Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

1. Internationaleries: Collectivism, the
Grotesque, and Cold War Functionalism
JELENA STOJANOVIĆ
We should not reject the contemporary culture, but negate it.
—Internationale Situationniste
This essay examines speciWc ways some of the main modernist
discursive tenets such as collectivism and internationalism have been rearticulated
in avant-garde art practice during the cold war ideological warfare. It
is important to note that this ideology became dominant in Europe with the
implementation of the Marshall Plan in 1948. This was also the moment
when globalization began to take root and when the term “international”
began to Wgure prominently in the names of art collectives. By focusing on
the theory and practice of four early cold war collectives this chapter will
investigate the changing nature of collective art practice itself and its interaction
and future impact on the way modernism and modernist art practices
are understood and interpreted.
One period text above all neatly and polemically articulated many
of these concerns. Although written at the very beginning of the Second
World War, Harold Rosenberg’s 1940 essay “The Fall of Paris” warns of the
impending death of modernism. Primarily focusing on Europe and on Paris
in particular, Rosenberg identiWes the spread of nationalism as a force that
is about to destroy the cultural internationalism that had always characterized
this modernist capital. This metaphorical “fall” of Paris as the cultural
international was for Rosenberg about to complete the fall and failure of the
political international that had taken place in the twenties in Moscow. This
judgment implied, or rather was based upon, a clear spatial, topographical
metaphor. Hence the end of a political internationalism would inevitably
be followed by the end of a cultural internationalism, thus Wnishing the Wnal
chapter in the irretrievable destruction of the modernist dream, that of a
“world-citizen” included. 1 Rosenberg’s rhetoric, while representative of the
dominant interpretive tropes of modernism, 2 is yet another example of what
17