Luis Felipe Noé (1933) was born in Buenos Aires; he studied with painter Horacio Butler and later worked as a self-taught artist. In 1955, Noé began work as an art critic and reviewer in the daily El Mundo. In 1959, Noé carried out his first solo exhibition. Between 1961–65, he took part—together with Ernesto Deira, Rómulo Macció, and Jorge de la Vega—in the group Nueva Figuración [New Figuration], also known as Otra Figuración. Noé wrote numerous books, among them: Antiestética [Antiaesthetics] (1965), Una sociedad colonial avanzada [An Advanced Colonial Society] (1971) and, together with Horacio Zabala, El Arte en cuestión [Art in question]. It must be taken into account that, since its inception in 1951, the São Paulo Biennial was a focal point for both the circulation and the consecration of Latin American art. The document is a response to the open summons carried out by the action-nucleus that was generated around the Museo Latinoamericano, and made up by a group of New York-based visual artists, in addition to the MICLA [Latin American Cultural Independence Movement]. This response was published in the book Contrabienal [Counter- Biennial] designed and printed by the group made up of Luis Wells, Luis Camnitzer, Carla Stellweg, Liliana Porter, and Teodoro Maus. There, the initiative of opposition to the Brazilian biennial (so-called “the Dictatorial Biennial”) was displayed. Given the fact that Brazil—like many other Latin American countries in the 1970s—was ruled by an adamant regime of censorship, repression, and torture, this document brings to light one of the strategies of resistance wielded by artists to confront any kind of dictatorial policies.
