Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

34 Jelena Stojanović
Another signiWcant unitary urbanist event was the 1959 exhibition
entitled “La Caverna Antimateria” (Anti-Material Cave) that took place
at the Galerie Drouin in Paris. In this case two Situationist members from the
Italian section, Giors Melanotte and Giuseppe-Pinot Gallizio, collaboratively
extended Gallizio’s concept of “industrial painting” into the environment by
creating a full-blown art gallery installation that addressed several issues simultaneously.
By creating an environment made of an indeWnitely reproducible,
collectively made abstract painting reminiscent of bomb shelters that were
commonly featured in daily newspapers, they targeted the persistent massmarketing
of fear through nuclear annihilation while linking this to functionalist
art production. 65 In the same year the group founded Research Bureau
for Unitary Urbanism (Bureau de recherche pour un urbanisme unitaire). In
many ways it was a continuation of the MIBI Experimental Laboratory in
Alba. The Bureau’s Wrst projects were in the form of a labyrinth that rendered
everyday, lived situations events that surpassed art. 66 Much of this ludic
play was itself based on an earlier project in 1956 entitled Mobile Cities and
expressed a utopian belief that the city and its inhabitants should be able to
circulate freely, anarchically, according to their desires. This same grotesque
logic had previously informed another project entitled Temporary Habitations,
which was a series of spatial living constructs for the Gypsy population in
Alba. The Research Bureau for Unitary Urbanism revived this proposition
for nomadic living as a constantly changing and variable architectural environment
necessary for creating “collective spontaneity.” 67
However in 1962 the Bureau moved to Brussels. Here its tactics
once again took up a more theoretical direction. This included the production
of a number of texts including Vaneigem’s “Basic Banalities” that directly
attacked contemporary culture, but also the new program written by Attila
Kotanyi and Raoul Vaneigem who together pronounced that the SI artists
treated urbanism “as an ideology,” without which the “spectacle is impossible.”
68 In this sense the unitary urbanist actions dramatically departed from
most other contemporary art practices including the “de-coll/age” work
performed by Wolf Vostell, or such practices as “Destruction in art,” done
in a similar, performative mode. 69 By contrast the SI offered a powerful collective
vision, something that was profoundly lacking from these isolated,
individualistic political and aesthetic undertakings. 70 This degree of collectivism
was not seen again until, perhaps, the emergence of Fluxus several
years later, or in some of the collectivist actions staged by Jean-Jacques Lebel.
With the tactic of unitary urbanism artists stopped being the
constructors of useless, artiWcial art forms in order to become the constructors
of an environment for developing new forms of collective ownership.
The SI above all believed that architecture and urban planning needed to