The project’s historical and theoretical background

The project focuses on the period between 1957 and 1986, a period in which dictatorial regimes of different kinds predominated in a substantial part of the world (Spain, Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Eastern Europe), but which was also characterized by a post-war belief in a new modern era in which advanced technologies played an increasingly prominent role, the world was better connected through new ways of transport and new communication systems, and the media had increasing power. It was a time of politically and economically isolated spaces and at the same time of increasing globalization processes.

After different political regimes had collapsed, Eastern Europe and Latin America began to broach questions of their post-war avant-gardes more intensively, stimulated on the one hand by a lack of their own histories and on the other by a much-increased interest on the part of the West.

The biggest disadvantage of Eastern Europe and Latin America has been the absence of the political and economic conditions necessary to develop modern cultural systems as systems of shared values in cultural identities, memories, and strategies of integration in the international art world. With their different social, cultural and economical backgrounds, the five members of the L’Internationale thus want to introduce possible changes in the existing cultural system by developing new possible ways of collaboration based not only on the power of real but also symbolic capital.

The project will be based on the historicization of different post war avant-garde art practices, including performative practices, new media, political activism, and visual poetry from the early 1960s to the early 1980s, as well as some other art practices with strong social utopian imaginary. In this period different neo-avant-garde practices were often designated by the same term regardless of their different social and political contexts and the variety of their approaches. It is necessary to approach them through the multitude of their aesthetic concepts. The main tasks of this particular project would therefore be to create a narrative that speaks in the name of a multitude of narratives; to make a map of the different terms (including the terminology employed by the artists themselves); to draw relational maps which show how the terms entered a certain territory; to map the media of exchange and the exchange venues; and to reconstruct certain situations. The comparisons between post-war avant-gardes in the different spaces should reflect the dynamic and dialectic processes which evolved in the various artistic practices and their contexts.

A common ground for all these practices could be the definition of post-war avant-garde as a reaction to the break with modernism. However, no serious research into the circulation of ideas and artworks between Eastern Europe, Latin America and the West has ever been undertaken and our knowledge of this important dialogue from recent history is very fragmentary. A map of these communications should be constructed; this could also help us develop new approaches in comparisons between post-war avant-garde in different spaces and eventually enable the audiences of this extensive project to better understand the world of today.

1957–1986. Art from the Decline of Modernism to the Rise of Globalisation by L’Internationale follows and further develops the idea of the project Eastern European Conceptual Art proposed already in 2008, with particular emphasis on certain comparisons with the US and Latin America, which was discussed at an international meeting of experts at the Moderna galerija, Ljubljana in June 2007. The experts at that meeting all agreed that regardless of the degree of isolation of the individual countries, the art of Eastern Europe was nonetheless always involved in the international exchange of ideas, even if to a limited degree. That is why the project wanted to bring it into comparison with the art of other spaces, in particular the West and Latin America. This would be done not only by making aesthetic comparisons, but also by comparing the diverse contexts. Eda Čufer, a writer and curator, Ljubljana; Boris Groys, philosopher and at that time professor at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestattung, Karlsruhe; the late Charles Harrison, writer, artist and founder of the important artistic group Art & Language, whose view was that conceptual art had a very precise etymology; Vit Havranek, director of “transit.cz”; Piotr Piotrowski, director of the National Gallery in Warsaw, as well as the editor of the annual journal Artium Quaestiones; Branka Stipančić, a curator from Zagreb; Cristina Freire, a curator at the Museum for Contemporary Art and lecturer at the University of São Paulo, Brazil.

All these experts participated in the meeting in Ljubljana in June 2007 and will continue to collaborate as the group of advisors for the project L’Internationale.