b-inspired Exhibitions
Theory as action
Oscar Masotta at the MACBA
This exhibition, curated by Ana Longoni, is organised around nine separate these that cover the intensive philosophical and artistic trajectory of the Argentinean intellectual Oscar Masotta (Buenos Aires, 1930 – Barcelona, 1979) based on his conception of the theoretical exercise as a method of political action.
Held hostage by the climate of political violence during the Argentinean military dictatorship Masotta went into exile arriving in Barcelona in 1975 where he died four years later. Founder of the Freudiana Library in 1977, he played a key role to the introduction of Lacanian thinking to Spain, just as had done in Argentina and Latin America previously. In Barcelona, his city of exile, he was an active agent within the counter-cultural political opposition of the time, connected to the so-called “Gauche Divine”.
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"Oscar Masotta. Theory as Action" exhibition view, 2018. Photo: Miquel Coll
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"Oscar Masotta. Theory as Action" exhibition view, 2018. Photo: Miquel Coll
The interests of Masotta were manifold: everything from literature and political militancy to avant-garde art and cartoons, psychoanalysis, semiology, structuralism etc.. Theory as action integrates two distinct groupings of meanings and zones of action which he articulated within a shared itinerary. The exhibition seeks to reconstruct the intellectual trajectory of this intellectual, theorist and artist through a wide selection of documentary material, of artists works about whom he wrote and through the works that he himself brought to fruition, such as his poems and paintings that he considered not as artistic works but rather as “exercises in thought”.
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"Oscar Masotta. Theory as Action" exhibition view, 2018. Photo: Miquel Coll
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"Oscar Masotta. Theory as Action" exhibition view, 2018. Photo: Miquel Coll
Oscar Masotta. Theory as action brings together works by de Roberto Jacoby, Eduardo Costa, Raúl Escari, Marta Minujín, Charlie Squirru, Dalila Puzzovio, Rubén Santantonín, Luis Wells and Alberto Greco, amongst many others. It includes previously unseen documentary footage as well as recording his contribution to contemporary art through the productions of Gonzalo Elvira, Dora García, Guillermina Mongan and the Un Faulduo collective.
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"Oscar Masotta. Theory as Action" exhibition view, 2018. Photo: Miquel Coll
The exhibition project is the result of several years research on this crucial figure in the transformations of the Argentine and Ibero-American contemporary culture between the 1950s and 1970s. The exhibition was presented in 2017 at the MUAC (Mexico) and after its showing at MACBA will travel to Buenos Aires (Parque de la Memoria, 2018).
- From 22 March to 11 September
- MACBA
- Plaça del Àngels, 1 08001 Barcelona
- www.macba.cat