A Lecture by Armin Medosch
Sixty years ago, a modest exhibition featuring a group of little-known artists opened in the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb, capital of what was then the Croatian republic of a federal Yugoslavia. Named Nove Tendencije, or New Tendencies, it aimed to represent a snapshot of what was happening in the art world of the time. Europe was emerging from over a decade of post-war austerity and reconstruction, and its artists were refashioning the modernist avant-gardes of the inter-war years to address a new age of economic growth and technological progress.
It became an international phenomenon. Four more New Tendencies exhibitions launched between 1961 and 1973, attracting hundreds of artists, critics and intellectuals to a city that was fast emerging as a haven on the cultural cutting edge.
"According to Thomas Braden, the head of International Organizations Division—the “covert action” arm of the CIA—the cultural Cold War was, in essence, “the battle for Picasso’s mind”: in other words, an ownership dispute over the heritage and core of the avant-garde. The US—a country whose contributions to modernism were less significant than their European counterparts [1] — would, under Braden’s guidance, lionize, and thereby institutionalize, the early European modernist movements."
Parapolitics, an exhibition at HKW, 2018
curated by Anselm Franke, Nida Ghouse, Paz Guevara, and Antonia Majaca
After the Second World War, the battle of the systems also embroiled the arts and culture in a symbolic arms race. One example of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), an organization founded in West Berlin in June 1950 by a group of writers driven to consolidate an “anti-totalitarian” intellectual community.
It is a well-known fact that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) secretly funded culture during the Cold War. Parapolitics is not about revealing that scandal, despite the lack of engagement it has met from museums. The exhibition project questions whether the canon of Western modernism can really be retroactively “globalized,” without confronting the ideological structures and institutional narratives that supported and exported it. Against this backdrop, the exhibition traces how the struggle for hegemony during the Cold War helped shape the way modern art came to be defined and defended as “free” — that is, radically individual and beyond ideology. It looks at Cold War constructs of freedom and the ways in which artistic and cultural autonomy are conceived in the anxious liberal democratic consensus that pervades our “post”–Cold War contemporary.
"The search for a concrete form of poetic expression—for poems that could not just create but be their own objects, rather than representing ex- ternal reality through what was often described as the partial or abstract means of communication characteristic of verbal discourse—was one of the strongest and most original marks of postwar experimental poetry."
Lygia Pape's Livro do Tempo: 'An alphabet of feelings' – a video review with critic Adrian Searle
THE MEDIUM IS THE INTERNET IS THE POSTCARD IS THE NETWORK IS THE PEOPLE >> a few examples of web-based art
"While specific to the art worlds in Melbourne, Sydney, and London, the battle lines drawn within the Antipodean Manifesto are a microcosm of those that shaped postwar art discourse throughout the world: ab- straction versus figuration, nationalism versus “international styles,” peripheries versus centers, artistic autonomy versus social obligation, dependence versus nonalignment, democracy versus socialism. An- other, less remarked recurrence is the pivotal role of art critics, acting as champions of one artistic group or tendency against another and promoting one or the other side of these dichotomies. As we shall see, the debates were never black-and-white divisions between clearly marked positions. Local circumstances, the changing relationships among places, and above all the constant contrariness of artists made them always, everywhere, volatile."
Hanne Darboven (1941-2009)
AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions is a non-profit organisation, co-founded in 2014 by Camille Morineau, art historian and specialist in the history of women artists. Its goal is the creation, indexation and distribution of information on women artists of the 16th to 21st centuries: “I have created AWARE: Archives of Women Artists, Research and Exhibitions in 2014, so that we could rewrite art history from a more gender-equal perspective. It is high time we place women artists at the same level as their male counterparts by bringing their work into the spotlight.”