I  n a newspaper photograph from 1966, Liliana Porter is seated
on the floor on a large piece of fabric printed with a linocut
pattern. The same pattern continues on Porter’s dress. The
accompanying text reads, in part, “Printing in editions, the act of
creating an edition, is more important than the work carried out on
the printing plate; this attitude opens the way to molding, cutting,
folding, and using space”; and “The time has come to take respon-
sibility for developing our own images as printmakers, conditioned
but not destroyed by our techniques.” B Thus during The New York
Graphic Workshop’s exhibition at the Plástica gallery in Buenos
Aires, the press publicized the first manifesto of the group that
included Luis Camnitzer, José Guillermo Castillo, and Porter, in an
article that successfully fused image, word, and aesthetic program.
To Develop
Buenos Aires was the last stop on the 1966 voyage that trans-
ported the group’s work from their home in the “magnet” of New
York.C Before Buenos Aires, the members’ work had been shown
at the Galería Universitaria ­Aristos of the Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México in Mexico City, then at the Centro Uruguayo
de Promoción Cultural in Montevideo. Fully aware of how difficult
Images from
it was to be noticed in New York, the NYGW had implemented
this exhibition strategy—specially crafted by Castillo—which
focused on Latin America as the ideal place to gain some initial
exposure.D
The works presented in 1966 expanded the canon of printmak-
Thoughts
ing to include new supports and techniques that were articulated
in an equation that repositioned both concept and praxis, thereby
displacing the traditional artisanal focus of the graphic arts. The
group’s pursuits, which highlighted process and idea over the mate-
riality of the object, overlapped with their reflections on the act
of editioning, the theory of FANDSO (Free Assemblable Nonfunc­
tional Disposable Serial Object), and FANDSO’s promise to “remove
The South American Travels of The New York Graphic Workshop the difference between artists and consumers.”E Many artistic pro-
posals of the sixties focused on the active role of the public and the
Silvia Dolinko redefinition of venues for the circulation of artistic ­production—
bringing a notable expansion of spaces and strategies of diffusion
and ­visibilityF—and the NYGW’s ideas regarding the potential of
serial works may be considered closely related to, for example, Julio
Le Parc’s proposal of the multiple as a tool to resolve the disconnect
between art and the public.G
Camnitzer’s discourse, which was the ideological bedrock of
the NYGW, involved language on two levels: while he drafted the
group’s thoughtful manifestos, in his work he explored the com-
municative and symbolic logic of language as raw material (fig-
ure 23). For his part, Castillo was interested in a simplification of
both image and execution, a concern that led him, for example,
to “appropriate” works that were published in ARTnews (figure 19,
p. 26).H Porter, meanwhile, moved from her initial research on the
ontology of the printed image toward an exploration of gesture
and the “superimposition of the verb” on a representation, com-
plicating the relationship between fiction and reality. That ­tension
30 31
Opposite: Luis Camnitzer’s Olas [Waves] at the
Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, 1969
1. “Liliana Porter. Durero, Industry, Object, Week-end,”
El Mundo (Buenos Aires), October 23, 1966, sec. 2,
p. 41.
2. This characterization of the city comes from the
1964 exhibition Magnet: New York: A Selection of
Painting by Latin American Artists Living in New York,
organized by the Inter-American Foundation for the
Arts and held at the Bonino Gallery in New York.
Magnet: New York “gave presence to Latin America
and highlighted the political necessity of recogniz-
ing it.” Andrea Giunta, Avant-Garde, International-
ism, and Politics: Argentine Art in the Sixties, trans.
Peter Kahn (Durham, N.C.; London: Duke University
Press, 2007), 236. Porter and Camnitzer were among
those who took part in Magnet: New York along with
Luis Felipe Noé, one of their main intellectual
interlocutors.
3. Luis Camnitzer, “El New York Graphic Workshop,”
Revista del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, spe-
cial edition, Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan, no. 10
(July–December 2004): 9.
4. The New York Graphic Workshop, manifesto, 1966;
reproduced in the documents section of this cata-
logue. Here there is an underlying trace of the “cul-
tural utopian mood” that existed in Latin American
cultural circles during the sixties: “a confidence in
political involvement (which encouraged Camnitzer,
for example, to expect an active, participatory reac-
tion from spectators).” Gabriel Peluffo Linari, “La
transmigración de las ideas,” in Camnitzer–Sagradini
(Monte­video: Juan Manuel Blanes Museum, 1991), 8.
5. The redefinition and expansion of exhibition ven-
ues during the sixties evolved differently in each of
the areas where the NYGW operated, whether in
New York or in the various Latin American spaces
where the group’s works and writings circulated.
6. See “Múltiples,” in Julio Le Parc (Buenos Aires: Edi-
torial Estuario, 1967). Le Parc was one of the artists
involved in the exhibition Art in Editions: New
Approaches, which Camnitzer curated, held at the
Loeb Center in New York in 1968.
7. For a reading of these appropriations as pressure
exerted on the conceptual limits of FANDSO, see
Ana Tiscornia, “José Guillermo Castillo,” in Blanton
Museum of Art Latin American Collection, ed. Gabriel
Pérez-Barreiro (Austin: Blanton Museum of Art, The
University of Texas at Austin, 2006), 136.
fig. 23  Luis Camnitzer, Envelope, 1967, series of ten
etchings with rubber stamping, plate: 7 * 7 inches
each, sheet: 16 * 13W inches each

32

fig. 24  Luis Camnitzer’s Living–Comedor, as
installed at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas,
1969
8. In Porter and Camnitzer’s case, the exhibitions
introduced approaches that they would later
develop extensively. See Mari Carmen Ramírez,
“Moral Imperatives: Politics as Art in Luis Camnitzer,”
in Luis Camnitzer: Retrospective Exhibition, 1966–
1990 (New York: Lehman College Art Gallery, 1991);
Liliana Porter: Fotografía y ficción (Buenos Aires: Cen-
tro Cultural Recoleta and MALBA), 2003.
9. Luis Camnitzer, artist statement, in New York
Graphic Workshop: Luis Camnitzer, José Guillermo
Castillo, Liliana Porter (Caracas: Museo de Bellas
Artes, 1969), n.p. Reproduced in English translation
in the documents section of this catalogue.
is evident in her Wrinkle series (figure 22, pp. 28–29), in which she
destabilized the rhet­oric of the graphic arts by undermining the
traditional virtuoso discourse of medium: what can medium mean
within the context of this crisis provoked by the NYGW?
The artists of the NYGW took these proposals to the extreme in
the exhibitions that took place in several South American countries
in 1969. From a material, ideological, and institutional standpoint,
the exhibitions were a far cry from those presented during their
previous tour of the region. With each artist’s particular personal-
ity, the works in the exhibitions gave voice to ­proposals sustained
in the group’s manifestos as well as in the common framework of
debates surrounding radical experimentation with the elements
of printmaking.I Their reflections on an expansion of the graphic
arts—actively involving the spectators’ imaginations—generated
a destabilization of local traditions. Understanding 1969 as the
moment of greatest symbolic density for the group, this essay will
focus on the events that unfolded sequentially during that year,
thinking in an integrated way about the exhibitions that were
significant both because of the importance of the works them-
selves and because the works communicated the sense of crossing
a threshold.
The first exhibition in the sequence was held in January at the
Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas. It constituted a condensation
of the ideas that the NYGW had been developing, translating the
proposals presented in the outstanding exhibition catalogue into
three-dimensional works and innovative graphic installations. In
keeping with his desire to “to re-imagine the process of thought,”J
Camnitzer displayed Living–Comedor, an installation in which he
reconstructed a typical middle-class environment that would be
familiar to exhibition visitors (figure 24). Camnitzer printed words
using industrial stencils, then photocopied and glued them to the
floor and walls, prompting visitors to reconstruct their mental and
spatial experience of a familiar setting. The choice of photocopies
—a speedy, mechanical printing medium used in Conceptual art
34
fig. 25  José Guillermo Castillo’s 32 unidades
[32 Units] at the Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas,
1969
projects but alien to the printmaking field—can be understood
as Camnitzer’s challenge to the technical habits of traditional
graphic arts.
Castillo presented a series of interchangeable units made of
industrial laminated wood (figure 25), based on his sketches and
plans. Taking into the third dimension the serial assemblage
of basic modular components, he suggested the possibility of
exchange as a way of generating “a greater participation in the cre-
ative process” on the part of spectators, as advocated by the ideals
of the FANDSO.BA At the same time, Porter expanded the concept of
the graphic wrinkle into an environment by covering the wall and
objects in the gallery, including a chair and a framed painting, with
offset prints—another form of mechanical printing—made from
an “original” soft-ground etching (figure 26). She also attached
reams of paper to the wall so that visitors could peel off sheets and
crumple them; as Porter pointed out, “the image no longer matters;
not even the final image of the environment. What is important is
the transmission of the verb. The public’s freedom to crumple the 10. José Guillermo Castillo, artist statement, in New
York Graphic Workshop: Luis Camnitzer, José Guillermo
world at their whim.”BB Thus she encouraged spectators to unmake-
Castillo, Liliana Porter (Caracas: Museo de Bellas
make a work of art. In all three proposals one finds a physical move Artes, 1969), n.p. Reproduced in English translation
into space, acknowledging a conceptual leap and a break with the in the documents section of this catalogue
conceptual and technical constraints of printmaking, encouraging 11. Liliana Porter, Liliana Porter (Caracas: School of
the proposed “development” of images by means of the spectator’s Architecture and Urban Studies, Central University
intervention. of Venezuela, 1969), n.p.
fig. 26  Liliana Porter stands in front of her Arruga
[Wrinkle] installation at the Museo de Bellas Artes,
Caracas, 1969
35

12. They exhibited at the biennials that were orga-
nized in 1963 (prior to the establishment of the
NYGW), 1965, and 1968. Camnitzer and Castillo
received a special mention at the first exhibition,
and Porter’s work received a mention at the second.
13. Justo Pastor Mellado maintains that the “Cam-
nitzer/Porter effect” did not impact Chile until the
eighties. Justo Pastor Mellado, “La impugnación del
grabado: Potencial de nuevas prácticas,” Trans/
Migraciones: La gráfica como práctica artística con-
temporánea (San Juan de Puerto Rico: ICP, 2004), 27.
14. That project, in which Roberto Plate also partici-
pated, highlighted a certain irony as regards the cir-
culation of works of art in the capitalist system and
the difficulty of gaining access to galleries in that
highly coveted area of Manhattan. See Camnitzer,
“El New York Graphic Workshop,” 10. The Manufac-
turers Hanover Trust “exhibition” lasted from May 1
to June 30; the exhibition in Chile ran from June 20
to July 6.
15. The original soft-ground etching that Porter had
used to produce the offset prints in Caracas did not
arrive, as planned, in Santiago, so she made offset
prints from a photograph of wrinkled paper. Liliana
Porter, correspondence with the editors, Decem-
ber 21, 2008. Ed.
16. Liliana Porter, interview by the author, Buenos
Aires, April 5, 2005.
figs. 27 and 28  Sculptures at the Museo Nacional
de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile, with wrinkled
paper by Porter, 1969
In the group’s second incursion of the year into the South Amer-
ican circuit, the members continued their exploration of these
issues in Chile. Although Castillo was not involved, the catalogue
of the exhibition at Santiago’s Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes—­
organized at the invitation of the director, Nemesio Antúnez—
carried the logo of the NYGW and photographs of the members’
Caracas installations, marking the exhibition as a group endeavor.
Camnitzer’s catalogue text also presented Castillo’s idea of the
“super-object”: the catalyst for a people-environment relationship
that, by reorganizing the “art context,” was capable of transcend-
ing traditional frames of reference.
From a distance, the three artists were already acquainted with
Chile, having participated in the Bienal Americana de Grabado as
“printmaking professionals.”BC The NYGW exhibition in Santiago,
however, proposed a move away from the prints exhibited there
previously. The exhibition ratified the group’s conceptual rupture,
a direction unprecedented in the Chilean field.BD “A few lines by
Lucy Lippard” (figure 21, p. 27) served as the prologue for an exhibi-
tion that was far removed from the ironic criticism of the group’s
“exhibition” Safe Deposit Box #3001, which Camnitzer also refer-
enced in the Santiago catalogue and which, coincidentally, was still
installed in a safe-deposit box at Manufacturers Hanover Trust in
New York. BE
At the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Porter created a version
of the Caracas installation: an extensive, continuous surface of
wrinkles made by pasting small offset prints on one gallery wall.BF
Since this wall covering was detached at some points, it accen-
tuated the sensation of an unstable support. As in Caracas, she
hung reams of paper printed with the wrinkle image on top of this
surface and on the connecting walls, inviting the intervention of
spectators. The project extended all the way to the main hall of the
museum where, like trail markers, she had placed crumpled sheets
of paper on the sculptures in that solemn space, using her playful
provocation to lighten the serious tone of the “Great Art” on display
there (figures 27 and 28).BG
Whereas Porter’s presentation questioned perception and
stimulated a gestural involvement, Camnitzer’s Masacre de Puerto
Montt [Puerto Montt Massacre] concentrated on textual codifica-
tion (figure 29). The installation referred to the repressive measures
taken in March of that year when—on the order of Interior Minister
36
Edmundo Pérez Zujovic—the police violently evicted scores of
families from a local landowner’s property, murdering at least nine
people and injuring dozens. Camnitzer eschewed both illustra-
tion and explicit denunciation, choosing instead to “reconstruct”
the situation with words that he had photocopied and stuck
to the walls and floor along with dotted lines that represented
the spray of bullets. By way of a conceptual route, he inscribed a
hitherto unknown form of political art into the official museum,
expanding a mode of expression that he had already introduced
in etchings like Che (figure 30). Here, his particular interpretation
of a recent local event can be read as a clear example of his idea of
“contextual art.”BH
Porter and Camnitzer continued the proposals that they had ini-
tiated in Caracas and developed in Santiago in their final presenta-
tion within the South American “avant-garde” circuit during 1969:
at the invitation of Jorge Romero Brest, director of visual arts at
the Instituto Torcuato di Tella, they took part in the Experiencias 69
exhibition in Buenos Aires. After the turmoil of the previous Expe-
riencias exhibition,BI the artist Edgardo Vigo emphasized that the
general attitude toward participation in the 1969 edition involved
“certain kinds of action at the level of thought . . . activation of the
spectator, discouragement of passive observation, messages at a
mental level, non-negotiable art, and a variety of elements that
have liberated the artist from the pigeonhole of technique.”BJ These
were tendencies that were central to the NYGW’s propositions. At
Experiencias 69, Porter and Camnitzer’s proposals appeared among
various “communication situations” that involved TV sets, inter-
changeable modules, organic-artificial habitats, and audiovisual
environments.CA The NYGW artists declared, “We want to try to
­create keys to liberate the creative facility as a public and common
good,”CB addressing again the ideas published in the group’s texts
and the postulates of FANDSO.
Their project, presented in two consecutive parts, included a
sequence of eight mail exhibitions along with installations at the
Instituto Di Tella on Florida Street, in the heart of Buenos Aires. The
mail exhibitions continued the circulation strategies that the NYGW
had initiated in New York in 1967, when Camnitzer had mailed adhe-
sive labels printed with words, an early expression of his work with
37
fig. 29  A museum visitor walks through Luis
­ amnitzer’s installation Masacre de Puerto Montt
C
[Puerto Montt Massacre], Museo Nacional de Bellas
Artes, Santiago de Chile, 1969
fig. 30  Luis Camnitzer, Che, 1968, etching, plate:
17X * 17FŠi inches, sheet: 26 * 25BŠi inches
17. As a way to avoid being labeled within “Concep-
tual art,” the NYGW stamped “contextual art” mul-
tiple times on the card that they submitted to Lucy
Lippard as part of her exhibition 557,087, held at the
Seattle Art Museum from September 6 to October 5,
1969. See figure 80 in the chronology of this
catalogue.
18. Roberto Plate presented the “bathroom” at Expe-
riencias 68. Police censorship of this piece prompted
Plate, Roberto Jacoby, Jorge Carballa, and Oscar Bony,
among others, to destroy their own works outside
the Instituto Di Tella, on Florida Street, on May 23.
See figure 79 in the chronology of this catalogue.
19. Edgardo Vigo, “Exp.69-I/Di Tella,” Ritmo (La Plata,
Argentina), September 1969, ITDT–Di Tella University
Archive, Buenos Aires.
20. The exhibition included works by Hugo Álvarez,
Luis F. Benedit, Grupo Frontera, Lea Lublin, Pablo
Menicucci, Luis Pazos, Jorge Luján Gutiérrez, Osvaldo
Romberg, and Enrique Torroja.
21. “Creación: Bien público,” Confirmado (Buenos
Aires) 5, no. 220 (September 3, 1969): 76.

22. Porter, “Entre espejos, sombras y viajeros,” 76.
23. Edgardo Antonio Vigo, “Primer antecedente
argentino,” typewritten manuscript, Vigo-CAEV
Archive, La Plata, Argentina. With various qualities
and objectives, Latin American artists during that
period established a dynamic mail art circuit, the
main contributors being Vigo, Clemente Padín, Paulo
Bruscky, and Guillermo Diesler, in Argentina, Uru-
guay, Brazil, and Chile, respectively. There is also a
possible association with the later Pinturas aero-
postales [Airmail Paintings] by Chilean artist Eugenio
Dittborn.
24. This work is a good example of what Camnitzer
described as a “FANDSO by light” in the text he
wrote for the Caracas catalogue.
25. Luis Camnitzer, interview by the author, Buenos
Aires, October 17, 2005.
fig. 31  Liliana Porter, Sombra para dos aceitunas,
Exhibición no. 2 [Shadow for Two Olives, Exhibition
#2] and Sombra para un vaso, Exhibición no. 3
[Shadow for a Glass, Exhibition #3], 1969, offset,
4W * 5V inches, each card; 5HŠi * 6BŠi inches, each
envelope
language; Castillo had distributed sheets of paper printed with dot-
ted lines to fold and form into an accordion; and Porter had contrib-
uted a piece of paper stamped “to be wrinkled and thrown away,” a
disposable art that referred to an “existential attitude” toward the
fleeting nature of things (figures 14–16, p. 23).CC Between August 18
and September 1—before Experiencias 69 opened to the public—
approximately one thousand people in ­Buenos Aires received
eight envelopes, each numbered in sequence. Vigo described the
project as “the earliest effort in Argentina of [artistic] communi-
cation from a distance by mail.”CD The first four mail exhibitions,
all of which ­Porter created, contained offset-printed cards show-
ing the shadows of distinct virtual elements (figure 31), recalling
the play between presence and absence.CE The other cards, which
Camnitzer made, referred to military power and the repressive
environment created by dictatorships; the artist once again used a
linguistic code to stimulate political interpretation (figure 32).
Porter and Camnitzer’s approaches were not entirely sealed away
in envelopes as mail art exhibitions, which had a wide circulation
but an individual reception; they were extended into the physical
space of the Experiencias 69 exhibition. Camnitzer installed let-
tering in the front windows of the Di Tella on Florida Street that
read “Arte colonial contemporáneo” (contemporary colonial art).
These provocative words appeared on the street where, a little over
a year earlier, the artists involved in Experiencias 68 had destroyed
their works of art as a protest against official censorship. If the
designation “colonial” stirred up feelings about different kinds
of domination, the shrewd link to contemporary context could be
associated with the circumstances of an institution that, in those
days of ­aesthetic-political radicalization, was being questioned
by the local avant-garde. Camnitzer used the building’s façade to
imply that his phrase defined the whole group shown within: thus,
his work was an “appropriation of the whole exhibition.”CF These
words activated a signaling within the public space that, in turn,
foreshadowed the title of an essay he would write on cultural
dependence, the imposition of hegemonic ­models, alternative
options for the “colonial” artist, and the ­activities of the Uruguayan
38
urban guerilla group the Tupamaros, which he posited as an figs. 32 and 33  Luis Camnitzer, Para parar de
“aesthetic” operation.CG canto y aplastar, como ejercicio de poder, Exhi-
Camnitzer also presented the installation Fosa común/Frag- bición No. 3 [To Stand on an Edge and Crush It
as an Exercise of Power, Exhibition No. 3], offset,
mento de un amigo [Common Grave/Fragment of a Friend] at the 4W * 5V inches, card, 5H/i * 6B/i inches, envelope
Instituto Di Tella. Using stenciled letters once again, as he had in
Caracas and Santiago, Camnitzer structured his work out of words.
The phrase “Fragmento de un amigo” appeared under the word
“mirador” (lookout point). The phrase, which was broken into two
parts, started on the wall and continued on the floor. Right next to
the broken phrase on the gallery floor a large rectangular sheet of
paper read “Fosa común” (figure 34). Exhibited during a year in which
there were several popular uprisings against the military regime
of Juan Carlos Onganía in various parts of Argentina—starting
with the resounding “Cordobazo”—Camnitzer’s work condemned
the situation in both Argentina and Uruguay, which was ruled by
the authoritarian Jorge Pacheco Areco in the “populist, militaristic,
and repressive tradition of the Colorado Party.”CH As it happened,
on August 14, just a few days prior to the opening of Experiencias
69 at the Di Tella, a student was murdered. Camnitzer’s “friend,”
however, was not intended as a reference to any particular person;
rather, the generic allusion to a collective, anonymous burial place,
marked with ascetic “industrial” letters, stripped his work of any 26. Luis Camnitzer, “Arte colonial contemporáneo”
expressive quality and focused on the idea of death and the sinister (1969), presented at the II International Congress of
methods of repressive dictatorships in Latin America that during the Latin American Studies Association, Washing-
ton, D.C., spring 1970. Published in Marcha (Monte­
the seventies increasingly disappeared many people and dug many video), July 3, 1970, 19–20.
common graves.
27. Tulio Halperín Donghi, Historia contemporánea de
Meanwhile, Porter created an installation inside the Di Tella
América Latina (Madrid: Alianza, 2000), 657.
that, as in the case of the mailing project, explored her interest
in “the relationship between fiction and reality, superimposed 28. Liliana Porter, artist statement, in New York
Graphic Workshop: Luis Camnitzer, José Guillermo
. . . what I make added to what naturally occurs.”CI In the installa- Castillo, Liliana Porter (Caracas: Museo de Bellas
tion, she took the play between two- and three-dimension­ality to Artes, 1969), n.p. Reproduced in English translation
an extreme by creating a fictional projection of real ­bodies in the in the documents section of this catalogue.
39

29. Kynaston McShine, “Acknowledgments,” in Infor-
mation (New York: The Museum of Modern Art,
1970), n.p. The other Latin American artists who
were involved in the Information project were
Jorge ­Carballa, Rafael Ferrer, Cildo Meireles, Marta
Minujín, Helio Oiticica, Alejandro Puente, and Grupo
Frontera.
30. On the participation in the Information exhibi-
tion and the disbanding of the NYGW, see Luis
­Camnitzer, Conceptualism in Latin American Art:
Didactics of Liberation (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 2007), 188 and 240.
fig. 34  Luis Camnitzer’s Fosa común [Common
Grave], installed at the Instituto Torcuato di Tella,
Buenos Aires, 1969
exhibition space. She painted gray silhouettes of Osvaldo Romberg
(an artist who also participated in Experiencias 69), Romero Brest,
Camnitzer, and herself (figure 35) on the wall. When visitors were
in the gallery, the shadows that their bodies cast onto the painted
shadows made the work almost “invisible.” It was “dematerialized,”
to use a term of the period, so much so that on the first night the
painted silhouettes registered with spectators as real shadows
rather than as an artistic intervention. Experiencias 69 was one of
the last exhibitions to be held in the space that was so important
to the local avant-garde; soon thereafter, other “real” shadows fell
across the Di Tella and their venue on Florida Street, which was
finally closed in mid-1970.
By that time, the NYGW was involved in Information, a group
exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York that set
out to present the “strongest ‘style’ or international movement
of the last three years, . . . part of a culture that has been consid-
erably altered by communications systems.”CJ Reconfirming the
NYGW’s moment of consecration and high institutional visibility,
the group’s participation in Information could be considered a sig-
nificant achievement in their quest for recognition within the New
York art scene. Their very presence in that renowned museum space,
however, stirred up controversy among the members of the NYGW
concerning the symbolic implications and effects of their involve-
ment. Their First Class Mail Exhibition #14, a “counter-exhibition”
that was a textual and temporal uroboros, resolved the ideologi-
cal dilemma that arose from their involvement with MoMA. Within
the exhibition, a poster designed by Castillo read, “The New York
Graphic Workshop announces its First Class Mail Exhibition #14.”
It was accompanied by an invitation asking visitors to self-address
envelopes in order to receive the mail exhibition. Those accepting
the invitation eventually received a nearly identical flier that read,
“The New York Graphic Workshop announced its First Class Mail workshop not only as a space for praxis but also as a place to estab- fig. 35  A museum visitor in front of Liliana Porter’s
Exhibition #14.” This was the NYGW’s final joint endeavor; shortly lish a sense of group identity, promote a collective critique of work, Untitled (Shadows) at the Instituto Torcuato di Tella,
thereafter the members decided to disband their group.DA and outline strategies for institutional circulation. Buenos Aires, 1969
Serving as a synthesis of a particular aspect of the NYGW’s Within this framework, and throughout its six-year existence,
program, a final exhibition in Caracas in December 1970 brought the NYGW advanced an intense process of revision as well as of
together a collection of prints made by Camnitzer, Castillo, Porter, aesthetic, discursive, technical, material, institutional, and ideologi-
and other visiting artists that were produced in the group’s ­studio, cal redefinition, all finely overlapping. The members of the group
offering material testimony to an already concluded activity. Far introduced unprecedented conceptual approaches into the graphic
from the innovative three-dimensional pieces and ephemeral arts, opening up new avenues of exploration that they then contin-
installations, the prints in the exhibition offered an account of the ued to follow in their own personal work, and that also would oper-
ate as a reference for later aesthetic-visual developments. Between
1964 and 1970, Camnitzer, Castillo, and Porter worked together on
an artistic program, gradually expanding their proposals and objec-
tives, including the questioning that led from materiality to the
concept; the resignification of the print as a disciplinary territory to
the “development of images from thought”; the reframing of the
graphic mark on the plane to a spatial expansion; and the diffusion
of aesthetic-ideological ideas by way of the traditional route of the
manifesto to a “dematerialized” discursive strategy.
In years that were crucial to the reformulation of artistic dis-
course in general, the NYGW introduced a subtle yet provocative
form of conceptual graphic art. A closer look at the group’s pro-
posals during its brief but intense lifespan allows us, in short, to
continue discussing and expanding narratives about the dynamic
development and questioning of art in the sixties.
40 41