Gravura Brasileira

August 24, 1998

EHRENBERG, NEOLOGIST

Shifra M.  Goldman

If it were possible, or even accurate to say that one individual triggered a new avant-garde in a particular time and place, that person, in Mexico of the 1970s, would be Felipe Ehrenberg.  Of course it was not he alone, but a spectrum of artists organized in various groups of "cultural workers" that changed the course of Mexican art before the much-publicized "return to painting" of the mid-1980s.  Nevertheless, Ehrenberg served as a "yeast": a promoter of new conceptual and formal ideas, an artist who experimented with a wide range of possibilities as the previous explorations, replacing the total abstraction and neofiguration that had occupied the sixties. His influence has extended to a second and even a third generation of experimental artists.

Conceptual art , happenings and performance (or no-object art),  mail art, installation, artist's books (or book-objects as they were called in parts of Latin America), alternative publishing, collage, rubber stamps, blueprints, copy machine art, mimeography, assemblages, neo-concrete visual poetry and forms, neo-Pop, video art, new media of all sorts were part of Ehrenberg's contributions after returning from Europe after a period of self-exile following the political ruptures of 1968-1971, which also caused a rupture in visual languages.

If the visit to Chile of German artist Wolf Vostell in the mid-1970s caused new ideas to be generated in Santiago in a period of crisis, that of Ehrenberg operated  similarly in Mexico. Of particular importance was  the impact  of Fluxus art forms  coming into a Latin American context through these two artists and percolating in  new environments.

With reason did Ehrenberg call himself a neólogo (neologist) working on the edges of accepted practices.  The term also defines his love affair with words. He identified himself as an "image-maker" rather than an artist: tapping into television (an interview with Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, on television) comic strips, advertising, series of books and newsletters sometimes printed on homemade presses made of wood and utilizing mimeograph stencils instead of silkscreens, junk and discarded materials, computer lettering, and other non-traditional materials and forms.

Around him, artists with whom he worked made street murals with stencils themselves designed from photographs, banners as works of art, full-size photographic installations, and so forth - created with the critical edge which is a hallmark of contemporary Latin America.

Ehrenberg's six years in England had been germinal: working with the vanguard group Polygon Workshop which he founded, producing his books with a Gestetner mimeograph, creating the Beau Geste Press (which in Mexico became Libro Acción Libre (Free Action Books), and producing the unorthodox art periodical, Schmuck.  At one point of time, Ehrenberg entered a codex (an accordion-pleated book derived from pre-Columbian sources), a monotype done with spray cans,  into a Latin American print Biennial, where it was rejected for not being a proper "print" process.  In recent years, Ehrenberg returned to the book as a frame for his thinking: the huge 183x294x150 cm. diptych books of his "Past Imperfect" exhibition, stood on end and opened to Latin American history since the conquest, functioned on a giant scale like children's pop-up books where the characters and symbols are three-dimensional.

Dr. Shifra M.  Goldman
Art History Dept. and Latin American Center, UCLA