NICOLÁS GARCÍA URIBURU

When García Uriburu’s intervention took place, in the shocking year of 1968, no one, or very few, noticed the possible effects of these transformations. The voices that warned about the dangers of that vision that considered nature a never-ending source of resources, and not a living organism, were not heard. That optimistic perception prevented us from seeing the irreparability of many of our actions. Environmentalism was a minor aspect within the political-cultural alternatives of the French May generation, which emphasized social protest, sexual freedom, aesthetic rupture, and anti-authoritarian revolt, although with streaks that led to a reunion with natural life, in search of a restorative utopia, behind the backs of capitalism. In the art system, land art proposed to intervene in the natural space as a way of challenging both the museum and art gallery institutions as well as the support of artistic production, with approaches that sought to minimize the hand of man or make his interaction with matter given by nature an axis of nuclear questions of the work.

Nicolás García Uriburu

International proyect for green water coloration, 1970. Venice, Paris, New York and Buenos Aires.

García Uriburu’s performance, where the stars were the waters of Venice themselves, transformed nature into the agent of the work, into its author. The waters dyed in fluorescent green—an index of pollution, but also of the lost nature to be restored—showed themselves in an act, the only one known to the waters, which is flowing. Thus, the action of man, stopping its course to give it a specific use—channel it, bottle it, use it as a means of transport, market it—was exposed in what it has as a naturalized event.