Art Collectives in Western Europe (1956-1969)
A fascinating book about a countercultural milieu that attempted to establish innovative ideas of collectivity and individuality through the formation of art groups in the 1950s and 1960s.
This volume is the first publication to examine in detail the phenomenon of collective art practice in the continental Western Europe of the late 1950s and of the 1960s. The book elaborates a comparative perspective, engaging with a cultural history of art deeply concerned with political ideas and geopolitical conflicts. Groups of artists and activists including Equipo 57, Equipo Cronica, Equipo Realidad, N, GRAV, Spur, Geflecht and Kommune I, have often been neglected in the English-speaking world. This happened partly because they were active in allegedly minor art centres such as Valencia, Padua, Cordoba, West-Berlin and Munich. However, their works, debates and intellectual networks cast new light on both the art produced during the Cold War and the heightened interest in participatory and collaborative art practices that has characterised the art world of the 2000s and 2010s. Individuals against Individualism tells the stories of these artists and activists, and focuses on their attempts to depict and embody forms of egalitarianism opposing the Eastern bloc authoritarianism as much as the Free world’s ethos. By setting their political use of collective authorship, resistance to institutional co-optation and attack on the 'ideology of freedom, against the backdrop of the Cold War, the book largely speaks to the present.