Dead Matter for an Enlivened Practice

Chapter 5 considers the exhibition Homenaje a la necrofilia (November 1962) by artist Carlos Contramaestre (1933−96) as an extreme example of how El Techo subverted nationalized aesthetic values associated with petroleum-driven capitalism to create art that reflected the grit of contemporaneity. Through a series of twelve ephemeral assemblages created from disintegrating cattle carcasses, viscera, and blood, Contramaestre confronted death and decomposition with forceful vivid assertions of physical love. The conflation of the Freudian sexual and death drives was a direct affront against the technological utopia projected by hegemonic tendencies such as geometric-abstraction or the restrictive unanimity of (far less popular) strains of folkloric landscapes and genre scenes that circulated in Venezuela at this time.But the strategy also allowed the artist and the collective to challenge an atmosphere of political repression, torture, disappearances, and a corrosive culture of cyclical violence that accompanied a fast-tracked national project of socioeconomic modernization in the country.