430 for art, which will make possible that the same Schönberg wrote Harmonielehre of 1911: ‘after the emancipation of tone, every chord is possible’. All chords and all forms are possible, and on that voyage, the idea of building is central. Peter Bürger in his Theorie der Avantgarde he designated aesthetic autonomy that art conquers in the process of experimentation of the first Avant-guardistic movements. This autonomy is that which will give to art the auric and propositional dimension against the other components of the culture. It was to build a new culture, and art had endorsed this desire and this dream. At the end, we know that it was a dreamed dream. 4 The Second War meant the end of an age and opened a time of silence and new languages, which after the end of the Avant-gardes, begin to appear on the new art scene. Already in the mid 50 we can identify the new proposals in descriptive terms pass by European Informalism and American Abstract Expressionism. Artists such as Dubuffet, Fautrier, Burri or Tàpies, on one hand, such as Franz Pollock, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline or Barnett Newman, another, representing the transformation that was taking place in the arts and to guide their process. It is important to bear in mind the key role that criticism begins to play at this point. It is not a simplification, but the authority and legitimacy of the art historian, which begins to be replaced by the critic. They are key years and the view of art adds to more complex perspectives. What is at stake is the awakening of a new type of society, close to the parameters of what came to be called the American Way of Life or what from this other side of the shore was called advanced capitalism. In this context the gaze of art moved to other areas of a world, which in its complexity, had defined its political horizons and soon would suit their lifestyles. The appearance of Pop Art would express better than any other these changes and legitimations. From this perspective it is increasingly necessary to have a look towards the past 50s and 60s to identify strains that have come across problems of the artistic culture of our time. It was then that emerged with force the questions relating to the orientation of contemporary societies and their economic, political, social, and cultural forms. Those years were a real laboratory, which crystallized forms and speeches of a new culture that was being installed in the symbolic border of what was no longer possible and another that had still not occurred. A double job, that of a mourning for the loss of that heroism that Avant-guards had claimed for art at the time; and, on the other, the furious experiment of shapes and gestures that invaded the various scenarios of those years, the broad outlines of a story that reaches us. Indeed, a first reading allows us to enter into the broad debate of ideas which toured a plural form of the different artistic disciplines from the late 1950s and that questioned concepts and strategies that were beginning to take shape towards the construction of the post-industrial civilization. It was a criticism that equally approached art and culture. It is now located in a critical distance that is addressed by the principles of the Modern Movement and the historical Avant-gardes, the new humanism or the illusions of real socialism. It was necessary to go beyond the conventional confrontations and open the artistic culture to other territories, such as the Internationale Situationiste had raised at the end of 1950s. In this line of thought and action could be construed the proposals of Land Art or Art Povera, proposals with a new languages in the context of an attentive search to imagine the new times. There they all coincided, attentive to invent new worlds, small utopias, games and situations in which sometimes irony, others, a playful sense of life, will create the bases of a new radicalism as Guy Débord proposed as an urgent task: “Any future construction will have to go preceded of a deep investigation of the relations between spaces and feelings, between form and frame of mind”. An exhibition such as This is Tomorrow of 1956 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in which Alison and Peter Smithson presented next to Paolozzi and Henderson their ideas about the room or house of the future, was without doubt a real manifesto in defence of the new forms of life that already were being drawing on the critical horizon of those years. They would soon become the ideas that most effectively are reflected in the fields of architecture as well as the arts. It would be of today’s great interest to compare these first proposals that only years later sustain the 1966 Biennale de Venezia or the Dokumenta in Kassel of 1972. In a widespread way programs began to emerge, actions, situations that will soon be planning a universe of signs, which already announce the new order of ideas and worlds. A tension that will allow art to reinvent its relations with its era, at the time that it prefigures the horizon from another era to which we belong. The utopian tension, which had accompanied the experience of the Avant-gardes, now returned the critical and radical examples of people who thought that art was the privileged laboratory where one can experience the ways of the culture of the future. It was enthusiasm always willing to imagine new languages. New signs that, in its precariousness, will advance forms of the future. On the other hand, the accelerated process of industrialization polarized the contradictions of the social and cultural system, developing a critical space of Capitalism, understood in the weberian sense, that is to say, as an articulated system of relations and determinations ranging from the economic to the political, social and cultural. Freud and Marx enter the scene feeding a complex system of concepts that will have a fruitful development starting the 1960s. Criticism of forms will now join the diagnosis of a new discomfort, whose causes are directly related to the new dominant social and cultural processes of normalization in the post-industrial society. So if Adorno had advanced the first analysis of the emerging industry culture, it will be Guy Debord who, with his La société du spectacle will open a new critical space in which one can already be identify the processes of performance and new fetishism obtained by the post-industrial societies. Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, etc., from different coordinates, plotted a new speech, which with their speech and more direct intervention will put in scene the contradictions of a system which, as Bataille years earlier had said, was built on ‘the kidnapping of experience’.
Colección del IVAM. XXV Aniversario
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