VIDEO

Ana Longoni, curator of the exhibition and the artist Guillermina Mongan, talk about Oscar Masotta. Theory as Action.

Oscar Masotta has been described as ‘a true modernising hero’, ‘a prototypical sensibility of the 1970s’ and a ‘lighthouse-writer’. His theoretical interests were multiple and mobile: from literature and militant politics to the artistic avant-garde and comic strips, psychoanalysis, semiology, structuralism and much more. A heterodox Marxist and an intellectual on the margins of academia, he was (and continues to be) a controversial figure due to his dandyism and the ‘frivolity’ of his passions, and for failing to fit into the model of the committed or organic intellectual.

This exhibition project, organised around different thematic sections, aims to reconstruct his complex intellectual and artistic career, emphasising his crucial role as a driver of the Argentine avant-garde from the outset: the theoretical exercise as a mode of political action.