Item #54660 [ESCENA DE AVANZADA CHILENA – CHILEAN NEO-AVANT-GARDE – ARTIST'S BOOK] Estrategias y proyecciones de la plástica nacional sobre la década de los ochenta [Strategies and projections of the national plastic arts on the decade of the eighties]. Eugenio Dittborn.

Dittborn, Eugenio.

[ESCENA DE AVANZADA CHILENA – CHILEAN NEO-AVANT-GARDE – ARTIST'S BOOK] Estrategias y proyecciones de la plástica nacional sobre la década de los ochenta [Strategies and projections of the national plastic arts on the decade of the eighties].

Santiago de Chile: Grupo Cámara Chile [1979]. Quarto (31 × 21.5 cm). Original spiral-bound printed card wrappers; [44] pp; Each page with a reproduced collage of newspaper clippings, typewritten texts, book pages, manuscripts, etc., printed in dark blue, brown and black. Due to the paper quality, the leaves are somewhat toned and occasionally with small marginal tears; else good or better. Item #54660

Exceptionally rare first edition of the artist book by one of the central protagonists of the Escena de Avanzada. Eugenio Dittborn's mixed-media images are influenced by Concept Art, Fluxus, in particular Wolf Vostell's décollage, as well as the aesthetic strategies of the “antipoesía” of the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra, whose daughter Catalina Parra collaborated with Dittborn on various projects. The parallels between the catalog she designed for the “Imbunches” exhibition and the artist's book presented here are unmistakable. Dittborn also incorporates the spiral binding into the fragmented images like a stitched wound. Here too, the collage presents itself not only as a new combination, but also as a “deformation”, a fragmentation. Images of heads and bodies are cut off, as it were, injured bodies are shown next to butchered flesh, texts are radically cut or partially deleted and overwritten.
The use of photographs of anonymous people from newspaper clippings and older criminological publications, which document acts of violence against social outsiders (indigenous people, the sick, asocials, criminals), runs through his entire oeuvre and can ultimately also be interpreted as allusions to those who “disappeared” during the Pinochet dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, together with the Escena de Avanzada, Dittborn rejects a decidedly left-wing activist, political art. He and his comrades-in-arms were too interested in an experimental approach to various materials, media, and techniques. In 1981, for example, he poured 350 liters of used oil over the ground of the Tarapaca Desert in an action (Cambio de aceite) or worked with video art. He uses his collage technique not only in exhibition installations, but also in his mail art works, which, when unfolded, on occasion result in large wall tableaus. (Cf. Michael Nungesser, AKL XXVIII, 2001, p. 18.)

As of September 2024, KVK, OCLC lists only one copy worldwide, which is merely the “reedicion” published in 1981 (Princeton).