Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

24 Jelena Stojanović
the CoBrA IAE members drew heavily on his revision of Marxism and more
speciWcally on his concept of everydayness. Lefebvre’s Wrst version of the Critique
of Everyday Life appeared in 1947 and offered a critical analysis of the
dangers of techno-bureaucracy and modernization. He identiWed passivity
and overwhelming boredom as a consequence of specialization and the increasing
amount of leisure time that in turn made the critical analysis of reality
problematic and made creating the necessary tools of resistance extremely
difWcult. 35 In response, the CoBrA artists offered an oxymoronic product:
the artist as a “professional amateur.” Through a combination of collective
ownership and active production this hybrid would, they believed, disrupt
then obliterate normative, canonical modernist art making. In addition, the
more they made their art temporal and ephemeral, the more commodiWcation
was resisted. Such collective, hybrid actions were always eclectic, often
mixing together drawing, painting, poetry, sculpture, and decorative or applied
arts such as ceramics and tapestry as well as even free cinematic experimentations.
These collaborative encounters between artists and nonprofessionals
also blurred the lines of specialized distinctions, literally making others into
“professional amateurs.” In addition, they also took total control of the reception
of their work by not allowing any curatorial or art-critical interference.
CoBrA IAE carefully orchestrated a number of unconventional
exhibitions including the famous 1949 project at the Stedelijk Museum in
Amsterdam 36 that powerfully mocked even the most unorthodox of surrealist
installations. And contrary to surrealist happenings, they did not try to address
or remotely create any form of “modern marvelous” but, on the contrary,
sought to establish a populist and festive occasion that took place within the
everyday “now.” The same irreverent, informal mode was also characteristic of
their conferences. During the 1949 gathering in Bregneroed they collectively
repainted the interior of their meeting space, thus revealing the intrinsic logic
of the “everyday” within common architecture while demonstrating one possible
tactic of the grotesque. Many of these tactics reXected the teachings and
writings of Gaston Bachelard, 37 a French thinker of discontinuities and epistemological
breaks. Bachelard was in fact a philosopher of science and one
of the rare “thought professionals” the group invited to take an active part
in the pages of their journal Cobra. Rejecting completely the established modernist
myth of an individualist creation ex nihilo, Bachelard argued instead
for the importance of exchange and reuse and insisted that there are two types
of imagination: one visual, the other materialistic. For him, the importance
and power of the materialistic imagination, as opposed to the mechanical,
repetitive tendency of the visual, was its ability to “reorder the world.” 38 This
was achieved by breaking down the existing order to build anew. Furthermore,
his concept of materialistic imagination implied a careful examination of