http://www.newhavenadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=15540
The anti-bourgeois arts underground is, um, at Yale
November 18, 2009
By Hank Hoffman
The Postwar Avant-Garde and the Culture of Protest, 1945 to 1968 and Beyond
Ends Dec. 19. Beinecke Library, Yale University, 121 Wall St. Free.
203-432-2977, library.yale.edu/beinecke.
--
Were the revolutions of the 1960s and 1968 in particular just a
dream (or nightmare, if you were part of the ruling class)? Based on
evidence presented in a fascinating show at the Beinecke Library, the
revolutions were both real and surreal.
The Postwar Avant-Garde and the Culture of Protest, 1945 to 1968 and
Beyond tracks the influence of a generation of artistic rebels in
Europe. These artists/activists sought not just to change art but to
change life.
According to curator Kevin Repp, 2008 the 40th anniversary of 1968,
when the globe convulsed with multiple upheavals would have been
the ideal year to mount the show. But Beinecke was undergoing
renovations at the time.
Meanwhile, the collection has been further fleshed out. The library
purchased more than 240 posters produced during the May 1968 uprising
in France when students occupied the universities and some 10 million
workers went on strike.
"Rather than focus solely on 1968, the focus here is to put 1968 into
the larger story," Repp says.
Radical posters from that year ring the glass tower on the first and
second floors. Downstairs display cases, or vitrines, document the
avant-garde's development after World War II, which culminated in the
revolution in France.
The exhibit gives special attention to the role of the Situationist
International and its chief theorist Guy Debord. Upstairs, a
sucession of virtrines chart the post-1968 fallout: the burgeoning
underground press, the feminist movement, the sexual liberation
movement, gay rights, anarchism, Italy's Movimento del '77 and punk.
Besides the bold revolutionary posters, the show includes radical
journals; broadsheets; collections of rare, hand-typed newsletters;
personal manuscripts of key participants; and copies of underground newspapers.
As its champions readily acknowledged, the postwar avant-garde owed
much to the pathbreaking of the prewar avant-garde, particularly the
Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists. Those movements not only
produced recognizable works of "art" in the conventional sense; they
also positioned themselves as radical critiques of society.
By the late 1940s, the mandarins of artistic rebellion had lost their
edge. When surrealist theoretician André Breton returned to Paris in
1947, after spending the war years exiled in the United States,
radical artists formed the Revolutionary Surrealists in response.
They accused Breton of abandoning Communist politics and going commercial.
Revolutionary Surrealism lasted barely a year, Stalinism being
inhospitable to the avant-garde. But the contacts made between
artists amid the hubbub over Breton's apparent apostasy proved
durable and influential.
Equally enduring was a vision of art as revolution.
A transnational network emerged of groups and movements dedicated to
experimentation: Cobra, Arte Nucleare, the Lettrist International and
the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus. Each had its own
manifesto, publication, art and interventions. However, common ground
existed in the belief that art had a responsibility to engage in the
struggle over "everyday life," a concept that included, but went
beyond, politics.
Various currents converged with the founding of the Situationist
International in 1957. Among its key figures were Danish painter
Asger Jorn and French theorist Guy Debord, who became editor of
Internationale Situationniste, the group's slickly produced journal.
According to Repp, where Jorn and Debord came together was in their
desire to "move out into the urban landscape, break out of the salon
and gallery scene and bring the revolutionary potential of art and
the revolutionary potential of detournement into the streets."
Detournement was the process of taking existing cultural products
like advertising and comic strips and substituting their own
subversive texts. It aimed to disrupt the "spectacle" the mass
media-drenched society in which the public functioned as passive
consumers rather than active participants.
Decrying boredom and alienation, the journal sought forms of
resistance and amplified them through theory.
"We will only organize the detonation," an anonymous Situationist
emphasized in the 1963 edition of the journal. "The free explosion
must escape us and any other control forever." When the detonation
came in May 1968, Situationist slogans reproduced on posters by the
Atelier Populaire (Popular Workshop), many of which are on display at
Beinecke blanketed Parisian walls.
"Abolish class society."
"Occupy the factories."
"Power to the imagination."
"Beneath the paving stones, the beach." The cobblestones tossed at
police were aimed at liberating society.
With so much text in this show, some may be frustated if they don't
read French, Italian or German. Title cards, however, offer
translations for some of the shorter manifestos; translations for the
pithy posters would be welcome as well. These title cards also
provide a comprehensible narrative to a potentially bewildering subculture.
Otherwise, there's a jarring irony in having this material presented
in such a staid context. There are no paving stones to throw at
Beinecke, and there is no beach.
The avant-garde was a movement explicitly in revolt against the
sequestering of the creative impulse in museums. The posters,
according to activists with the Atelier Populaire, were designed for
the "centers of conflict" streets and factories. "To use them for
decorative purposes, to display them in bourgeois places of culture
is to impair both their function and their effect," they declared at the time.
Yet here they are.
Still, if these documents serve as inspiration for a new generation
of radicals, then their imprisonment in a "bourgeois place of
culture" will not have been in vain.
.
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