Los muebles de Beatriz González [The Furniture of Beatriz González] is the only book by Argentine art critic and historian Marta Traba (1923–1983) devoted to a single artist. Indeed, it is about a single series of works, the furniture pieces that Beatriz González (b. 1938) began making in 1970. The book sets out to provide tools to understand González’s aesthetic project in the first decade of her career. There is a clear affinity between the production of a young artist from a new generation that took over from artists active in the fifties and sixties, on the one hand, and the critical vision that Marta Traba developed pursuant to the “theory of resistance” published in the book Dos décadas vulnerables en las artes plásticas latinoamericanas, 1950–1970 [Two Vulnerable Decades for Latin-American Visual Art] (Mexico City: Editora Siglo XXI, 1973), on the other. Marta Traba’s theoretical work from the fifties, which put forth a highly formalist vision, was in keeping with the production of a generation led by figures like Alejandro Obregón (1920–1992), Fernando Botero (b. 1932), Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar (1923–2004), and others. In the book discussed here, however, Traba observes a new sort of production as she presents a notion of art that reformulates, appropriates, and envisions “the national” without eschewing a structured pictorial project. Therefore, in this book Traba draws on references from the social sciences (such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno) rather than restricting herself to a formalist history of art.
Traba’s reflections demonstrate the pertinence of Beatriz González’s creative strategies insofar as they break away from a personal and romantic impulse in order to make use of an array of sources, such as mass media, popular culture, political discourse, and other means. These strategies are characteristic of the generation that emerged in the sixties and seventies, a generation that includes Bernardo Salcedo (1939–2007), Álvaro Barrios (b. 1945), Antonio Caro (b. 1950), and many others.