The Madis

Pedro and friends were not much of a success in Argentina's capital. Pedro, one of the characters in a strange brand of ultra-free verse, was characterized in rambling lines such as these: "Pedro rose slowly . . . gathered once more about him his tree of duration: moments," achievements, events. . . ."

But Pedro is a hero to a small group of Argentine workmen who call themselves the Madis. Pedro's sponsors are sculptors, painters and poets in their spare time and they think they have built up an art form, built about a brand-new philosophy. Say they:

"We Madistas, taking the elements of each art, build;, that is, we make a real invention. With this we don't express anything, we do not represent anything, we do not symbolize anything. We create the thing in its unique presence. . . . The thing is in Space and is in Time; it exists. Our art is human, profoundly human, since it is the person in all its essence that consciously creates, does, builds and invents."

Buenos Aires citizens had heard about such artistic and philosophic vagaries from Dadaism and surrealism to existentialism, yawned at the Madists, and that was not to be borne. This week the Madists were across the Rio de la Plata estuary in Uruguay, seeking a new public. In Montevideo's Salon Aiape, visitors gaped and grinned at sculpture of strangely articulated sticks of wood by Giyulia Kosice (see cut), an irregularly framed abstract painting by Arden Quinn, a collection of odd pieces of paper covered with gibberish.

There was more to come. The Madists, led by Kosice, are also getting ready to put out their own dictionary, listing their version of Spanish as it is spoken by Madistas. But as the definitions of terms are also in gibberish, no one outside Madism is likely to be the richer for buying a copy.

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