For most of us, the words ‘pop art’ conjure up graffitied images of Ché Guevara and enormous coke cans. Fundación PROA’s new exhibition of Argentine and Brazilian pop art bears all the familiar hallmarks of the movement but relocates the focus to the southern cone, where familiar bold fonts and cartoon images meet a carnal, visceral movement rooted in the wounds of dictatorship and repression.

Claudio Tozzi & Roberto Jacoby interpret Che Guevara in 1968 (images courtesy of PROA)

This is a brutal yet beautiful exhibition, located deep in the heart of La Boca. Curated by Paulo Herkenhoff and Rodrigo Alonso it charts the links between Argentine and Brazilian pop art in the 1960s and showcases a movement which synthesises the political, social and cultural violence of the era as well as the roots of hope and revolution.

“Ideological clashes, military regimes, resistance struggles the dependence on foreign capitalism, urbanisation and the distinctive popular protestsi n these countries – this is the starting point for this fervent aesthetic and political study,” says Adriana Rosenburg, president of PROA.

“For the first time we are bringing together 59 artists from Brazil and Argentina and more than 150 works, photographs and documents from this movement.”

Western audiences have become increasingly inured to the stylised cartoon images and bold colours which define pop art and it’s easy to forget the political context behind the images which now adorn our aprons and sofa cushions.

For North American and British audiences in particular, for whom Lichenstein’s stylised spots reign supreme, the Coke cans and Ché Guevara images have lost their political and cultural reference points. Yet for Latin American audiences, these are powerful symbols of social and political change, and central to the pop art movement.

“South America produced two key symbols in these years, one local, in the form of Ché Guevara, who represents change, liberation and social revolution and another international, in the form of Coca-Cola which appears in general as a symbol of American imperialism and economic domination,” explains Rosenberg, in literature accompanying the exhibition.

'La civilización occidental y cristiana' by León Ferrari (images courtesy of PROA)

The first room of the show is dedicated to these more familiar manifestations of the movement. It is filled with irreverent subversions of political and cultural imagery. The middle of the stylish room is consumed by a giant model plane suspended from the ceiling with a crucified Jesus attached to its wings. This piece, “La civilización occidental y cristiana” by León Ferrari, is flanked by a series of images of the Kennedys and a playful coke bottle installation.

However the second room introduces us to the darker, carnal themes of Argentine and Brazilian pop art. This work in this space is body-centred and deeply political, with references to torture, repression and social pain. Antonio Dias’ ‘Glutāo’ is typical, depicting a blood red figure with a set of abstract organs on display, brining to mind disturbing hints of physical pain and punishment.

The centre of the room features two disturbing sculptures, one resembling a giant misshapen sack and the other a garish knot of intestinal woollen tubes. The colours of the works here are less brash than the familiar cartoon style and have been created in a range of textures and mediums. As well as flat poster style pieces jammy canvases, thick with murky oil paints line the walls.

Organs on display (images courtesy of PROA)

The third room continues this trend. Its walls are painted black and eerie noises drift from a video playing in the corner. This room features unsettling installations like Ivens Machado’s white tiled slab, plain apart from a light bulb in one corner and a bullet hole in the other with a dark trickle running from it. In another corner is a black veiled chair with spikes on the seat.

Violence – physical and political – lie close to the surface of these works and this movement in general. There are four rooms in total, displaying a wide range of styles and forms of pop art but all have been chosen to reflect these underlying themes and all display Argentine and Brazilian pop art at its politial best.

The exhibition has the added benefit of its PROA setting. An established art venue since 1996, the stylish building boasts panoramic views of La Boca’s industrial landscape and sprawling ports. The gallery is well known for its interesting take on contemporary Argentine art and also boasts an excellent library, bookshop and modern minimalist cafe with a roof terrace.

‘Pop…’ will remain at PROA until 16^th September when the exhibition will move to the Oscar Niemeyer museum in Curitiba. In 2013 the show will relocate to the Bergamo Gallery of Contemporary and Modern Art before ending up in the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro.

Entrance to the exhibition costs $12, for more information go to http://www.proa.org/esp/ or call 4104.1000

Fiesta en el Cielo Exhibition at Centro Cultural Borges (Photo: Hannah Flint)

In 2012, at this advanced stage of globalisation, it can be difficult to comprehend just how revolutionary the birth of aviation must have been for those who achieved and witnessed the earliest flights.

Children who now grow up with toy Cessna planes and fighter jets, gleefully crashing remote controlled helicopters into kitchen cabinets, are a clear illustration of how flight has transformed our imagination and sense of possibility in the world.

The hundreds of thousands who board domestic and international flights each day, traversing the skies in their sleep, further serve as a testament to the gruelling engineers and aviation workers who toil to make this kind of world a reality.

It was in this thoughtful and playful spirit that the Argentine Association of Aeroplane Pilots (AAA) conceived the idea of ‘Fiesta en el Cielo’, a 700m² free exhibition at the Borges Cultural Centre in downtown Buenos Aires.

Sponsored and produced by the AAA, the organisation chose world-renowned Argentine pop artist Edgardo Gimenez to bring the party to the sky.

The exhibition space is, frankly, a very bizarre one. For starters, the Borges Cultural Centre is only a few stories high, but the walls of the exhibit are suspended in cloudy blue skies that distort your sense of altitude. It’s not impossible to detect the eccentric spirit of Jorge Luis Borges himself, tweaking out your proprioception in ways only he could.

Displayed throughout the exhibit are five jumbo toy aeroplanes constructed from moulds. Four of them are in bold, solid colour and the last, in the very back, is a white model with green and red emblazoned on its surfaces.

Fiesta en el Cielo Exhibition at Centro Cultural Borges includes life size photographs of flight attendants offering help in many forms. (Photo: Hannah Flint)

All along the walls, standing side by side in mid-air, are recurring life-size photographs of flight attendants dressed in uniform, smiling courteously and offering you refreshments, promotional magazines, safety instructions and the like.

A lot of comparisons come to mind in this space, particularly in the later hours when there are fewer patrons. It could easily be mistaken for either Willy Wonka’s private hangar, heaven as monitored by aircraft personnel, a scene in ‘The Matrix’, or ‘Toy Story’ heavily pumped up on juice. Without question, Gimenez has skilfully captured the oddly sterile cheer and beaming pop potency that stirs up tides of collective imagery.

If this were all, however, the exhibit would leave the visitor with a cloudy understanding of why it came together in the first place.

Ultimately, ‘Fiesta en el Cielo’ is worth the RSVP because, for those inspired to examine such things, it also packages a strong political and social message from the AAA without nose-diving into pure propaganda.

At the centre of the exhibition, a small theatre is set up for visitors to watch a brief documentary chronicling the major milestones of Argentine aviation. The video and exhibit pay tribute to the proud but contentious history of commercial aviation and labour struggle in Argentina.

Focusing primarily on state-owned companies like Aerolineas Argentinas and Austral, the documentary traces the industry’s growth in Argentina through its Peronist foundations, its austere restructuring in the years of dictatorship, the privatisations of the Menem years, and the re-nationalisation that took place in 2008 under the current president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

Going the extra step, the AAA has also generously supplied the exhibit with free copies of its 161-page book ‘El cielo es nuestra’ (Heaven is Ours), in which the history of the aviation workers’ struggles and achievements is related in forceful narrative and first-hand testimonies.

The account, written in Spanish, is a refreshingly informative homage, expressed from the specific social angle of union leadership. It makes for a compelling case study of one of Argentina’s historically pioneering industries—from its crises to its triumphs and future aspirations.

'Self-Portrait in Drag, 1980' Image courtesy of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts ARS, NY SAVA, Buenos Aires

As the man at the epicentre of the 60s Pop movement, Andy Warhol shaped how we think about art now. Elevating the everyday into art, he blurred the lines between high and low culture. He created the model of the artist as media persona, mass producer and businessperson, a concept taken forward by contemporary art giants such as Damian Hirst, one of the most successful artists working today.

Yet despite his epoch changing career, Warhol’s real identity and motives remain in question. Was his work simply a celebration of surface and the cult of celebrity or was there something more underneath? A series of portraits of Warhol in drag that greet you at the start of MALBA’s exhibition, ‘Mr America’ seem significant in this respect. Dressed in coarse blonde, brunette and red wigs with shocking crimson lipstick and strangely white skin, his stark stare provokes us to consider what motives might be beyond this crude manipulation of his own identity.

“The Polaroid portraits of Warhol wearing makeup and in drag were deliberately contrived to recall Man Ray’s well-known portraits of Marcel Duchamp dressed as his famous alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, and to position Warhol as his most spectacularly successful descendent,” says the show’s curator Philip Larrat-Smith. Duchamp, like Warhol, was a famous user of ruse, irony and sensationalism in his work.

The show moves on to the screen-prints of Campbells Soup cans which helped launch Warhol’s career at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962, and finishes up at the voyeuristic filmic portraits taken at The Factory, his centre of artistic production and microcosm of 60s alternative culture, where “rich and poor, famous and marginal, gay and straight met and mingled”.

'Self-Portrait, 1986' Image courtesy of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts ARS, NY SAVA, Buenos Aires

The aim of the exhibition, according to Larrat-Smith, is to present the works that show: “…the political and popular culture of the United States through Warhol’s eyes.” It abounds with icons of the American dream, from Uncle Sam to the Empire State Building, seductive graphic portraits of Marilyn Monroe using his signature silkscreen process, to celebrations of the mass-produced superabundance that has come to represent the US myth.

Larratt-Smith is keen not to brand Warhol’s work as a straightforward avowal of American ideals, however. “For all that his Pop canvases may appear to uncritically reflect affirmative American values, his work is never without an awareness of the tragedy and entropy that accompanies stardom and self-exposure,” he says. In particular, he considers Warhol’s silkscreen series of disaster victims, criminals and Hollywood stars to represent the dark side, and therefore a critique of, the American dream.

This compelling ‘Death and Disaster’ series features four screen-prints of electric chairs on pink, violet, yellow and grey backgrounds, pictures of most wanted criminals taken from CIA files, as well as grainy images of car crashes and race riots blown up from newspapers. But Warhol’s refusal to acknowledge any meaning beyond the surface denies us any overtly moral reading of these works. Famously deadpan, he adopted an emotionless speaking voice in interviews and once declared: “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.”

'Little Electric Chair, 1964-1965' Image courtesy of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts ARS, NY SAVA, Buenos Aires

Warhol’s cultivated facade prompted rumours of a double identity, and debate remains as to whether the cool, unaffected persona hid a deeply sensitive, even religious man. Critics however felt that his exploitation of the strange and troubled characters who came into The Factory, for his work, proved him to be as cool and heartless as his public persona. This cast of eccentrics, drag queens and drug addicts became the subjects of hundreds of works including his ‘screen tests’, shown in the exhibition. In these filmic portraits, taken between 1964-66, he fixed the camera upon his subjects for a period of minutes.

Behind their images of dramatically lit glamour and mystique, were tales of personal tragedy as many inhabitants of the Factory slid into irreversible decline. In particular, Warhol famously looked on as Edie Sedgwick, a beautiful and deeply troubled heiress took a path of drug abuse and self destruction in front of his eyes, dying at the age of 28.

'Uncle Sam, 1981' Image courtesy of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts ARS, NY SAVA, Buenos Aires

Despite accusations of heartlessness, others see Warhol as representing a martyr like figure who used his work to highlight a symbolic and universal plight, and put up a troubling mirror upon American culture. A show in Paris’s Grand Palais in 2009, inspired by Warhol’s Catholic-Orthodox upbringing, even likens his portraits to religious icons, and puts them in terms of parable-telling and religious ideas. In his later years, the curators point out, Warhol moved beyond the film stars and political icons and turned to religious imagery, including works such as 112 screen-prints of Christ and a series of screen-printed images of the last-supper.

With his religious references, dramatic disasters and portraits in drag Warhol seemed to demand that the viewer look beyond the visual seduction of the image, and yet his insistence on remaining passive and superficial forces us to do the work of interpretation. In terms of Warhol’s attitude to the American Dream, Larrat-Smith sees the drag images as a pointer towards his true intentions: “From Hollywood to TV footage of the man on the moon, America has constructed an idealised image of its own hegemony,” he says, asking: “Is the American dream which Warhol embodied in his life and expressed in his art really just a series of images of an empire in drag?”

The exhibition runs until 22nd February at Malba, Av. Figueroa Alcorta 3415. Open Wednesday-Monday, 12-8pm. For more information, visit www.malba.org.ar