Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

38 Jelena Stojanović
The internationaleries took upon themselves the immense and
utopian task of reimagining collective subjectivity. That is, of redeWning the
very notion of utopia for the cold war era, a time when the “colonization
of everydayness” Wrst took on an unconditional presence. They sought to
achieve this gargantuan task by employing what they believed was the only
available tactic: a critical art practice, informed by the cold war in which
negation, debasement, and blasphemy were discharged against all highly
promoted cultural values including “art,” but also the “avant-garde.” Hence
their use and interpretation of the grotesque remained close to Bakhtin’s
deWnition of an “ambivalent and contradictory” 83 act, even if in practice
their application of grotesque varied a great deal. From one internationalerie
to another, each redeWned its own use on its own terms. 84 CoBrA IAE Wrst
outlined the task at hand—the Wght for a free, experimental cultural practice
set against an increasingly ideologized and functionalist everydayness.
By sporting grotesque imagery and an impressive control over its own
collective production, MIBI, the LI, and the SI slowly moved into a more
politicized realm, dramatically altering artistic practice in the process. The
Wrst collective experiments in the early Wfties by the MIBI lab in southern
Italy carried the group into the streets in turn creating an unprecedented
network of people with the same urge to Wght functionalism and fundamentally
transform everyday experience. The most radical artists, architects,
designers, art critics, and theoreticians who were active at that time
either received a copy of their publications or visited their exhibitions and
organized events.
The spectacular organizational skills these artists displayed recalled
both futurism and surrealism while generating a secret “public” fame.
This grotesque collectivism was brought to perfection with the SI. Paradoxically,
they did manage to turn the famous surrealist quip “Never work” literally
into a political project. Ultimately however, they achieved not so
much a fully realized critique of political economy as much as they redeWned
the idea of art within the speciWc historical circumstances of the cold war.
Their famous, or rather infamous, conferences and tireless magazine publishing
were impressive acts of production that successfully moved art away
from an object-bound practice and into a more performative, “deskilled”
tactical mode. Unitary urbanism especially demonstrates this shift and represents
their most intriguing as well as perhaps most contradictory and
therefore most grotesque product. It also demonstrates the increasingly ideological
turn the internationaleries took on in response to escalating global
tensions. Perhaps it is necessary to ask whether or not the grotesque collectivism
of the SI and other internationaleries was at once a calculated response
and an inevitable cohort to the cultural politics of the cold war.