In 1977, multimedia artist Margarita Paksa (1936–2020) resumed her artistic practice after having stepped away from the art world for nearly a decade. She chose the “worst time” to go back, she recalls, without mentioning her motivations. Her words likely allude to the violent period of military rule that began in the early hours of March 24, 1976, when a military junta seized power in Argentina, deposing the government of Isabel Perón. 1  By the time of her “strategic retirement” ("retirada estratégica," as she calls it), in 1969, she had already amassed a significant body of work and garnered widespread recognition. In the tumultuous year of 1968 alone, she had participated in two pivotal art events in the history of Latin American Conceptualism: the Di Tella Institute’s renowned Experiencias ’68 (May) and the equally legendary Tucumán Arde (November), both of which were ultimately shut down by the police.  2 Throughout that decade, Paksa had been active in both socialist and Peronist cultural circles and had become involved in collective projects aimed at contributing to broader social change. However, unlike other artists and writers of her generation, such as Rodolfo Walsh and León Ferrari (with whom she collaborated), the inscription of the political in Paksa’s art was far from evident. By contrast, her artistic style was marked by the use of technology and an emphasis on intermediality and dematerialization. To borrow Luis Felipe Noe’s words, her art developed somewhere between “technology and rebellion.” 3  Moreover, as the above makes clear, the chronology of her artistic praxis cannot be easily explained by political developments, where it fits uncomfortably. Rather, her art was, as I will suggest, more fully oriented toward articulating a critique of the longue durée, particularly of the role of saturation and speed in late modernity and the relationship between the human and the machine.

In this essay I propose a close reading of a work produced by Paksa after the eight-year hiatus in her career: the performative video and poem Tiempo de descuento-cuenta regresiva-la hora cero (Extra Time-Countdown-Zero Hour [1978]—hereafter, Tiempo de descuento.) The video, which lasts between 10 minutes, 41 seconds to 12 minutes, depending on the version, was instigated and sponsored by Jorge Glusberg’s Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAYC) in 1978, and subsequently also exhibited by CAYC at various venues, including the Encontro Internacional de Vídeo-Arte de São Paulo (1978) and the Trienal Latinoamericana de Grabado (1979). One of the aims of this text is, therefore, to situate this work within CAYC’s broader video production, reflecting in particular on the place of women artists within the institution.

Tiempo de descuento was Paksa’s first collaboration with CAYC. In a televised interview from 1995, Paksa recalls meeting Glusberg in 1978, when he invited her to make a video using a machine that combined sound with “image bombardments,” effectively serving as a portable postproduction laboratory. 4  The context of this invitation was Glusberg’s fascination with video art, of which he became one of Latin American’s most ardent promoters both as a producer, through his production collective Third World Editions (which he cofounded with Pedro Roth and film editor Danilo Galasse), and as the organizer of ten Encuentros Internacionales Abiertos de Video, which took place between December 1974 and May 1978 in different cities around the word, including London, Paris, Ferrara (Italy), Buenos Aires, Lima, Mexico City, and Tokyo.

Glusberg is also widely remembered as the first person to introduce a Sony Portapack to Argentina in 1969. The early surviving videos made with this camera focus on documenting CAYC activity, in particular exhibitions like CAYC al aire libre (1972) and Arte de sistemas en Latinoamérica (1974). Despite the apparent visual simplicity of these materials, film scholar Clara Garavelli sees them as prime examples of the local exploration of the formal qualities of the electronic image, in tune with similar developments in Europe and the US. 5  Access to this equipment certainly brought new life to a medium that first gained significance in Argentina in the second half of the 1960s in the context of artistic experiments with television sets and closed circuits at the Centro de Artes Visuales (CAV) of the Di Tella Institute. As Katarzyna Cytlak points out, this early video scene in the country was dominated by women, with Paksa playing a significant role. 6  As the years went on, however, in particular after the closure of the Di Tella’s CAV in 1970, the predominance of women in the country’s video art scene started to dissipate.

Glusberg founded CAYC (first named Centro de Estudios de Arte y Comunicación) precisely at the time the CAV was closing down, and arguably saw the latter as a model to build upon. 7  Like CAV’s director Jorge Romero Brest, Glusberg was committed to raising the status of Argentine art internationally. However, rather than pursuing a strictly cosmopolitan project, he situated CAYC at the intersection between Third Word singularity and artistic universalism, shifting the emphasis between the two in different contexts. 8  One of the strategies Glusberg employed to position not only Argentine but also Latin American artists on the global stage was the often outright appropriation of techno-scientific discourses, beginning with cybernetics on the occasion of the 1969 exhibition Arte y cibernética—whose theoretical framework he mostly borrowed from the London-based curator Jasia Reichardt—and followed by systems and information theory—understood through the writings of Jack Burnham (who Glusberg often failed to reference). 9 

Glusberg’s embrace of video, the latest image technology in the 1970s and the one that arguably captured zeitgeist of the time, was spearheaded by this appropriational dynamic but then taken much further. Glenn Phillips and Sophia Serrano argue that he viewed video through a utopian lens, aspiring to democratize access to the technology among “Third World artists” and also believing in the medium’s potential to catalyze social change. 10  Although his approach was likely more pragmatic than utopian, several recently digitized videos from his archive, which for many years were considered lost, suggest that video became for him the ultimate medium: a universal artistic language capable of encompassing all media and spanning all modalities of practice, from the indexical documentation of reality to entirely abstract sonic and visual experiments. 11 

In one of these works, titled From Leonardo to the Intermedia Revolution (October 1969), Glusberg describes video as the axis of an intermedial revolution driven by the inclusion of new technologies in artistic practice. 12  Scripted by Glusberg, this 19-minute, 35-second film, which has become blurred due to the decay of the original tape, proposes an evolutionary trajectory for the “development of culture.” The trajectory leads back to Da Vinci and Duchamp as figures who “not only incorporated technology in [their] work but transformed technology [into] art.” The montage juxtaposes portraits of both artists, while a photograph of Mona Lisa (1503) is followed by one of Bicycle Wheel (1913), suggesting an organic liaison between them (fig. 1). In the work of both Da Vinci and Duchamp, intermedia becomes, as the voiceover affirms, “an art of interweavings between men and machine,” leading to “the most accelerated and dazzling production” of artworks. The trajectory continues with the Bauhaus (highlighting figures such as László Moholy-Nagy and Oskar Schlemmer), May Ray, Naum Gabo, Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky, Jean Tinguely, the Futurists, and Experiments in Art and Technology. It culminates with a list of 1960s experimental artists, at which point, crucially, CAYC enters the canon, adding both Latin American and women artists to an otherwise entirely European and male genealogy. Among those listed are Leopoldo Maler, Luis Benedit, Víctor Grippo, and Lea Lublin. Glusberg also inserts himself into this remarkably linear historical narrative. At one point the voiceover declares: “Speeding up the development of aesthetics, this is what really interests us” 13  and goes on to contrast this approach with an art of “arcane form” and “artificial purity.” Glusberg suggests that not embracing the so-called intermedia revolution effectively heralds the end of art: “the twilight of brotherhood between art and technology is also the twilight of art.” 14 

Although Glusberg’s project was far from consistent, this developmentalist historical perspective, characterized by a Eurocentric sense of origin, a linear trajectory of development, and a will to accelerate history, is one of CAYC’s defining features. In other words, Glusberg believed in what Jean-Luc Nancy describes as “mastered history,” marked by a sense of continuity, command, and teleology. 15  Furthermore, Glusberg saw himself and CAYC artists as the protagonists of what still seemed like a promising future, even if his vision was often ambiguous and shifting, possibly excluding the prospect of international success. However, Glusberg was not naively optimistic, nor were the artists who collaborated with him. An awareness of political repression, censorship, and even ecological devastation is present in CAYC’s art and exhibitions throughout what Mari Carmen Ramírez describes as the Center’s key years (1969–77), which coincide with the military governments of the so-called Argentine Revolution (1966–73) and the subsequent 1976 coup. 16  Ramírez goes on to propose a reading of CAYC as a politicized version of Burnham’s systems aesthetics, arguing that “CAYC artists denounced through their works and pronouncements the conditions of censorship, repression, and violence that took hold of Argentine society during this period.” 17 

In reality, the politics of Glusberg and the artists who collaborated with CAYC are far too complex to narrow down to a single stance, if only because CAYC partnered with numerous artists, who also shifted over time. Glusberg himself was arrested in 1972, when the de facto government of Alejandro Agustín Lanusse censored the outdoor exhibition Arte e ideología: CAYC al aire libre, which featured works critical of the regime (figs. 2 and 3). Only a few months earlier, however, CAYC had participated in a satellite exhibition at the São Paulo Biennial. In deciding to participate, Glusberg had been seemingly oblivious to the international boycott of the event to denounce the Brazilian military government’s use of “the bloodiest repressive tortures in our hemisphere,” as one protest letter read. 18  More seriously, through Modulor, his lighting company, Glusberg had numerous dealings with the military government that came to power in Argentina in 1976. He particularly profited from illuminating public events, such as the 1978 World Cup, which the military government used to cover up widespread human rights abuses taking place in the country. 19  Despite this, Glusberg did not make his personal political views known and, in contrast, supported left-leaning artists, including Paksa.

In the midst of this complex scenario, and following a decade of relentless political violence, it is my contention that in the late 1970s, Glusberg constructed the allure of CAYC around its connection to technoscience, as a field perceived to be apart from the clash between communist/revolutionary and Catholic/conservative ideologies. Ultimately, technological advancement had become one of the last remaining promises of historical progress in Argentina. Defined as an interdisciplinary project, CAYC aspired to revitalize avant-garde art precisely through its coupling with new epistemologies and technologies, locating in this coupling a hope for societal transformation tantamount to political chance itself. For instance, in a 1977 text titled “Rhetoric of Art and Technology in Latin America,” Glusberg presents video as a “revolutionary” medium and as “the most interesting synthesis of art and technology.” 20  He adds: “The ills which affect the creative deployment of the new media and materials have to do with social conflicts and not with the unceasing progress of technology and its applications.” 21  In this and other texts, the critic not only describes technology as part of an unstoppable tidal movement but also sees himself as aiding artists to join and navigate this fast-moving flow of historical time.

II

Paksa was largely inactive as an artist during CAYC’s early years and did not belong to the so-called CAYC group, or Grupo de los Trece, a name used to refer to the thirteen male artists that allegedly accepted Glusberg’s invitation to form a “Grotowskian laboratory” days after Jerzy Grotowski’s visit to Buenos Aires from Poland in November 1971, and whose work became the “core” of CAYC activity in the years to come. 22  The composition of this group reveals the extent to which Glusberg’s project was decidedly masculine: even when some of the founding members were replaced, the new members were still always men (one exception was Mirtha Dermisache, who hesitantly joined the founding group before deciding to leave soon after). 23  Women artists collaborating with CAYC were in fact hidden in plain sight: several of them, including Marta Minujín, Mirta Dermisache, and Margarita Paksa, developed important projects at CAYC and participated in key exhibitions, such as Arte y cibernética (1969) and Arte de sistemas en Latinoamérica (1974–76). However, they received much less attention than the “core”, male CAYC group, and their activity was regarded (by the press, by CAYC contacts and by Glusberg himself) as being effectively peripheral.

Glusberg somehow managed both to give a platform to women artists and to suppress them. For example, in September 1972, CAYC published a gacetilla, or “news brief,” announcing a performance by Ana Kamien during the opening of Arte de sistemas II in Buenos Aires. Despite this, Kamien was never named as participating in the show nor included in the catalogue. Additionally, in 1974 she traveled to London for the Art Systems in Latin America exhibition and First International Open Encounter on Video at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). On that occasion Glusberg decided at the very last minute not to project her film Ana Kamien even though it had already been announced in the program. 24  Similarly, Kamien performed a dance as part of the ICA show but was never listed as one of the participating artists (possibly also a consequence of what today might be considered outdated boundaries between the visual and performing arts). This strange middle ground of simultaneous exclusion and inclusion has not been unusual for women artists. 25  Significantly, this has also been the locus from which they have often articulated potent cultural and gender critiques—as, I will argue, was the case with Paksa.

Tiempo de descuento opens and closes with brief title sequences that unmistakably mark it as a CAYC production. After the initial intertitles, the film gives way to a flickering timecode that grows and then shrinks repeatedly, seemingly responding to the erratic rhythms of a strident piece of electroacoustic music. The date displayed in the timecode, 11-15-’78, is written using US month-day-year format, an involuntary marker of the technology as a foreign, imported instrument of time capture. Paksa further renders time as muddled and discontinuous: although the video begins at 17:21, the editing takes it back in time; and by the end of the piece, the time elapsed according to the still-visible timecode does not correspond to the video’s actual duration. With this initial, subtle temporal gesture, the video points not only toward the use of an imported technology but also to a willingness to use it “wrongly,” or against its inbuilt rationale.

The work’s overpowering sound design, in turn, situates the spectator in an atmosphere of automation, if not anomie, filled with repetitive, mechanical sound. The anxious feeling that results is intensified by the vision of an empty room, furnished only with a chair and the puzzling presence of an abstract scenography: a medium-size square (roughly 1m2) demarcated with white contact tape on the parquet floor. Within seconds of being confronted with this vision, a barefoot man dressed in a long-sleeved black shirt and black jeans enters the frame, positions himself inside the square, and begins making exaggerated running movements (fig. 4-6.)

The rest of the video is a visual choreography of this man’s long, uninterrupted, yet static, run. Filmed exclusively from his left side, the video emphasizes rhythm over narrative and gesture over sequence. Although he remains on screen until the end of the film, we learn nothing about him: he appears as a strictly generic figure, at times barely a moving silhouette drifting towards abstraction. His image is mechanically manipulated by a video synthesizer, which duplicates and illuminates it with rapidly changing fluorescent lights. The man’s contour is also artificially entrapped by the footage of a turntable, which like the rest of the elements in the video, changes in color and size as the video progresses (fig. 7-9). The sudden appearance of the turntable in Tiempo de descuento inevitably references Paksa’s iconic work Communications, presented at the Di Tella in 1969. In that piece, a vinyl record featuring human sounds—including the sounds of Paksa having sex with her partner—was played to the audience using two turntables (fig. 10). In the video, the turntable, which at one point encircles the body of the runner, also suggests the figure of a rodent trapped in a revolving wheel. Meanwhile, the initial timecode flickers unstoppably on the left side of the frame, occasionally jumping forward and backward in time. This disruption of the temporal sequence renders the man’s race ever more pointless and exposes, through a simple gesture, the runner’s vulnerability to the annulling powers of a technology capable of accelerating, slowing down, and erasing time.

At once visually complex and highly monotonous, Paksa’s video makes for a demanding experience that exhausts the viewer, as if she had run the race herself. This exertion is intensified by the video’s strident music, which triggers a sense of unease, further enhanced by the framing of the runner in abstract enclosures produced by geometric figures. The pace of the editing is fast, almost electrifyingly so, yet its logic feels improvised, if not erratic, exposing the synthesizer’s strictly mechanistic artistry. The video combines wide, medium, and close shots, never offering a moment of calm, and plays with the vertigo of a movement that wants to stop but is overtaken by inertia, as if conjuring a self unable to arrest a damaging compulsion; or a society that won’t relinquish an illusion of progress that ultimately guarantees its destruction. Despite not moving forward, the runner is dynamic in the extreme: he alternates postures, shifts from a steep inclination to almost complete verticality, and his arms and legs go through stages of hyperbolic, almost desperate movement, that occasionally give way to a rundown floppiness. What is clear is that his strenuous effort is futile. He runs without getting anywhere, his overly emphatic movements turning the performance into a parody of the very notion of running to achieve something or to speed up the course of a set process. Moreover, following Glusberg’s own argument on the pervasiveness of rhetoric in video art, the dramatized gestures of this abstracted body immersed in an unstoppable flow of image and sound invite a reading of the video as an allegory of linear time and of the belief in historical progress that sustains it.

In her 1976 essay on video art and the aesthetics of narcissism, Rosalind Krauss notes that most of the work produced in the early days of video art used the human body as its central instrument. In doing so, she argues, it positioned the body between two machines generating instant feedback: the camera and the monitor (“which reprojects the performer’s image with the immediacy of a mirror.”). 26  The effect of this entrapment of the body is, for Krauss, a “collapsed present … completely severed from a sense of its own past,” and devoid, too, of any horizon of futurity beyond the immediacy of feedback. 27  The subject of the video—often the artist—thus becomes “self-encapsulated” by the medium. Krauss goes on to argue that this technical condition turns video into a “psychological situation” that breaks away from the reflexive tradition of painting and sculpture to produce, instead, instances of reflection, mirroring, and symmetry. 28  This distinction between video and modernist painting ultimately leads Krauss to associate the former with the aesthetics of narcissism.

Yet Paksa’s use of video in Tiempo de descuento is more clearly geared toward a commentary on technology, its social conditions, and its place within the CAYC project than toward a commentary on the self—and much less toward a libidinal investment in the latter. This is consistent with her artistic production up to that point in her career, with some of her better-known works being 500 Watts, 4.635 KC, 4,5 c. (1967) and Comunicaciones (1968). Indeed, the appearance of the turntable in Tiempo de descuento folds this piece into the debates on technology and the politics of (dis)embodiment and dematerialization that marked Paksa’s earlier work. 29 

From the mid-1960s, Paksa sought not only to turn away from the art object but also from the human figure, aiming to generate a reflection about this distancing or disappearance, effected in this case by technology. Regarding her use of recorded, human-generated sound and voice in Comunicaciones, she recalls wanting to “create an artwork that worked in the imagination … that was not an object, something palpable, but something totally virtual, dematerialized,” despite having palpable markers of human life. 30  In an interview with Laura Buccellato, Paksa explains that her aim was to emphasize “the technique, the mechanics” (la técnica, lo mecánico), aiming to steer herself and the spectator away from “the traces of the human” (los rastros de lo humano). From the early days of her practice, therefore, Paksa’s work positioned technology as an instrument capable of capturing and ultimately substituting somatic life. 31 

Paksa recalls having originally filmed Tiempo de descuento as a rehearsal, which she was unable to repeat due to the performer’s reluctance: “He said it was already done, that there was no time, with very bad will.” 32  However, the historical record suggests at least one more staging. In particular, a black-and-white photograph shows the same runner performing Paksa’s piece in a different setting: an unidentified room with floor tiles instead of parquet, a staircase (under which he is situated), and a monitor behind him (fig. 11). The runner is again barefoot, dressed in the same clothing as in the original video, and standing inside a white square demarcated on the floor. At first glance, it appears that closed-circuit TV was used to display his image visible on the monitor; however, there is clear asynchronicity between his posture and the recorded image. This more likely suggests that the monitor was projecting a prerecorded video; i.e., Paksa’s original Tiempo de descuento.

Despite the temporal slippage between performance and video, the tautological structure of the piece, combined with the simultaneous presence of the human and his (technologically mediated) representation, recalls Joseph Kosuth’s Three Chairs (1965), in which a chair, presented as an object, a picture and a linguistic sign, prompts a reflection on the workings of representation—having in turn famously become the exemplar case of what Lucy Lippard and Joseph Chandler describe as a “post-aesthetic” or Conceptual form of (dematerialized) art. 33  At some point in the conception of her piece Paksa also introduced a third, linguistic element to her tautology: an (anti-)poem bearing the same long title as the video. According to some accounts, printouts of this text were handed over to the audience during one of the presentations of the work, although it is not clear where or when this may have taken place. 34  The poem begins:

"The law of its continuity

is the feeling of the same

of the identical, which serves as the basis of memory

the transition from the homogeneous to the different

the form of all activity, in turn

a successive form

a perplexed succession" 35 

Conceived as a collage, Paksa’s poem is printed in multicolored text that reveals the juxtaposition of definitions of time. Although “time” is mentioned only in the title, the text elaborates on its different meanings: as a form (“la forma de toda actividad”), a sequence (“la sucesión de la conciencia”), an abstract formulation (“fórmula abstracta de todo cambio”), an illusion (“idéntica ilusión”), a law (“la ley de su continuidad”), a foundation (“que sirve de base a la memoria”), and the coming into being of difference (“el tránsito de lo homogéneo a lo diferente”). The insistence on positing time as multiplicity roots it in its social and perceptual dimensions while staging the frictions between temporal realities. 36  Moreover, the (anti-)poem, as Paksa referred to it, explores the dialectics of homogeneity and difference, continuity and emergence, spatializing time as the locus of a transit and the repository of futurity. That is, Paksa renders time as the condition for being to become what it’s not, to gain motility and to undergo change. Time is, the calligraphic (anti-)poem repeats three times, “a perplexing succession” (una sucesión perpleja) (fig. 12).

If Paksa’s insistence on treating her text as an anti-poem is of value here, it is to revive Nicanor Parra’s idea of the anti-poem as profoundly permeated by reality. According to Parra, the anti-poem, as a carrier of the rhythms and expressions of the spoken word, “oscillates between the academy, the street and the fair” (oscila entre la academia, la calle y la feria). Its approach to the political is characterized by humor and critique, avoiding cartoonish slogans or overt militancy. 37  Its meaning is performative and relational. As Catherine Boyle puts it: “It works not only in the fluidly visible ways of everyday language but establishes itself as a poetic utterance that demands an audience, whose linguistic structures can only be understood when they do battle with an interlocutor.” 38 

Seeing Paksa’s video, live performance, and poem through the prism of Parra’s anti-poetry, on the one hand, and Kosuth’s Conceptualism, on the other, reveals a complex scenario that challenges the sense of closure the piece may generate on first viewing. Contrary to Krauss’s understanding of video art as marked by the aesthetics of narcissism, the film produces an anonymous, faceless object that allows us to turn the mirror away from the self and toward the social body. In doing so, it fosters a reflection on time, technology, and political repression that is sufficiently coded to evade censorship or fall prey to the transparency of propaganda. This reflection interpellates the linguistic and corporeal dimensions of being, without thereby narrowing the agency of the viewer-participant. 39 

While Tiempo de descuento is one of the few films made by women sponsored by CAYC, my interpretation is at odds with Glusberg’s rather literal and simplistic description of the video, which treats the medium as strictly representational (as opposed to performative and affective). “This individual,” writes Glusberg, referring to the runner, “metaphorized the human species, which runs, toils, works, without being able to free himself from his confinement, a life confinement that in turn cannot escape death.” 40  While the proposition is telling, it does little to recognize the agency of the medium and the political implications of Paksa’s aesthetic choices. Moreover, Glusberg’s almost literal reading overlooks the extent to which the piece might be seen as a critique of the obsession with progress that underpinned CAYC’s own masculinist project. Ultimately, I see Paksa’s approach to (video) technology as strikingly dissimilar to Glusberg’s understanding of the relationship between art and technics. Tiempo de descuento combines time, image, and form to disavow a linear historical imagination that excludes the feminine, propelled towards the future by inertia and ultimately emptied of political purpose.