After the Tucumán Arde [Tucumán is Burning] interruption caused by the show’s closure in Buenos Aires, the difficulties that the Rosario and Buenos Aires avant-garde groups had in remaining cohesive and committed to their quest for a “new aesthetic” grew up so that their abandonment of art becomes evident. In the case of the Rosario artists, the group’s dissolution was hastened once the work was completed, and the principal artists who realized the work met between December 1968 and the early-1969 to assess their status. After a painful and exhaustive process wherein repeated attempts were made to avoid dissolution, the decision was made to disband the group. Those present promised never to participate in any galleries, museums, competitions, awards, or any other institution belonging to bourgeois art. All were strictly true to their word as none of them returned to that visual arts sphere in the years that followed.
At the beginning of the 1970s, two works by Juan Pablo Renzi can be thought of as following in sequence behind Tucumán Arde. He called this series “Panfletos” [Pamphlets]. The series began with Panfleto nº 1 (Tucumán Arde, according to Renzi) and continued with Panfleto nº 2, dated 1970 and presented in 1971 at the invitation of Jorge Glusberg in the show De la Figuración al Arte de Sistemas [From Figuration to Systems Art] at the Camden Art Center in London.
During the so-called “Rosariazo”—a popular uprising that had its epicenter in the city of Rosario after the more widely known “Cordobazo”—a student was found dead in the street. Beginning with this event, Renzi took the black and white photograph taken by C. Saldi of a young man thrown face down on the pavement and blew it up in size. Using red enamel on the image, he painted blood running over the cobblestones, before the panel, was a simulation of a bucket full of blood. At the top of the photograph a text in English declared: “This blood is Latin American blood, shed in our fight for liberation. Sooner or later we shall retrieve it.” This work was accompanied by a graphic that reproduced, in English, the first part of his speech at the Primer Encuentro Nacional de Arte de Vanguardia [First National Encounter of Avant-garde Art] as well as another text titled Panfleto nº 2, also in English, that explained his aesthetic principles.
In 1971 Renzi presents a work consisting of a short text titled La nueva moda. Panfleto nº 3 in the show Arte de Sistemas organized by CayC at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires. The most striking characteristic of these “pamphlets” is its early and explicit resistance to the attempt to classify Tucumán Arde as conceptual art.
