Marcelo Pombo: conditions for the construction of an improbable artist

Abstract

This article revises the social trajectory of artist Marcelo Pombo, a major representative of Argentina’s esthetic revitalization in the post-dictatorship period. His case is considered a paradigm of a type of artist who, with no intellectual or economic capital, manages to break into the artistic scene in those early years of democracy armed with plebeian esthetic universes that confronted the usual legitimated styles. By analyzing the different stages of his itinerary – family origins,
education, work history, personal relationships and, most fundamentally, his homosexual experience and subsequent participation in gay activism – I attempt to explain the social basis for a dissident artistic strategy whose core trait is a plea for lost autonomy