El Techo de la Ballena Group: Cheesy, Necrophilic and Perverse in Venezuelan Art of the Sixties

Abstract

In this article we propose to consider the group of 'informalist' artists who founded and gave life to El Techo de la Ballena, animators of the cultural and aesthetic controversy in the Caracas scene throughout the sixties. This movement questioned the dominant trends in the Venezuelan field of arts. We believe that analyzing the artistic praxis of the balleneros (whalers) will make it possible to think about the critical modulations that the relationship between aesthetics and politics acquired in Venezuela during those years, the tensions that emerged between a sector of local culture in the face of certain types of exhibitions, as well as the way in which this artistic group incorporated into its repertoire of action a diversity of elements and materials traditionally identified with 'the aesthetics of the ugly'. From a theoretical-methodological perspective that articulates intellectual history with the sociology of culture, we will investigate the conditions of possibility that made Caracas a particularly feasible space for certain multidisciplinary, visceral, vitalist avant-garde configurations to have manifested themselves in the way they did.