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Internationaleries 25
and an active rethinking about the relationship of man-made objects with
nature. Bachelard’s work on imagination, in addition to Lefebvre’s critical
writings on space, provided CoBrA’s experimental starting point and provided
the group with a highly speciWc tool useful against all sorts of idealizations,
generalizations, and ideological recuperation.
The CoBrA IAE experimentation also included an active, collective
concern with the education of artists. For example, they proposed
that art was a total, collective act and art pedagogy was an exchange among
equals rather than a dynamic based on hierarchies of power. Another intrinsic
and crucial part of their activity was publishing. Much of this took place
in the “Cobra House” located in an abandoned house in the Atelier du
Marais in Brussels where the group’s printing press was located. It was here
the members collaborated on a variety of experimental publishing projects
including their journal Cobra: An Organ of the International of Experimental
Artists as well as Le Petit Cobra, a more spontaneous publication that served
to record the collective’s key events, dates, and so forth. There was in addition
a third organ called Le Tout Petit Cobra used to swiftly summarize group
activities. Given the difWcult economic circumstances in Europe during the
late 1940s these publications were among their most important achievements.
Considered together, the three collaborative journals, the group’s
research on existing and extinct folk traditions, their organization of numerous
festivals and exhibitions, and the series of printed monographs known
as the Cobra Encyclopaedie continue to demonstrate the signiWcance of
CoBrA IAE for the study and elaboration of visual culture and art history.
The 1950s were a particularly tense moment in the cold war. It
was also at this juncture that the book Kalte Kunst, or “Cold Art,” by Karl
Gerstner, was published. Its title almost served as a homogenizing metaphor
for the dominant functionalist rhetoric of the times. 39 Without any irony the
author advocated a speciWc form of geometric, highly rationalized, and monolithic
art making based on avant-garde constructivist-like forms, mathematical
formula, and arithmetical color progressions as the progressive artistic
form of the twentieth century. Yet the inconsistencies inherent in the functionalist
approach so forcefully critiqued by the internationaleries are actually
made apparent as the author rejects the role of the imagination preferring
instead a modular regulation of artistic form. Nevertheless, the rhetoric of
Kalte Kunst proved extremely popular among artists especially those in the
Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and Latin America with some of these ideas
reXected in the large number of groups who shared a similar belief in the
creation of systemic art including kinetic, op, or minimal art, and visual or
concrete poetry. Often these artists couched their aesthetic ideology, as well
as their obvious gloriWcation of functionalism, in an outspoken desire to