Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

22 Jelena Stojanović
conditioning, such as that carried out by the media or the movies in particular,
took up a central position within their internationally conceived
conferences. Totaling eight altogether, these gatherings were inaugurated in
1957 with the UniWcation Congress in Cosio d’Arroscia and concluded in
1969 with the Eighth Conference in Venice. The international ambitions of
these collective events is made apparent by their emphasis on the membership
in Africa, Latin America, and Asia as well as the fact that almost forty
organizations from all over the world attended over the life span of the organization.
As noted, however, only two groups stayed on permanently as part
of the SI. 27
COLLECTIVE EXPERIMENTATION/S:
TOWARD FORMING A GROTESQUE CRITIQUE
“Mr. Georges Lapassade is a cunt,” 28 exclaimed the Situationists, whose very
language manifests itself as a form of excessively hyperbolic and caustic
humor. Yet if the Situationist’s grotesque begins in rude expressions and
personal insults, it ultimately remained an ambiguous act. Its goal was to
critically address a total reality and to do so in the form of an “inside out”
reversal 29 or as a “third force” 30 that is ultimately “not beautiful but true.” 31
As is well known the experimental method or simply the “experimental”
was a powerful modernist trope denoting an objective, positivistic,
and scientiWc inquiry: a dispassionate recording and reordering of reality into
a set of easily measurable, quantiWable units. More importantly, the experimental
was not the “why” but the “how” things happen. As Émile Zola justi-
Wed its use in what he termed the “scientiWc age novel,” it was made to Wt a
“new, physiological man.” 32 The internationaleries, however, “détourned” the
term experimental, doing so with the hope that as a collective device it
would become a practice, or rather a myriad of practices, for turning insideout
its own positivistic utilitarianism while resisting classiWcation and homogenization.
For example, with CoBrA IAE, the experimental was primarily
understood as a “third force” that mocked the dominant cold war rhetoric
of ideological and formal antithesis. In artistic terms this took the form of
painterly abstraction vs. realism, or speciWcally, abstract vs. social realism.
In artistic terms this meant an ideological struggle between painterly abstraction
and realism, or speciWcally, American abstract expressionism versus
Soviet socialist realism. As Christian Dotremont explained in 1950, 33 experimental
practices were also a way to critically rework two important avantgarde
legacies, surrealism and Marxism, that were becoming increasingly
idealized and useless in the given historical situation. Although often in a
polemical exchange with Henri Lefebvre, 34 who was himself an old surrealist,