Inspired by the Escena de Avanzada, Fernando Balcells reflects on the concepts of “avant-garde” and “history and art.” This text was written in 1988, almost a decade after those art and experimental practices first emerged and created the aforementioned “scene.” Balcells presents a series of questions and speculations that both challenge and acknowledge details about the formation of the group. According to him, the Escena de Avanzada was about how the human body came to be portrayed in art; it also prompted a questioning of social life by involving participants from other disciplines (such as philosophy and literature), which spilled over from their respective fields of action. He also suggests using “transart” as a category with which to account for its characteristic mobility. Balcells mentions the idea that the Avanzada was made possible by the coup d’état (1973–90), a possibly controversial theory that he approaches from a different perspective. His basic question in this essay concerns the place of art. 

“La escena de avanzada: el cuerpo de la desdicha” is a text by the sociologist Fernando Balcells (b. 1950) that was published in Número quebrado (1988–90), a magazine devoted to cultural criticism. Balcells was a member of the art action group C.A.D.A. (Colectivo Acciones de Arte) (1979–85). Other members of the group included Lotty Rosenfeld (1943–2020) and Diamela Eltit (b. 1949), who was also a writer, the visual artist Juan Castillo (b. 1952), and the poet Raúl Zurita (b. 1950). The group’s work used the city and a number of art spaces as supports. Their maiden project was “Para no morir de hambre en el arte” (1979), which involved several simultaneous actions that took place in a town on the outskirts of the city of Santiago, in an insert in HOY magazine, outside the UN building, and at the Galería de Arte Centro Imagen. They invited other artists to get involved and started a group effort that operated in different places, only some of which were institutional, working with a wide range of strategies.    

The C.A.D.A. group used writing to communicate their ideas about art, which often conflicted with the views of theorist and cultural critic Nelly Richard (b. 1948), who had theorized the Escena de Avanzada, and the art critic and curator Justo Pastor Mellado (b. 1949), who presents discussions on the subject in his “Intervención viernes 20 de mayo” [see the ICAA Digital Archive (doc. no. 749179)] in which he discusses the role played by photography in the visual arts. The art action group described their work in “Una ponencia del C.A.D.A.” (doc. no. 732133).    

In addition to talking about the Escena de Avanzada with the hindsight provided by a new decade and perspective, Balcells muses about the project that launched the C.A.D.A. (20 years later) in his text “Hoy como ayer” (doc. no. 740288), in which he discusses the concept of “Social Sculpture” that the group used to describe their work in public spaces. In that same year (1988) Richard published “Trama urbana y fugas utópicas” (doc. 740281), in which she discusses the C.A.D.A. Both of these texts were published in the Revista de Crítica Cultural no. 19 (Santiago).

Escena de Avanzada is what Richard called the group of neo-avant-garde artists and practices that challenged art and art production methods in a country living under the strict censorship of a dictatorship. This movement, which produced counter-institutional art, sought to stimulate critical awareness and promote a commitment to resistance. These art practices prioritized the use of language in an attempt to challenge the dominant cultural discourse, opening a space for discussion between art, politics, and society that artists addressed from many different perspectives.