Madí

For other uses, see Madi (disambiguation).

Madí (or MADI; also known as Grupo Madí) is an international abstract (or concrete) art movement initiated in Buenos Aires in 1946 by the Hungarian-Argentinian artist and poet Gyula Kosice, and the Uruguayans Carmelo Arden Quin and Rhod Rothfuss.

The movement focuses on creating concrete art (i.e., non-representational geometric abstraction) and encompasses all branches of art (the plastic and pictorial arts, music, literature, theater, architecture, dance, etc.). The artists in the Madí movement consider the concrete, physical reality of the art medium and play with the traditional conventions of Western art (for instance, by creating works on irregularly-shaped canvases). Artwork of Madí movement appeared in eight issues of its magazine, Arte Madí Universal, published between 1947 and 1954.

Historical Context

The Madí art movement formed as a reaction to the major concrete art movement in Argentina at the time, known as the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (AACI), whose art was perceived by the Madí group as being too strict in their method of creating concrete art, resulting in a lack of expression in their artworks.

Operating under the rule of Colonel Perón, whose time in power was characterized by a volatile political climate, the Madí artists used their art to make statements with social and political implications. One of the most overt criticisms made by the Madí movement criticized cultural authorities in the Arte Madí Universal magazine, commenting "[t]he last submission to the Venice Biennial has signified for Argentina a blunt negation of the new [artistic] values. We invite competent authorities to stop and compare the true current of contemporary plastic arts with the submissions that today put us [our country] half a century behind", which vaguely attack the aesthetic choices of certain cultural officers under Perón. According to Pérez-Barreiro, Madí and Concrete art (referring to the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (AACI)) are the artistic parallel(s) of the political phenomenon of Perónism. These artists were also seen as combining modern art with Communist ideology. Some scholars, including Barreiro, saw the government was an outspoken critic against concrete art as a whole, whereas others such as Andrea Giunta assert that the Madí and Concrete groups were not victimized under Perón's regime; rather, they "coexisted on its margins".

The political regime of Perón made use of both linguistic and visual images for propaganda purposes. This is seen in his use of an image, "the shirtless workers" (los descamisados), as an alternative to the concept of the working class. This image had strong connections and connotations with the male worker, shirtless and, unrealistically, without much affliction. In a speech given October 17th, 1946 at Plaza de Mayo, Perón addressed the workers in speeches as "mis queridos descamiados" (my loving shirtless workers). At this speech, he declared October 17th the "Day of the Shirtless Workers" and stated "I don’t want to govern over men but over their hearts, because mine beats in unison with the heart of each shirtless worker, which I interpret and love above all things.” The use of representations to create propaganda opened up a clear target for the Madí artists to oppose.

Origin of the name

Gyula Kosice, who also operated under the pseudonym Raymundo Rasas Pèt, has explained that the name for the movement is derived from the Republican motto in the Spanish Civil War, "Madrí, Madrí, no pasarán" ("Madrid, Madrid, they will not make it in", i.e., the Francoist forces will not invade Madrid). The name is most typically understood as an acronym for Movimiento, Abstracción, Dimensión, Invención (Movement, Abstraction, Dimension, Invention).

Characteristics

A Madí work is non-figurative and non-representational; it has a cut-out or irregularly-shaped form, which takes away the viewer's perception of spatial depth that a rectangular frame provides; its colors are flat and sharply defined; it is often three-dimensional and sometimes articulated and/or mechanical; and it is playful in spirit. Madí artists were concerned with creating artworks that were autonomous with functions that naturally transcend the physical features that constitute the work. Introducing elements of transformation and ambiguity were techniques commonly employed by these artists to avoid representation as well as avoid the fixity of representations. In painted works, some artists would intentionally lower the legibility of the design.

The incorporation of unusual materials into artworks is seen throughout the art movement movement; this includes Plexiglas, fluorescent tubes, neon lights, water, metal, and other materials. An example of this is seen in Kosice's first hydraulic piece, La arquitectura del agua: Hidro-escultura (The Architecture of Water: Hydro-Sculpture), which utilized light and water interaction.

Madí artists sought to combat representational forms because this art reflected and perpetuated class-based social organizations. They believed that representational images "forced others to relate to concepts, connotations, and feelings which were superfluous to the object itself... which enticed individuals into supporting class-based organizations". The Concrete art they produced was meant to have a reality that was self-contained. In other words, the reality of the art ended in the object. In the minds of the Madí artists, "Concrete art was worthy as a contribution to social liberation" because it helped its audience grasp true reality while standing against the concepts, connotations and feelings associated with art. To state this differently, exposing people to what is actually reality allows people to eventually confront myths perpetuated by the bourgeois that has suppressed revolution.

Madí is perhaps the sole remaining art movement which can boast of a half-century of uninterrupted activity since its creation in Buenos Aires in 1946. Today, the MADI movement has over 60 members — painters, sculptors, architects and poets — working in France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Japan, Argentina and the United States. One prominent figure behind this fifty years of artistic creation is Carmelo Arden Quin.

The Madí Manifesto

The Madí Manifesto was created to defend the importance of invention in the light of limitations imposed on concrete art by the excessive rationalism of European concrete art. This strictness of form in concrete art was also demonstrated by the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención (AACI). The manifesto also called for "the integration of the nonorthogonal framework into representational space".

Madí Manifesto

Gyula Kosice

Buenos Aires, 1946

Madí art can be identified by the organization of elements peculiar to each art in its continuum. It contains presence, movable dynamic arrangement, development of the theme itself, lucidity and plurality as absolute values, and is, therefore, free from interference by the phenomena of expression, representation and meaning.

Madí drawing is an arrangement of dots and lines on a surface.

Madí painting, color and two-dimensionality. Uneven and irregular frame, flat surface, and curved or concave surface. Articulated surfaces with lineal, rotating and changing movement.

Madí sculpture, three-dimensional, no colour. Total form and solid shapes with contour articulated, rotating, changing movement, etc.

Madí architecture, environment and mobile movable forms.

Madí music, recording of sounds in the golden section.

Madí poetry, invented proposition, concepts and images which are untranslatable by means other than language. Pure conceptual happening.

Madí theater, movable scenery, invented dialogue.

Madí novel and short story, characters and events outside specific time and space, or in totally invented time and space.

Madí dance, body and movements circumscribed within a restricted space, without music.

In highly industrialized countries, the old bourgeois realism has almost completely disappeared, naturalism is being defended very half-heartedly and is beating a retreat.

It is at this point that abstraction, essentially expressive and romantic, takes its place. Figurative schools of art, from Cubism to Surrealism, are caught up in this order. Those schools responded to the ideological needs of the time and their achievements are invaluable contributions to the solution of problems of contemporary culture. Nevertheless, their historic moment is past. Their insistence on ‘exterior’ themes is a return to naturalism, rather than to the true constructivist spirit which has spread through all countries and cultures, and is seen for example in Expressionism, Surrealism, Constructivism, etc.

With Concrete Art—which in fact is a younger branch of that same abstract spirit—began the great period of non-figurative art, in which the artist, using the element and its respective continuum, creates the work in all its purity, without hybridization and objects without essence. But Concrete Art lacked universality and organization. It developed deep irreconcilable contradictions. The great voids and taboos of ‘old’ art were preserved, in painting, sculpture, poetry, respectively, superimposition, rectangular frame, lack of visual theme, the static interaction between volume and environment, nosological and graphically translatable propositions and images. The result was that, with an organic theory and disciplinarian practice, Concrete Art could not seriously combat the intuitive movements, like Surrealism, which have won over the universe. And so, despite adverse conditions, came the triumph of instinctive impulses over reflection, intuition over consciousness; the revelation of the unconscious over cold analysis, the artist’s thorough and rigorous study vis-à-vis the laws of the object to be constructed; the symbolic, the hermetic, and the magic over reality; the metaphysical over experience.

Evident in the theory and knowledge of art is subjective, idealist, and reactionary description.

To sum up, pre-Madí art:

A scholastic, idealist historicism

An irrational concept

An academic technique

A false, static and unilateral composition

A work lacking in essential utility

A consciousness paralyzed by insoluble contradictions; impervious to the permanent renovation in technique and style

Madí stands against all this. It confirms man’s constant all absorbing desire to invent and construct objects within absolute eternal human values, in his struggle to construct a new classless society, which liberates energy, masters time and space in all senses, and dominates matter to the limit. Without basic descriptions of its total organization, it is impossible to construct the object or bring it into the continuity of creation. So the concept of invention is defined in the field of technique and the concept of creation as a totally defined essence.

For Madí-ism, invention is an internal, superable ‘method’, and creation is an unchangeable totality. Madí therefore, INVENTS AND CREATES.

Madí Dictionary

In written works, artists "disrupted the construction of semantically coherent structures" to avoid attaching meaning to the art and the possibility of representation. The Madí created a dictionary that accomplished the opposite of what a normal dictionary does in that it confused and distorted the meanings of words and made up words. The following excerpt is from the Madí dictionary, which demonstrates a correct grammatical structure that relates ideas that are impossible to interpret meaningfully. This is an example of this incoherent construction which prevents interpretation:

M               

Maclode: Upward hill. / Slope to insinuate land.

Meril: Kidnapping of flat centimeters. / Madícional [‘Madí-like’ or ‘of Madí origin’] opposition and resistance.

Miogue: Account of events in which the authors of great answers participated.

Molois: Site where the most varied adjectives are collected. / Fam. Insult.

Musver: About the manner to focus in photography the liveliest glare of a childhood memory. / Fixation.

Macichud: Line of shade that emits a loosening of gray beams.

N

Nandy: Arrangement for new personal cuño.

Nem-Er: Record of instances.

Nigs: Opening that is left so that a cluster of enchanted powder emigrates.

Novoh: Shooter that the riverside authority exercises to learn the coastal ruling

Selected Artists and Artworks

Representatives of the Madí movement, in addition to Kosice, Quin and Rothfuss, include Martín Blaszko, Waldo Longo, Juan Bay, Esteban Eitler, Diyi Laañ and Valdo Wellington, among others.

Gyula Kosice

Röyi, 1944

Lámpara, 1961

Ciudad hidroespacial, 2005

Sobre Relieve, 1950

Pintura Madi, 1948

Hidroluz (Lampara de pie), ca. 1975

Coplanal, 1947

Parabolica, 1960

Gota de agua, 1960

Revolving water, 1964

Hidroluz [Hydrolight], 1975

Rhod Ruthfuss

3 circulos rojos, 1948

Diyi Laañ

“La batalla de Inod”, (short story) 1947

"Tiagno", (play script) 1947

Exhibitions

Aug. 1946 – Instituto Francés de Estudios Superiores in Buenos Aires, where the MADI manifesto was read

Oct. 1945 – Concret invencion (French) Location: House of Dr. Enrique Pichon-Riveiere (leader of Psychoanalytic Societry of Argentina)

Dec. 1945 – El movimiento de arte concreto-invencion, a multimedia event which became the hallmark of Madí exhibitions. Location: House of Bauhaus- trained photographer Grete Stern

1948 – Salon des Réalités Nouvelles in Paris

1958 – Art Madí International at the Galerie Denise René

Why MADI?

To the question, "Why MADI?" Josee Lapeyrere, who met Arden Quin in 1962 and has since participated with her poem-objects in most of the events organized by the movement, replies: "MADI's goal is to be rigorous, inventive, gay and ludic." By the importance to which they accord spiritual and imaginative games, even the most serious MADI artists can be described as playful. Already in 1795, Schiller focused on "the inborn playful nature of man" as an explanation for his production of art forms. In his remarkable essay, "Homo Ludens" ("Ludic Man") (1938), Johan Huizinga observed that, "Play reveals an aspiration to beauty. The terms we use to designate the elements of play are, for the most part, the same as those utilized in the aesthetic realm: beauty, tension, balancing, equilibrium, gradation, contrast, etc. Like art, play engages and delivers. It absorbs. It captivates, or, in other words, it charms. It is full of those two supremely noble qualities which man expresses through rhythm and harmony." The French art critic Dominique Jacquemin also remarks that, "It is possible that Arden Quin's passion for game playing led him to create MADI, the only remaining contemporary art movement which can pride itself in possessing both coherence and a truly international outlook."

External links

• Volf Roitman
• Madi Museum Dallas, Tx
• The Hungarian MADI art periodical in English
• Arden Quin