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