L'Internationale. Post-War Avant-Gardes Between 1957 and 1986

Edited by Christian Höller

Graphic Design: New Collectivism

2015
ISBN 978-3-03764-311-2

Contents

  1. 1.
    OPEN
  2. 2.
    Museum of Parallel Narratives, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona (2011)
  3. 3.
    Museum of Affects, Moderna galerija, Ljubljana (2011/12)
  4. 5.
    METHODOLOGY
  5. 6.
    Writing History Without a Prior Canon
  6. 7.
    Histories and Their Different Narrators
  7. 8.
    Approaching Art through Ensembles
  8. 9.
    An Exercise in Affects
  9. 10.
    What If the Universe Started Here and Elsewhere
  10. 11.
    Age of Change
  11. 12.
    CIRCUMSCRIBING THE PERIOD
  12. 13.
    Connect Whom? Connect What? Why Connect? The World System after 1945
  13. 14.
    Recycling the R-waste (R is for Revolution)
  14. 15.
    Art as Mousetrap: The Case of Laibach
  15. 16.
    Should Ilya Kabakov Be Awakened?
  16. 17.
    Forgotten in the Folds of History
  17. 18.
    Is Spain Really Different?
  18. 19.
    CASE STUDIES
  19. 20.
    A. ARTISTS
  20. 21.
    KwieKulik / Form is a Fact of Society
  21. 22.
    Július Koller / Dialectics of Self-Identification
  22. 23.
    Gorgona / Beyond Aesthetic Reality
  23. 24.
    OHO / An Experimental Microcosm on the Edge of East and West
  24. 25.
    Jef Geys and Marinus Boezem / Taking Care of the Frame
  25. 26.
    Paul De Vree and Toon Tersas / Hysteria Makes History
  26. 27.
    Grup de Treball and Vídeo-Nou / Two Collective Projects in 1970s Spain
  27. 28.
    Retroavantgarde
  28. 29.
    B. MONUMENTS
  29. 30.
    “A Huge Amusement-Park Exhibition” / Vision in Motion (1959)
  30. 31.
    Overcoming Alienation / New Tendencies 1961–1973
  31. 32.
    The Furor of the Festival / Los Encuentros de Pamplona (1972)
  32. 33.
    The Avant-Garde, Sots-Art and the Bullldozer Exhibition of 1974
  33. 34.
    Works and Words (1979) in the Shadow of I AM (1978)
  34. 35.
    A European Institutional Effort / Art in Europe after ‘68 (1980) and Chambres d’Amis (1986)
  35. 36.
    ARRAYS OF INTERNATIONALISM
  36. 37.
    Southern–Eastern Contact Zones
  37. 38.
    From the International to the Cosmopolitan
  38. 39.
    “Global” Art
  39. 40.
    CLOSE
  40. 41.
    Spirits of Internationalism, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven / Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (M HKA), Antwerpen
  41. 42.
    Contributors
  42. 43.
    Colophon

Taking as its starting point the five founding museums of L’Internationale and their collections, L'Internationale – Post-War Avant-Gardes between 1957 and 1986 presents a wide range of case studies, historiographic and theoretical essays to newly consider a period in art history that, according to the established canon, has been almost exclusively dominated by Western Europe and North America. In questioning this canon the publication works to acknowledge the existence of and explore a dispersed, multi-polar, and at times interconnected neo-avant-gardist field that existed (long) before it became common to think according to frameworks of globalization or trans-nationalism. In the process this collection of compelling contributions puts many a central question on the table: To what extent has a common international language existed in art over these three decades, while at the same time local terminologies and approaches might have differed significantly? How were such dispersed forms of knowledge and experience situated in their respective social contexts? What parallels of artistic method appeared across different regions, even continents? Finally, can such local narratives be brought together in a new rhizomatic way, one that works to reshape our ideas of trans-localism and internationalism?