8 - Violeta Parra's Contribution to the 1960s Art Scene

Summary

The turbulence of Violeta Parra's career has been clearly delineated in the preceding chapters. A pattern emerges in the analyses of her early struggles as a singer and folklorist and of her later success as an artist on the international stage: she was more successful abroad than she was in her home country. This was particularly the case with regard to her visual art. In chapter 7 Yalkin's analysis of Parra's most famous exhibition in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris gives a clear sense of the reception of her art in Europe. In this chapter I will continue the focus on Parra's visual art, seeking to explore the reasons why it was so successful abroad. I view Parra within the European art scene of the 1960s and consider the relationship between her art and that of other leading artists of the time.

Without a doubt, Parra's artistic masterpieces are her arpilleras (embroideries). One of these, emblematic of Parra's bold, activist style, is entitled Contra la guerra (Against War) (1964). It is a work of art which absolutely epitomises its era. The medium (cloth with wool embroidered on to it) is anti-intellectual and the pacifist message it presents brings politics into art in the era of the Cold War. In this, as in her other embroideries and sculptures, Parra was challenging the supremacy of the canvas by presenting radical ideas through undervalued and unorthodox media. In Europe at this time there was an ‘anti-movement’ formed of Abstractionists, New Realists, Assemblers and Pop artists. I propose that the agency of Parra's art was instrumental in this anti-movement. To demonstrate this, I will show that visually and conceptually her work was at the forefront of the artistic avant-garde. I relate Parra's work to what scholars like Bourdieu describe as being ‘in the air’. This endeavour is problematic because it involves recreating the less tangible aspects of an era:

One of the major difficulties of the social history of philosophy, art or literature is that it has to reconstruct these spaces of original possibles which, because they were part of the self-evident givens of the situation, remained unremarked and are therefore unlikely to be mentioned in contemporary accounts, chronicles or memoirs.