Grupo Proceso Pentágono’s Dissident Bodies; or, How to Construct an Alternative Future Out of Loss

In 1973, the collective Grupo Proceso Pentágono (Proceso) exhibited a set of artworks at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City that critiqued the violence that had resulted from the state’s growing attempt to create a global tourist image of the city that was to absent any dissent/difference. José Antonio Hernández Amezcua made a raw papier-mâché figure bound to a chair in front of a television screen, and Víctor Muñoz disturbingly arranged artificial dismembered body parts in a lucha libre wrestling ring. These forms referenced the convergence of media spectacle, sporting event, and tourism that had led to violence in the Tlatelolco Massacre (where more than 300 protestors were killed in the lead-up to the 1968 Mexico City Olympics) and the so-called dirty wars (where suspected dissidents were “disappeared” without recourse to judicial processes). In both cases, nonconforming information and people were censored in an attempt to create a globally marketable and coherent image of the city. The artists of Proceso not only disrupted this coherent image by exposing the city’s censorship of differences (a method similar to many conceptual and critical artists throughout the world) but also began to formulate an alternative model of art and of the city. It was not enough simply to point out the gaps in the normative order; instead, the artists’ abstract re-materializations of missing bodies, of their empty or non-informational spaces, utilized the generative potentials of loss to conceptualize alternative art and urban institutions.