Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

20 Jelena Stojanović
In other words, functionalism was understood to involve various
forms of social conditioning performed and enacted by the media and dominant
culture, but most clearly revealed by the establishment of a new, massproduced
architecture in which, as Louis Sullivan famously quipped, “form
betrays a function.” More speciWcally, functionalism included and was based
upon an imposed institutionalization and commodiWcation of contemporary
artistic practice that reinforced the notion of the artist as a single (male)
practitioner. 17 Modern and contemporary art exhibitions now mushroomed
across Europe, as did all manner of art museums, “international” and biannual
cold war art exhibitions all perfectly mirroring the existing social
divide. 18 All the while the division between the so-called East and West was
carefully maintained even as a global market for art began to take shape.
Simultaneous with this expansion was the rise of the so-called Kalte Kunst,
or cold-art collectives whose objective was to reconcile art with industry,
but always within strictly imposed geopolitical conWnes. 19 In sum, the cold
war discourse, or what the artists labeled functionalism, was effectively an
imposed modernization that implicitly conWrmed the recuperation of the
avant-garde discourse as yet another ideological tool in a dominant and
dominating “total warfare.” The solution was a “negation and not a rejection,”
itself an ambiguous and utopian project that sought to avoid the pitfalls
of the dominant discourse through a tactical or grotesque reversal of
power. 20 The four principal collectives forming the internationaleries were
CoBrA, Internationale des Artistes Experimentaux (CoBrA IAE), Internationale
Lettriste (Lettrist International, or LI), Mouvement International
pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste (MIBI), and Internationale Situationniste (Situationist
International, or SI). Each in different ways desired to redeem and
redeWne the very notion of international collectivism as an explicit critique
of modernist, cold war functionalism.
From 1948 through 1951, CoBrA, or the Experimental Artists
International, consisted of an international collective of artists’ groups whose
critical manipulation of surrealism and surrealist rhetoric was tempered precisely
by a practical “experimental” collectivism, 21 often in a form of a profuse
collaborative self-mockery, 22 but always emerging from a diverse, international
membership. The name CoBrA itself was an acronym standing for the
three principle cities these groups hailed from: Copenhagen, Brussels, and
Amsterdam. Asger Jorn, Carl-Henning Pendersen, Egill Jacobsen, Henry
Heerup, Else Alfelt, Sonja Ferlov, Erik Thommesen, Erik Ortvald, Mogens
Balle, and Ejler Bille among others came from Denmark; Pierre Alechinsky,
Christian Dotremont, and Reinhoud (Reinhoud D’Haese) from Belgium;
Svavar Gudnason from Iceland; Karel Appel, Constant (Constant
Anton Nieuwenhuys), Corneille (Guillaume Cornelis van Beverloo), Anton