Luis Pazos
La Cultura de la Felicidad (The Culture of Happiness)
1971-2012
Luis Pazos, La Cultura de la Felicidad (The Culture of Happiness), 1971 -2012
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La Cultura de la Felicidad (The Culture of Happiness) is a series of five photographs addressing everyday life—a couple in a bed, lovers on a bench and a family reunion. The subjects wear masks made of white cardboard. The series suggests the idea of a reality hidden under the appearances of the power in place that denies violence to citizens. Luis Pazos believes that art must respond to the condition of the country by questioning authority and violence in order to give individuals the possibility of constructing a critical discourse. As in Eastern Europe countries, performance has been a means of acting aesthetically and politically in places that are not marked by power with an a priori invisible art form.
Argentinian artist, born in 1940, Luis Pazos transitioned from an experimental poetry and editing practice to the creation of actions and happenings in the 1970s. Pazos uses the human body with the intention of questioning evolving political ideologies. The artist reports and examines the history of Argentina, a country that has suffered years of instability and dictatorship from the late 1960s. In his work Tranformaciones de masas en vivo (1973), he gives instructions to the audience who thus become living sculptures, transforming bodies into geometric shapes, evoking military enlistments as well as resistance forces. Political ideologies condition the social body and individual bodies.