Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Jorge Álvarez, 1967. 20x13,5 cm. Softcover. Spanish. 206 pp.

Seminal book on happenings and proto-performance art in Argentina. Edited by Oscar Masotta, featuring texts and works by Marta Minujin, Alicia Páez, Roberto Jacoby, Eliseo Veron, Eduardo Costa, Madela Ezcurra, Raúl Escari and Octavio Paz. Illustrated with a number of rarely seen b&w photos. This artists' book was published by Jorge Álvarez whose publishing house and homonymous bookstore (running from 1963 to 1969) was pivotal in the flourishing of the literary avant-garde scene of Buenos Aires in the '60s, editing and publishing works by Rodolfo Walsh, Manuel Puig, Juan José Saer and many more. Rare.

Clean and tight copy of a rather cheaply produced volume. VG+.

 In 1967, exactly half a century ago, intellectual and artist Oscar Masotta (born in 1930 in Buenos Aires, died in 1979 in Barcelona) edited the book Happenings. The publication assembles several articles and documents devoted to juxtaposing two art genres within the Argentine avant-garde of the 1960s. On the one hand was the “old” concept of the Happening and its theories and specific realizations in Buenos Aires, dubbed by Allan Kaprow as the “city of Happenists” in 1966, and on the other, the presentation of a new genre of Anti-Happening: the emerging experiences produced by the Arte de los medios de communicación de masas (Art of the mass media) group. This group (consisting of the artists Roberto Jacoby, Eduardo Costa, and Raúl Escari) sought to go one step further towards the dematerialization of art, finding its sole reality in mass media circuits and dissolving it into social life. [Anna Longoni, 2014, documenta 14].