Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

Internationaleries 27
create a democratic Marxian (egalitarian) type of abstract art. However, for
the internationaleries, the “Cold Artists” and their theoreticians, including
Max Bill, Abraham Moles, and Max Bense, were deeply ideological. In sum,
Kalte Kunst was the perfect embodiment of afWrmative culture, blindly adhering
to the cold war discourse without any critical reXection on its function
within that paradigm. 40 Instead of analyzing their own historical circumstances
in the present, these cold artists projected their practice into a mystiWed,
idealized future. Ultimately, cold art reinforced the very ideology its
adherents claimed to reject and, in doing so, committed the same crime as
the believers in industrial design: a belief in a fully rational and perfectly
homogenized human environment. This was a condition most adamantly
denounced by Asger Jorn in his text “Against Functionalism.” 41
This critique formed a base and materialized as both the name and
program of a group, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus,
severely mocking the Hochshule für Gestaltung in Ulm, or the “New Bauhaus.”
MIBI believed such functionalist ideology was the primary culprit
lurking within cold war ideology. Therefore MIBI’s experimental critique of
functionalism, modernization, and imposed specialization developed out of
necessity, its own ironic forms including an excess of impractical actions and
afunctional gestures. Once, for example, the members invited groups of school
children to individually paint mass-produced white plates as a sardonic rendition
mocking the self-absorbed “professional designer,” or what Max Bill,
the founder of the “New Bauhaus,” reverentially called the “Artist-Creator.”
They continued their collective games by literally staging exhibitions, retrospectives,
historical avant-garde revisions, and art conferences. And insofar
as these practices were unspecialized acts they proved difWcult to commodify
and even more difWcult to solidify into a single, homogeneous narrative. Dire
Wnancial straights, however, eventually forced MIBI members to reduce their
voluminous publication efforts. Still, despite the setback, they collaborated
on an issue of Il Gesto with the Movimento Nucleare while separately publishing
a few texts written by Asger Jorn. They also managed to found an
International Laboratory for Experimental Research in an old convent, which,
once again, led directly to a state of “productive chaos”; 42 one result of this
activity was the famous “Industrial paintings” executed by Giuseppe-Pinot
Gallizio and his friends. 43 By 1956, however, they were forced to consolidate
their efforts into one issue of the journal, collectively choosing to call it
Eristica, 44 mockingly debasing the very art of dispute while afWrming the irrelevance
of truth and veracity.
It was about this time that the Lettrist International became familiar
with MIBI’s critique of functionalism and their grotesque experimentations.
The LI’s work offered a number of similarities with MIBI, especially