Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

material for Expediente. And while both Haacke’s and the Mexican artists’
projects zeroed in on the individuals behind the institution, Haacke’s exposure
of the Guggenheim’s trustees was the work of an individual, while Expediente
was the work of an artists’ collective. Unlike Haacke’s piece, Proceso
Pentágono’s project questions the politics of individualism by suggesting a
number of provocative questions: Why is it that art institutions often conceal
the role played by individual administrators behind a facade of institutionalism?
Why is it that museums have always favored art authored by individuals
over collective, collaborative projects? Does the nature of collective
organization threaten the structures of museums, biennales, and other artistic
institutions?
CONCLUSION
The Mexican Pentagon 187
A fascination with collectivism—as an organizational principle, political
weapon, and utopian value—characterized all of Proceso Pentágono’s works.
And collectivism is closely related to the three themes I have discussed in
the group’s production: the celebration of the street, the focus on information,
and the Trojan-horse strategy of institutional critique.
By staging many of their actions on the street (as in El hombre
atropellado and El secuestro), the members of Proceso Pentágono proposed a
remedy against the alienation generated by the numerous modernizing projects
of the 1950s and 1960s. At a time when freeways and other projects
were transforming the capital into a city of individuals cut off from one
another, the group’s projects encouraged random people to walk on the streets,
think critically, and interact with one another. These actions aspired to transform
spectators into a collective of engaged citizens.
By shifting the focus away from “art” and toward “information”
(as the group did in “A nivel informativo”) the members of Proceso Pentágono
distanced themselves from the Romantic ideal of the artist as individual.
They moved away from the nineteenth-century concept of the “artist”
and embraced the twentieth-century ideal of the “cultural worker,” as group
members preferred to call themselves. Through their shift in terminology,
the artists in Proceso Pentágono not only suggested a provocative opposition—art
is done by individuals; information is processed by cultural workers—but
they also greatly expanded the social context of their activities:
they related their projects to other forms of collective organization, including
labor unions and political parties. In 1978, for instance, members of Proceso
Pentágono helped found the Mexican Front of Groups of Cultural
Workers, a hybrid organization that was part labor union and part artists’
collective. 40