How to Make Art when Art is Illegal
During the Dictatorship, art was heavily censored in Chile and artists were persecuted for making art that was critical of the government. Roberto was spared from the culling because he was based in Europe, but domestic artists were often heavily punished for illustrating transgressive themes. The solution was performance art. Performance art is temporary, interpretive, and hard to trace back to one individual. If artists banded together into a group, like CADA, an organization of Chilean performance artists that hid in numbers and disguised the true artist of their performances, no one individual could be singled out for persecution. And if the art, like Matta-Clark's, was destroyed after being displayed, the government couldn't collect evidence that artists were being political.
Matta-Clark's final principle of Anarchitecture, the performance, is perhaps the most Chilean of all, a silent protest against the censorship and treatment of artists in his father's home country and a commentary on the overstepped boundaries of government. The push against a federal style of architecture, the emphasis of emptiness, the deconstruction of home surveillance, and the very act of performance all combine into an art movement that, while distinctly American in its blending of French and Chilean and New York messages, was distinctly influenced by the politics and movements of Chile first and foremost.