Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

166 Rubén Gallo
individualistic production and reception of art (a process that followed a capitalist
model) with an art form that was collectively produced (a large team
of painters and helpers was needed to paint a mural) and destined for collective
reception (large crowds could stand in front of a mural and study its
message). Starting in the 1920s, the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party)
governments supported mural painting through hundreds of generous commissions
and grants.
Paradoxically, though most murals were the work of collectives,
they were signed by individuals, thus perpetuating the myth of the single
author. The murals at Mexico City’s Secretaría de Educación Pública, for
example, were painted by a team of hundreds of painters, plasterers, manual
laborers, and assistants—including well-known artists like Jean Charlot—yet
they were signed only by Diego Rivera. It is one of the ironies of Mexican
muralism that a movement predicated on collectivism and socialist values
led to the gloriWcation of a handful of individuals—Rivera, David Alfro
Siqueiros, and Clemente Orozco—who would go down in history as los tres
grandes (the three great muralists), a label that condemns to oblivion the
numerous artists that collaborated in their projects.
In the 1930s there was a different experiment with collectivism in
the arts: the workshop known as Taller de GráWca Popular (TGP), founded
in 1937 by a handful of artists and devoted to printing posters, Xyers, and
other “graphics” with overtly political subjects. The TGP was founded by
Leopoldo Méndez, Pablo O’Higgins, and Luis Arenal. Though its members
came together to discuss political issues and their relation to art practice, most
of them signed their works as individuals: for them collectivism was about
political discussion and strategizing, but when it came to authorship, most
members preferred to be known as individuals. 1
During the 1950s and 1960s Mexican artists expressed little interest
in collectivism. These two decades saw the rise of “the generation of rupture,”
a group of younger artists—including Manuel Felguérez and Fernando
García Ponce—who broke with muralism and embraced both abstract painting
and the myth of the single author. If murals were painted by collectives,
the works of the rupture were painted by individuals; if the former aspired
to represent the Mexican nation, the latter focused merely on the painter’s
subjective experiences. The shift to abstraction was a return to the Romantic
myth of the creative genius.
THE GROUPS
The next wave of artistic experiments with collectivism did not come until
the 1970s, with the emergence of a dozen artists’ collectives known as los