One Number Is Worth One Word

Working across such mediums as printmaking, sculpture, language, and installations, Camnitzer’s work investigates how power is exercised and can be challenged in society. An influential teacher, over the six decades covered by this volume, he has interrogated the power structures inherent to the practice of art at the same time as he explores its liberating potential. Many of these texts are published for the first time. The book offers a singularly authoritative—yet also anti-authoritative—gathering of a life’s work in art, education, and activism.

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.