockets of trees at each corner. The closed, continuously looping road—with no on- or off-ramp—also appears in Autopista del Sur (1980), part of the Heliografías series made during Ferrari’s exile in São Paulo (1976-91). Here, the design suggests a metaphor for the historical repetition of violence, whether in the name of Christianity or Western civilization, that Ferrari has long decried. “The axis of the West is religion’s threat to those who are different: intolerance taken to the extreme,” he explained. “Such intolerance is embedded in our culture” (in C. Sredni de Birbragher and I. Pini, “León Ferrari,” Art Nexus 6, no. 67, 2007, p. 91).
“Art will be neither beauty nor novelty,” Ferrari declared in 1968, his words resounding across a long and polemical career. “Art will be efficacy and perturbation. Successful art will be the one with an impact somewhat equivalent to a guerrilla attack in a country that is freeing itself” (“The Art of Meanings,” in León Ferrari Retrospectiva: Obras 1954-2006, exh. cat., Pinacoteca do Estado do São Paulo, 2006, p. 439).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park