Monthly Archive: June 2012

This article looks back on the consequence, for a scholar of the art of the western canon, of a two-day conference held at the Clark Art Institute titled “In the Wake of the Global Turn: Propositions for an Exploded Art History Without Borders.” The author reflects on the pedagogical challenges of the ethical and political project of reimagining the limits of the discipline in both geographic and theoretical terms in order to accommodate issues of the untranslatable, incommensurable, and irresolvable when it comes to visual cultures from around the world. As well, the article touches on the ways in which … Read more

This paper focuses on György Galántai’s networking strategies during the socialist period in Hungary. Beginning with the Balatonboglár Chapel Studio exhibitions (1970–1973) and ending with the discussion of Artpool, founded by Galántai and Julia Klaniczay in 1979, the paper considers the position of experimental art in Hungary in the 1970s and 1980s and Galántai’s struggles with the authorities. In analyzing the ways in which samizdat publications and the mail art network offered modes of resistance and alternative spaces for artistic exchanges, I propose that those experimental forms of art expanded artists’ communication by means of metonymy, conveying corporeal sovereignty among … Read more

Jarosław Kozłowski discusses his role in 1960s and 1970s alternative networks with Klara Kemp-Welch. The conversation begins with an overview of independent artists’ initiatives in the period, then moves on to Kozłowski’s early correspondence pieces, the conceptual proposition NET initiated in 1971 with Andrzej Kostolowski and mailed to hundreds of international recipients, the reception of the materials received through the NET, Kozłowski’s experience of running the gallery Akumulatory 2 in Poznań, and wider issues relating to mail art and 1970s Polish artists’ networks.

The testimony of a personal participation in the mail art network is presented together with and the characteristics of mail art, that emphasizes communication over market interests during the period of dictatorship in Latin America. The relationship with artists from Eastern Europe and colleagues from Latin America is the main focus concerning the friendship with Robert Rehfeldt, Guilhermo Deisler, Klaus Groh.

An introduction to and abridged translation of Romanian Surrealist Dolfi Trost’s 1953 book Visible et Invisible. Trost was part of a semi-clandestine and infrequently studied Bucharest Surrealist group; his book is about forming a new kind of revolutionary collectivity on the basis of what he calls a self-regarding or “cosmic” consciousness” made manifest within certain forms of dreams, as well as on the basis of a “spiritually heightened schizophrenia.” Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari were attentive readers of his work, and I place the translation in the context of their anti-oedipal and schizoanalytic theories.

Perhaps we can think that mail art derives from Dada and link it to Fluxus, Filliou’s proposal of an eternal network, and the highly innovative poetry and experimental art, born at the same time in different countries. GGMarx practiced collective creation, in poor areas of the southern cone of South America. In a broader and ideologically more sensitive context, a folk art appeared, thanks to the popular struggles in Cuba, México, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Uruguay, Colombia, Ecuador and Argentina. The liberation movements, developed during the seventies, have marked the direction of Latin American mail-art intercourse. But they … Read more

This article traces the roots and development of the Beau Geste Press, which developed extensive international networks through its publishing activity in the 1970s. The article suggests that these links developed because an idea of “openness” was applied to artistic practices, resulting in a shared aesthetic language that enabled cross-border collaboration. I propose the term “translocal” as a way of understanding how artists in different contexts communicated and attempted to build a system parallel to the art world.

This article identifies what the recognition of forms of collaboration in the mail art network suggests to us today about a distribution of experiences. This was not fixed only in objects, but in exchanges of moments, affections, preoccupations, political positions and collective desires, that were anticipated as episodes of correspondence through a “Collectionism of place” and an estrangement of what circulates. The action of receiving remains implicit the act of sending, and also considers the translation of object or letter received as crucial. For any cultural exchange, translation is vital to activate the content and its significance in the new … Read more

“Black Sea” is a photo essay that consists of a series of vertically framed seascapes. The accompanying narrative text presents a “timescape” parallel to these seascapes; by bringing together pieces of memory and history, it tells the story of the people absent from the photographs — the Pontus (“sea”) Greeks who once lived on these coasts.

This article examines the rise and reception of conceptual art in Argentina. Against dominant readings of the 1960s’ and 70s’ visual avant-gardes in Latin America, I reconsider the stakes of art’s so-called “dematerialization” and its unique claim on ideology critique in the work of the Grupo Arte de los Medios [Media Art Group], a collective of young artists led by the philosopher and literary critic Oscar Masotta. Arguing for a re-historicization of the 1960s avant-garde as one that emerges as a self-reflexive reaction to the novel articulation of late capitalism in Argentina, I trace a critical continuity between the Grupo … Read more

The text proposes a comparative reading of two self-organized projects of the 1970s, Podroom — the Working Community of Artists, founded in 1978 by a group of artists in Zagreb, and La Galerie des Locataires, founded in 1972 in Paris by art historian Ida Biard. The analysis addresses the Issue: of work/labor as one of the key preoccupations of both projects, situating it within the theoretical perspectives that define the crisis of Fordist labor in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as its resolution in the transition to the post-Fordist era with its emphasis on immaterial labor, keeping in mind … Read more

The guest editors’ introduction to ARTMargins Issue: 1:2–3 proposes that the dynamic marginal art scenes that developed under Latin American military dictatorships and in Late Socialist Eastern Europe in the 1960s and 1970s were characterized by their commitment to freedom and its furthering through cultural exchange and networking. To the extent that direct exchange was controlled from above, its significance, from below, increased in inverse proportion. From the peripheries of the Cold War, a marginal cultural intelligentsia sought creative ways to inhabit counter-cartographies and to foster an alternative sense of belonging. The introduction gives an overview of the transnational networks … Read more