In this essay, the artist and performer Clemente Padín explains the concept of “street art and urban art” following the alternative art exhibition, Tomarte, held in the city of Rosario, Argentina, in April 1990, with the pretense of injecting the type of innovative political content into these movements. It was during the end of the period of imposed military dictatorships by the CIA, and, of course, the hegemonic geopolitics of the United States, in the principal countries of the southern Latin American continent. After the great advent of the happenings and performance art movements in the sixties and seventies, some contemporary Latin American artists began promoting their rebirth in the nineties. Recovering their original performance artistic mark and embodying it with a “marginal” edge removed from the art market, their underground and alternative nature, little by little, managed to penetrate and ultimately to prevail in the Latin American cultural scene.

In Argentina, at the end of the sixties, a collective of intellectuals and artists of different disciplines created a self-designated “avant-garde” group with the objective of promoting art as a tool for political activism and social participation. In 1968, the first Bienal de Arte Alternativo, Tomarte was held in the city of Rosario, and then partially in Buenos Aires. It initiated a series of discussions centered on the possibilities of creating a cultural phenomenon that would partake of the truly controversial role of changing the basic principles of society in relation to the administration of the capital. Several contemporary Latin American artists therefore rejected the creation of works as enduring “unique objects” to instead create “alternative cultural strategies,” intending to transform art from its practice into a tool of resistance. In the second Encontro Latino-Americano de Artes Plásticas, held in Porto Alegre in 1990), important recognition of Latin American art was expressed with various action guidelines and measures that were proposed for adoption on the Latin American continent. That same year, in the city of Montevideo, the Encuentro Latinoamericano de Arte en la Calle was held in the city of Rosario, the first Bienal de Arte Alternativo “Tomarte” was held. In this document, the Uruguayan artist Clemente Padín (b. 1939) describes his experience in this last event and refers to the importance of a collective art group and of street art. [It was an] art that would be capable of surprising viewers and involving them suddenly in subversive mundane situations and routines, consequently offering the invitation to exercise critiques and promote group reflection. The basic argument of Padín is the following: “The streets, by its characteristics and by its nature, being central to social life, is disinterested of what art is and of what it is not, contrary to art galleries and museums that impose its logic of consumption. What I mean is that everything exposed in them is art or assumes that character (if it is not). On the other hand, the street emphasizes its communicational relationship, allowing art to deploy all of its functionality, its productive reasoning and communication, and not as mere merchandise subjected to market laws and commercial profit.”