Mahler: Symphonie Nr. 3

In 2013, Argentina celebrates thirty years of democracy since the end of the last dictatorship (1976-83). In that period, visual artists and art-activists have been central both to campaigns that have sought to initiate the criminal prosecutions of those initially granted amnesty and to a variety of commemorative projects. In The Art of Post-Dictatorship: Ethics and Aesthetics in Contemporary Argentina Vikki Bell provides an assessment of these interventions, examining them as important moments in how the horrors of the last dictatorship period are recalled. Bell argues that the questions and demands that emanate from the aesthetic realm cannot be understood through an art-historical approach. Instead, they must be understood as fully part of a collective endeavour, since through them people collectively question, debate and make demands about present responsibilities. In this sense the ‘art’ of post-dictatorship is not something that belongs to the art or the artists themselves, but is about how the subjectivities and imaginations of new generations debate questions of response, ethics and justice; and, in so doing, re-align themselves in relation to the past and to the future.