Images & Ethics in Contemporary Argentina: The Art of Post-Dictatorship

Presenting the guiding argument of my recent work in Argentina, this paper argues that aesthetic interventions can be understood as ethical endeavours that accompany but exceed any political-legislative or juridical project.  Insofar as aesthetic endeavours constitute forms of 'memory work' they risk being understood as attempts to put the past to rest, or even as melancholic returns to the scene of the past to rehearse the stories encountered there.  But this 'return' is not a real return and is not 'about' but is instead 'before Memory' in Derrida's sense.  In other words, the concern is to respond to the past by enacting and inculcating a response-ability, an ethics.  The examples I discuss concern the relation to the other characterised by Levinas' concept of the Infinite, and are therefore as futural as is possible.  Thus while many artist activist interventions (such as the work of GAC and the escraches) have called for trials - Juicios y Castigo - it is argued here that all of the examples I have dealt with are interventions that exceed this.  They also concern absolute Justice.  Drawing on examples from my book The Art of Post-Dictatorship: Ethics and Aesthetics in Transitional Argentina (2014, Routledge/Glasshouse) this paper will consider two sets of photographic portraits of desaparecidos from Buenos Aires and Córdoba.