“Investigación de las basuras,” the essay by the Venezuelan writer Adriano González León (1931–2008), is the prologue to the anthology of poems by Caupolicán Ovalles (1936–2001) ¿Duerme usted, señor presidente?, published in 1962 by El Techo de la Ballena group (Caracas, 1961–68). Of all the material published by El Techo de la Ballena, this book is considered paradigmatic due to the blunt, provocative, and obscene language it used to ridicule Rómulo Betancourt, the acting president of Venezuela (1959–64). Parts of the “subversive” publication were seized by the authorities, González León was briefly arrested, and Ovalles was forced to leave the country.
In the prologue, González León does not focus solely on Ovalles’ poetry; he also discusses the overall aesthetic of the Ballena group since, as an artists’ association, no clear distinction is made between artistic genres, so that poetry, narrative, visual art, and action art are all intertwined and coexist alongside each other. The “balleneros” [participating artists] were mainly concerned with the concept of “creative purity,” and their essays, including this one, were essentially manifestos. Most of the essays openly challenged impositions of any kind and called for a constant challenge to the traditional codes in any genre. Another unique feature involved the use of sordid, unpleasant, repulsive metaphors that pushed the boundaries of social tolerance—such as necrophilia, eroticism, tumors, pus, and similar “trashy” concepts—to represent the moral decay and degradation of contemporary society.
El Techo de la Ballena was a group of visual artists and writers from the Venezuelan avant-garde who (from 1961 until 1968) combined a range of different disciplines—visual art, poetry, photography, film, and action art, among others—to create a revolutionary form of art that, in their opinion, challenged and contradicted every traditional socio-cultural value during the decade of greatest political violence that Venezuela had ever experienced. The group saw themselves as the artistic expression of that chaotic period, and viewed guerrilla warfare, intellectual leftist ideas, repression, and cities devastated by the forced and accelerated developmental model of the country’s nascent democracy as their frame of reference. The visual artists in the group embraced informalism as their aesthetic, to which they added a potent shot of aggressiveness to counter the values of geometric abstraction, traditional landscape painting, and even social realism, and adopted a strategy that was subversive, provocative, irrational, and surrealistic. The group produced numerous publications—including the three issues of the magazine Rayado sobre el techo—and exhibitions. Members of the group included the Venezuelans Carlos Contramaestre, Juan Calzadilla, Caupolicán Ovalles, Edmundo Aray, Francisco Pérez Perdomo, Salvador Garmendia, Adriano González León, Fernando Irazábal, Daniel González, Gabriel Morera, Gonzalo Castellanos, and Perán Erminy, as well as artists from other countries who were living in Venezuela at the time, such as the Chilean Dámaso Ogaz and the Spaniards J. M. Cruxent, Ángel Luque, and Antonio Moya.
