Since settling in the United States in 1964, Luis Camnitzer (b. 1937), not only worked as an artist and an art teacher in New York, but wrote weekly newspaper articles for the Montevideo newspaper Marcha that made him a character that was privileged as a first-hand informant. He provided and brought news about artistic events to a broad spectrum of readers of this weekly bulletin in Montevideo. In addition, he served a middle-class audience avid for information and ideas developed abroad as visible forms of contemporary critical thinking.
In this article, the author described and evaluated in a conversational tone the exhibitions by various artists whose works were spatial in design and exhibited simultaneously in New York, in February 1965, such as Alexander Calder’s mobiles, a proto-minimalist design metal sculpture by David Smith, bronze sculptures by Roberto Matta, sculptures made of large pieces of wood that resulted from a compilation of drawers forming panels up to three meters high by Louise Nevelson. The latter, had obtained the International Prize of Sculpture in 1962 for the sculpture Paneles en sombra (1961) given by the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella de Buenos Aires. This is reason why he was known in the artistic circles of the Río de la Plata. Additionally, Camnitzer made article reviews on both the “Pop” works by Peter Agostini and on the crushed cars by John Chamberlain. However, he also stopped to comment on the works of Mark Di Revero and Richard Stankiewicz who were both artists of iron and abstract expressionism and both whom Camnitzer considered “the most traditionalists” of all the exhibition artists at the time in New York. However, both artists were the closest to the type of work being performed by several sculptors in Montevideo. An example of this could be seen in the first open-air exhibition carried out by the Instituto General Electric in Montevideo in 1964.
The last words of the article, were dedicated to the work by George Segal, the sculptor of the human figures in plaster that, curiously, seemed to be the most poignant in Camnitzer’s view, as the sculpture identifies with a rubber of sudden death that is daily present.