The UAG continues its Major Work of Art Series with Roberto Jacoby’s 1968: el culo te abrocho.  Jacoby is an Argentine artist whose artwork in the 1960s defined a branch of “new media” conceptual art a full decade before such aesthetic experiments were made in the Northern Hemisphere.  Along with his colleagues Oscar Masotta, Eduardo Costa and Raúl Escari, Jacoby led experiments in “social oriented” Conceptualism at the Instituto Di Tella in Buenos Aires.  One of their most important interventions was Total Participation Happening, which consisted of a feature picked up by the local press about a series of Happenings that the group staged for the camera but, in fact, never took place.  During Jacoby’s hiatus from the art world in the 1980s, he was the lyricist for the Argentine new wave band “Virus.”  In 1968: el culo te abrocho Jacoby superimposes those lyrics upon digital reprints of archival documents related to his activities at the Instituto Di Tella. Taken together, the political posters and lyrical texts provoke us to reflect upon the utopian, poetic hopes that characterized the global cultural revolution of the 1960s and to ask what that legacy might mean to us now.

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