Nelly Richard   discusses C.A.D.A. (Colectivo  Acciones de Arte), taking a critical look at the art action group’s relationship to what she called the Escena de Avanzada, a name she coined based on the group’s strategies and projects during the dictatorship. According to Richard, one of the group’s defining features was its aggressive approach to the concept of rupture as part of an avant-garde, unifying call on behalf of social, artistic, and political issues. She reviews two of the group’s actions that echo the spirit of their slogans: “art/life” and “art/politics.” In Richard’s opinion, the avant-garde discourse of “messianic utopianism” was what set the Avanzada apart from other artists who produced a sketchy body of work that completely ignored totalitarian discourses. Here, avant-garde discourse rejects a post-avant-garde “critical deconstructivism.” Richard wonders what happened to that avant-garde approach once political conditions changed during the so-called “democratic transition” (the C.A.D.A. group performed its final action in 1985). In response, she discusses the intervention that Raúl Zurita performed in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile in 1993, which consisted of writing a three-mile-wide phrase, “Ni pena ni miedo” [No Shame, No Fear].   

“Una cita limítrofe entre neovanguardia y posvanguardia,” by the essayist and cultural critic Nelly Richard (b. 1948), appears in La insubordinación de los signos (cambio político, transformaciones culturales y poéticas de la crisis) [The Insubordination of Signs (Political Changes, Cultural Transformations, and Poetics of the Crisis)] (1994), a collection of essays about relationships between the neo-avant-garde and the post-avant-garde; the role that the social sciences played in the wake of the dictatorship (1973–90); leftist culture; and the “democratic transition” as seen from the vantage point of cultural criticism. Rather than a purely academic work, this book embraced semiotics, literary criticism, the social sciences, the arts, psychoanalysis, philosophy, and aesthetics in an attempt to address political, ideological, and cultural issues. During the 1990s Richard was the director of the Revista de Crítica Cultural, a forum for critical reflection supported by Chilean and Latin American intellectuals, whose editorial boards included Chilean artists, writers, philosophers, and essayists. [See the ICAA Digital Archive for another essay published in La Insubordinación de los Signos: “Roturas, memoria y discontinuidades (homenaje a W. Benjamin)” (doc. no. 736059).]
 
In this review of two of the actions taken by C.A.D.A. a decade after the group disbanded, including a consideration of new artists, Richard discusses Para no morir de hambre en el arte [To Avoid Starving to Death in Art] (1979) and ¡Ay Sudámerica! [Oh, South America!] (1981). She claims: “Despite their desire to adhere to the program defined by the group’s discourse, members of C.A.D.A. began to disagree with each other about the relationship between art and society that was the common thread in their works.” Richard discusses the solo intervention performed by Raúl Zurita (b. 1950) whose work, in 1993, was aligned with the mood of the democratic transition. [For more information about these two actions, see: “Para no morir de hambre en el arte” (doc. no. 730226) and “¡Ay Sudámerica!” (doc. no.730004).] 
 
C.A.D.A. was an art action group whose members included Lotty Rosenfeld (1943–2020) and Diamela Eltit (b. 1949), who is also a writer; the artist Juan Castillo (b. 1952); the sociologist Fernando Balcells (b. 1950); and the poet Zurita. The group used the city and its art spaces as supports for their works. The Escena de Avanzada, on the other hand, was Richard’s name for a group of artists whose practices who challenged art, its conditions of production, and the context of the dictatorship. Due to its critical character, it represented an unofficial art that sought to stimulate an imaginary of resistance. In this sense, the group’s prevailing artistic practices were committed to working with visual languages that sought to dismantle the dominant culture. [See the following texts that discuss the group’s work: “Cada día: la creación de un arte social” (doc. no. 732411) by Robert Neustadt; “La ampliación del espacio crítico” (doc. no. 734883) by Milan Ivelic and Gaspar Galaz; “Cada 20 años” (doc. no. 740299) by Diamela Eltit; and “Una ponencia del C.A.D.A” (doc. no. 732133) written by group.]