This collection of texts—with many unpublished—spans over half a century of the conceptual artist's radical engagement with art education and its institutions.
For nearly sixty years, Luis Camnitzer has been obsessing about the same
things. As an art student in Uruguay in 1960, he was part of a collective
of artists, students, and educators who reformed the School of Fine Arts
in Montevideo. Today, he is still an “ethical anarchist” preoccupied with
the role of education in redistributing power in society. With mischievous
wit and wisdom, Camnitzer's writings summons an inherent utopianism in
egalitarian, participatory models of art education to identify how meaning
is made. One Number Is Worth One Word spans over half a century of the
Conceptual artist's radical engagement with art education and its
institutions, from his student days in Uruguay and move to New York in
1964 to his current work and writings, with many texts published for the
first time. This is a singularly authoritative, antiauthoritarian
gathering of a life's work in art, education, and activism.
Artist, critic, educator, and theorist Luis Camnitzer (born 1937 in Lübeck, Germany) grew-up in Uruguay and moved to New York in 1964 where he co-founded The New York Graphic Workshop, along with fellow artists, Argentine Liliana Porter and Venezuelan Guillermo Castillo. For six years until the end of the workshop in 1970, they examined the conceptual meaning behind printmaking, and sought to test and expand the definition of the medium. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Camnitzer developed a body of work that explored language as primary medium, shifting from printing text on paper or walls. As his interest in language unfolded, so did his aim to identify socio-political problems through his art. Camnitzer responded in great part to the growing wave of Latin Americanmilitary regimes taking root in the late '60s, but his work also points to the dynamic political landscape of his adopted country, the United States. Luis Camnitzer's strong interest in Simón Rodríguez has been both educational and political. Whilst willingly referring to European artists such as Magritte or Mallarmé, Camnitzer insisted on the importance of Simón Rodríguez as a tutelary figure in the historicisation of conceptualism in Latin America.
