In the following passages, Luis Felipe Noé reflects on the function and methods of art in the contemporary atomized society. He asserts that transformations of art imply a constant revolution. Today’s artists must examine and expose the basic contemporary social traits: chaos and disorder. The new anti-aesthetic would organically express these crucial characteristics and not simply represent them. The author assigns a special role in this task to the artists from Latin America since the artists from the societies responsible for the “chaos”—Europe and the United States—refused to address the issue by adhering to the outdated “language of order.” He thus suggests the crisis of Western civilization—the loss of order, harmony, and the central organizing principles. In turn, now its structure is constituted by chaos.

Noé puts forth several ways through which the artists might express this “chaos as a structure.” He postulates for the destruction of unity as the organizing principle of a work of art. Hence, formalist approaches are no longer valid. He calls for the embrace of movement and “permanent transformation.” He further urges going beyond abstraction since the drama of human condition is the key to the current situation. Finally, he signals that to fully “assume” chaos the artists must resort to collective work.

The Argentine painter Luis Felipe Noé (b. 1933) was the leading spokesperson and theoretician of the group Otra Figuración [Another Figuration], also known as Nueva Figuración [New Figuration]. The group—comprised of Noé, Ernesto Deira (1928–1986), Rómulo Macció (b. 1931), and Jorge de la Vega (1930–1971)—debuted at the Galería Peuser in 1961 and exhibited together until 1965. [For Noé’s statement from the catalogue of the group’s first exhibition, see ICAA digital archive (doc. no. 740692).] They represented one of many new experimental trends that during the 1960s rejuvenated the Argentine artistic scene, previously dominated by Informalist abstraction.

The following passages reflect the key tenets of Noé’s artistic attitude during this time— especially the notion of the “chaos as a structure”—that were premised on his deep reflection on the contemporary society. They were published in his book Antiestética [Anti-aesthetic] (Buenos Aires: Editorial Van Riel, 1965).

In the early 1950s, Noé studied law at the University of Buenos Aires and took art classes in the private atelier of the figurative painter Horacio Butler (1897–1983). He had his first solo exhibition in 1959, at the Galería Witcomb in Buenos Aires. During these early years of his career, from the mid-1950s to 1961, he worked as a journalist for the newspapers El Mundo, El Nacional, La Razón, and La Prensa. Notably, in 1956, he published as series of exhibition reviews in El Mundo, which played an important role in the renovation of critical terms used in the Argentine artistic debates. [See the collection of documents in the ICAA archive: (docs. no. 738275, 739775, 739885, among others)]. Noé has continued to write throughout his career. Among his important later publications are Una sociedad colonial avanzada [An Advanced Colonial Society] (Buenos Aires: Editorial La Flor, 1971) and El arte en cuestión. Conversaciones con Horacio Zabala (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2000).

This text was published in English as “Anti-Aesthetics” in Mari Carmen Rami´rez and He´ctor Olea, eds., Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 481–482.