Art Collectives, Progress, and Forgetting in European Art after WWII

Abstract

Artists have long worked collectively for functional and ideological reasons: to produce large, multi-media projects like cathedrals, for example, or to recapture the ethos of the middle ages in order to slow the alienating effects of nineteenth-century capitalism. During the decades following WWII, collective artistic production took on a range of significations that drew from legacies of communism and worker representation, but also from the abundance and exploitation of the new consumer culture made possible by the United States’ investment in Europe in the form of the Marshall Plan. Collectives were inspired by the technocratic think-tank and the scientific research team; they transformed into anti-capitalist communes and revolutionary propaganda machines. The artists considered in Joseph D. Ketner II’s Witness to Phenomenon: Group Zero and the Development of New Media in Postwar European Art and Jacopo Galimberti’s Individuals against Individualism: Art Collectives in Western Europe (1956–1969) confront the multiple historical conflicts...