Roberto Jacoby

Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1944

            Roberto Jacoby's artistic trajectory can be understood as the construction of a vital, communitarian, and political archive. From his early participation in informalist and neo-figurative art circles and his relations with artists and intellectuals of the Bar Moderno during the 1960s, to his essays on collaboration and fellowship through projects and institutions such as START, Bola de Nieve, or Proyecto Venus in the 21st century, Jacoby's work puts the raw material of socialization at the center of attention. Trained as a painter, he very quickly turned to the making of objects and sculptures of obvious pop inspiration, and, at the same time, began a series of experiments that would mark his artistic ethic. Collaboration, audience participation, collective authorship, and social ties constitute some of the critical pillars of his work.

            The first formats that allowed him to deploy this attraction to relationality were performance and happening, either by taking his own workshop life live to a gallery or by inscribing himself in the so-called mass media art to show his capacity to produce reality. In addition to collectivization, other profoundly avant-garde traits that mark Jacoby's artistic praxis are his quests for dematerialization. In 1966, he presented one of the first conceptual experiments that focused on the imaginary nature of the work, Maqueta de Una Obra, at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, in Argentina, in which, through a piece of styrofoam, he invited the audience to project the work. This would be the first of a series of interventions that would draw attention to the importance of the circulation of ideas over physical presence.

            This line of work was accompanied by a process of political radicalization that had its central place in the Di Tella Institute and Tucumán Arde, and later became a platform for creation that refused to participate in art institutions, establishing a parallel and often hidden scene outside the lights of official art. Jacoby also participated intensely in the Buenos Aires underground scene, where he developed the famous "joy strategy," a political response to the terror left latent in Argentine society by the military dictatorship, which included itinerant events and parties. In the 1990s, he also created the fictitious creative agency Fabulous Nobodies, remembered for its campaign, "I have AIDS," which sought to fight discrimination against HIV. Urban interventions, clandestine film screenings, artistic magazines and social science books editing, poster printing, costume designing, lyricism, and stage designing are some of the ways in which his artistic practice has manifested itself.