Gastón Pérsico

Buenos Aires, 1972

In 2006, on the occasion of the launch of Heavy Mental Records, Gastón Pérsico was interviewed by No, the youth-culture supplements to Página/12 newspaper that began as a counterpart to Clarín newspaper’s Sí! supplement. For the record album, Pérsico had invited heavy-metal bands like Insurrección and Sacred Trash to set to music lyrics he had written by splicing together texts by Bataille, Deleuze and Guattari, and Foucault. In the interview, Pérsico explains, “While heavy metal is a marginal subculture, it is also massive in scale. That duality is also at play with philosophy, which is the highest level of thought, on the one hand, and yet a philosopher is a marginal figure within Western culture. In both cases, there are specific signs of identity and belonging to a community.”

The work on exhibit here is part of the Heavy Mental series that crosses philosophy and heavy-metal music. The objects in the series include—among other things—T-shirts, posters, sculptures, and a record album. Pérsico’s idea was to bring together two universes presented as opposites, where philosophers and self-help authors clash amidst studs and fake leather.

Gastón Pérsico Heavy Mental: Apocryphal Library (remastered), 2005-2023 The artist’s collection