between organism and sky: oscar bony, 1965-1976

Oscar Bony was a key figure in the generation of avant-garde artists who famously broke with the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in the wake of censorship at Experiencias ’68. He was also the official photographer for RCA’s affiliate record label in Argentina between 1967 and 1973, producing publicity for a new wave of rock n’ roll bands and solo popular music acts including Los Gatos and Arco Iris. Attending to key phases in his artistic oeuvre as well as close readings of his expertly crafted popular images, this article attempts to bridge these seemingly irreconcilable aspects of Bony’s practice. At first glance, his rock photography, known as el estilo Bony, has little relation to his art, and is perhaps even its political antithesis: “creative” work in the service of a top-down business model. Yet a closer look at both endeavors yields a lasting interplay between flesh and concept—at the grain of the work, a dialectic between incontrovertible index and crafted, calculated image—that was the artist’s central preoccupation in the fraught decade between the military coups. As such, Bony provides an opportunity to recover a category often absent from the Argentine art of this moment: the body, factual and libidinal.