Rubén Santantonín, a transgressor in low-key mode

In late 2024, an unusual and necessary event took place in New York. The exhibition Rubén Santantonín: Hoy a mis mirones (Ruben Santantonín: Hoy a mis mirones) opened its doors as a result of the ISLAA Artist Seminar Initiative in collaboration with the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard). Inspired by the Argentine collector Ariel Aisiks , since 2011, ISLAA (The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art) has housed one of the most important archives of Latin American art.

The exhibition focused on works by the Argentine artist that no longer exist, through his personal archive , which is part of the institution's collection. In this way, Ray Camp, Hayoung Chung, Bruna Grinsztejn, Cicely Haggerty, Lekha Jandhyala, Ariana Kalliga, Sibia Sarangan and Micaela Vindman, accompanied by fellow Argentine Mariano López Seoane , presented one of the first exhibitions since Santantonín's death in 1969: photographs, documentation and writings that attempt to reveal his vision of art.

Rubén was born in Villa Ballester in 1919, when the neighborhoods of the Buenos Aires suburbs had become the new home for families fleeing the overcrowding of the city and for those with more resources who chose the large villas. Surrounded by low houses with gardens, children playing in the streets, and a budding artistic community with figures such as Carlos Ripamonte and the gallery owner Alejandro Witcomb , who founded the Bristol Club in 1925, he spent his early years there and dabbled in art as a self-taught artist, exhibiting abstract works close to Concrete art in the late 1940s, as curator and historian María José Herrera points out. However, a painting of a realistic passage and a drawing of a portrait were donated to the Museo Moderno by the son of a friend from Santantonín. These are the first evidence of his beginnings.

Beyond that, little is known about his personal life . In the early 1960s, he began to become involved in the Buenos Aires cultural scene, making his debut in 1958 with an exhibition organized by Jorge López Anaya , and another in 1961 at the Lirolay Gallery, curated by Germaine Derbecq , a symbol of the era in enabling the presentation of experimental works with a disruptive language.

At 42, Santantonín was emerging as an artist , close to a younger generation who had no idea how or when he had emerged, but who loved and admired him. Among them were Luis Felipe Noé , Leopoldo Mahler, Luis Wells , David Lamelas , and Pablo Suárez.

At Lirolay, Rubén presented his Things, objects —although he understood them as the antithesis of these—created with precarious, everyday materials such as cardboard, newspapers, fabric, and wire, understood as concepts in opposition to art and life , “parading the viewer's relationship with objects and matter.” This was complemented by a manifesto-text , “Hoy a mis mirones” (Today to my voyeurs), as an open invitation to all human beings, not just connoisseurs.

Herrera provides evidence of this when he explains: “At a time marked by the rise of the middle class and the emerging consumer society, the artist aimed to criticize institutions (galleries, salons, museums) and propose an unsaleable art option (...) Panflecosa is art that is not for sale, it is art that is given away. Panflecosa is solitary and egoless rebellion. Panflecosa will be the art authorized by the police. Panflecosa will be the art forgiven by critics (...) Panflecosa is: Pamphletarian, Proletarian; Solitary, Unsaleable; it is the incorruptible image that is given away (...)”. Less elite, more everyday life and an art for people who approached the urban environment, where everything happened.

With a reserved but generous spirit, Santantonín also had a prolific participation abroad with an exhibition in New York and as a representative to the São Paulo Biennial , as well as a second exhibition at Lirolay in 1964. Another milestone was La Menesunda , together with his friend Marta Minujín and the collaboration of other artists in 1965 at the Di Tella Institute , as a participatory action that called on the public to get involved and installed new formulas in Argentine art far removed from a traditional visual and academic conception. Art had to be experienced as it was lived day to day . Both artists walked together through Buenos Aires trying to capture elements, signs and behaviors that they later materialized in the great happening that went down in history.

However, Santantonín was burdened by the lack of understanding of his work . Even La Menesunda , which was widely discussed and which catapulted Minujín into the spotlight perhaps because it was more extroverted or younger—as explained by the curators of CCS Bard—demonstrates that the artist occupied transgressive and relevant places, albeit in a low-key mode, supported by his interpretations and visions of conceptual art. Eventually, frustration took hold of him, leading him to devote himself to advertising photography and even to burn almost all of his works in a silent and discreet action , as if a ghost had entered his studio to tell him, "The time has come to transform."

However, unlike other artists who made similar decisions but planned the events as part of an artistic process, such as the American John Baldessari in 1970 or Minujín herself with La Destrucción , made in Paris in 1963, Santantonín left almost no evidence . "Nor is there much historical precision about that 'great bonfire', rather a collection of oral accounts that coincide in the agonizing and disappointed gesture of an artist who continued to maintain a marginal position despite the centrality of his artistic interventions that, undoubtedly, changed the poetics of the 60s," explains curator Jimena Ferreiro in the text that accompanied the exhibition Arte Cosa. Discreta historia local de la deformidad , at Roldán Moderno in 2022.

The great Santantonín passed away in 1969, a year of conflict and decline, when the Di Tella Institute closed its doors, many artists went into exile, and others stopped producing. However, his death was not a coincidence, but a sign and a mark that we have yet to decipher.