The Fluidity of Venezuelan Informalism

Chapter 2 examines how, in the context of this imperfect panorama, Informalism represented the visual manifestation of a growing discontent with the economic conditions that spurned the “make-believe” at the core of the diatribes of the Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil and the telenovela pioneer turned political commentator José Ignacio Cabrujas. In the late eighties, they had observed that with the professionalization of the oil industry in earlier decades the wealth that it generated attained chimerical qualities in Venezuela. Such rapid development that obscured the realities of a largely agrarian nation whose modernization was artificially fed by petrodollars. Here, I borrow from GeorgesBataille’s treatises on ritualistic expenditure and his argument that economic wealth and growth governed the physical force field of all organic phenomena. I propose that by the early sixties Venezuela’s unspent energetic surplus had begun to unleash a destructive process from popular segments of the population that, it may be argued, is climaxing in present-day Chavismo. Bataille’s thinking revealed the paradox of utility, or life “beyond [the realm] of utility” as he described it: its ultimate end could only be uselessness as sovereignty was achieved only by those who consumed but did not labor.