In El Techo de la Ballena, María C. Gaztambi depresents an account of the visual arts production of the Caracas-based collective El Techo de la Ballena (active 1961−69). In spite of evident convergences with other global art tendencies, these radicalized artists from Venezuela anchored their multidisciplinary interventions in a fundamental retrograde stance which, in the author’s view, represented a deliberate inversion of an internationallyaligned modernity hinging on the need for constant evolution and progress in the visual arts. El Techo’s against-the-grain position became the basis for a ... More

In El Techo de la Ballena, María C. Gaztambi depresents an account of the visual arts production of the Caracas-based collective El Techo de la Ballena (active 1961−69). In spite of evident convergences with other global art tendencies, these radicalized artists from Venezuela anchored their multidisciplinary interventions in a fundamental retrograde stance which, in the author’s view, represented a deliberate inversion of an internationallyaligned modernity hinging on the need for constant evolution and progress in the visual arts. El Techo’s against-the-grain position became the basis for a disorderly project of grief that counteracted the swiftness by which Venezuela fast-tracked its modernization (in the sense of material and technological progress) and consumed international modernism (its cultural production). Against this fragmentary development, El Techo deployed an integrated approach to art-making that included artworks with multiple meanings, alternative exhibition spaces, politicized actions, as well as highly confrontational printed materials. All these elements came together into a single, indivisible body of work merging the visual, the poetic, the performative, and the political. Yet Venezuela’s eroded local environment required an outright unsettling through extreme scatological content and strategies that the balleneros qualified as “a biological art, violently exuded from our bowels…” Theirs was a total output that tested the limits of art to provoke an anesthetized local public under the motto of cambiar la vida, transformar la sociedad(to change life, to transform society).