Writing to the General, and Other Aesthetic Strategies of Critique: The Art of León Ferrari as a Practice of Freedom

This article considers the long career of Argentine artist León Ferrari, from its beginnings to the midst of military dictatorship, through his political exile, to his return to a renewed democracy that nevertheless remains in need of critique. It approaches his oeuvre as the story of an artist's ‘practices of freedom’, in Michel Foucault's sense, a story that is an exploration of the different modes of critique, witnessing and critical contestation that one encounters in Ferrari's artworks. Foucault's thought frames this exploration insofar as it enables one to understand Ferrari's art as a series of experiments in critique executed in different periods and hence in different political configurations. Since this is the case, the artworks also enable one to reflect upon how one can conceive of art's ethical role, how it might be thought to insert and assert itself within the lines of power and subjectification.