Autogestion in French Art after 1968: A Case Study of the Sociological Art Collective
All life, all culture, all art is only one vast learning process. The technique and the ability of organization constantly transform the means of production, the capabilities of communication, the habits of work, the conditions of creation and life.
Sociological Art Collective, “Sociological Art: An Art of Organization,” c. 1976.1
Autogestion
May 1968 marked the dawn of the age of autogestion (workers’ self-management).2 Or so argue countless historians, who link the uprisings of May and June to the subsequent blossoming of small-scale collective endeavors in journalism, publishing, and politics, and to events such as the takeover of the LIP watch factory by workers in 1973. In the period between the founding of the journal Autogestion in December 1966 and the election of the socialist François Mitterrand in 1981, autogestion became indispensable to leftist re-imaginings of France and modern life.3 Labor groups, political parties, newspapers, journals, factory workers, and activists throughout France discussed autogestion as an alternative to capitalist society.4 This thriving discourse fueled dissatisfied workers and frustrated students to demand greater control over the institutions that governed their lives. “Autogestion,” writes the French historian Pierre Rosanvallon, “traversed the French political sky like a meteor in the 1970s.”5
What is missing from these important accounts of the years following May 1968 in France is an assessment of the many ways that artists and art workers harnessed the powerful idea of autogestion to transform their practices, and how this embrace of autogestion, in turn, has shaped art and art history over the past fifty years. In this chapter, I trace the formation and early collaborative endeavors of the Sociological Art Collective (Collectif d’art sociologique) in order to illuminate the emergence of two key forms in the 1970s that connected the theory of autogestion with its practice in the arts: the artist collective and the artist-curated exhibition. The management and organization of both collectives and exhibitions offered artists key tactics to challenge conventional notions of authorship, invert power hierarchies in the art world, and redefine artistic labor. Even when these modes of self-management led to the proliferation and internalization of the very institutional impulses originally resisted (hierarchy, bureaucracy, systematization, and so forth), the act of self-governance was political, however compromised.
Before looking more closely at the collective and artist-curated exhibition through the Sociological Art Collective, it is helpful to recall the overarching shift from an industrial to a postindustrial economy after the Second World War. There have been many compelling accounts of the ways that this economic transformation led to the valuation of a different set of skills.6 Rather than producing products, workers—and increasingly artists—tended to manage, arrange, and implement services and information, leading to the emergence of white-collar artistic labor. “Many artists (like their working and professional counterparts) no longer felt compelled to offer a discrete object produced by hand,” writes art historian Helen Molesworth. “Rather, they explored ways of producing art that were analogous to other forms of labor.”7 In Work Ethic, Molesworth examines artists as workers, managers, and experience makers, connecting instances of novel artistic labor—erasing a drawing, commissioning a painting, drinking beer, or playing ping-pong—with the broader deskilling (or rather reskilling) of Western work forces in the 1960s and 1970s. Discourses of autogestion, especially as they inflect artistic labor, become bound up with the privileging of services and experiences, hallmarks of our neoliberal economy. Indeed, distinctions between resistance and collusion seem to grow ever more inchoate during the waning radicalism of the late 1970s.8 While these complex economic and cultural changes are not the subject of this chapter, they provide an essential ground on which to begin a closer investigation of sociological art as “an art of organization.” When the collective formed in 1974, the activity of organizing crisscrossed economic, political, and artistic spheres, merging, at once, with the immaterial labor of late capitalism, with leftist conceptions of autogestion, and with the most advanced artistic practices of the period.
The collective
Three young French artists, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, and Jean-Paul Thenot, declared the formation of the Sociological Art Collective in October of 1974 by publishing a manifesto in the arts section of Le Monde (The World).9 This act marked a definitive turning point within a community of artists and critics in Paris. Foremost in this community were the art critics Pierre Restany and François Pluchart, who began to integrate references to sociology into their writing about art just after the uprisings of May 1968.10 Restany and Pluchart had been intimately involved in the contestations of May, publishing an article that called for the resignation of the Minister of Culture, André Malraux, in the leftist journal Combat, and leading, with the critic Otto Hahn, about 200 artists to occupy and temporarily close the Musée d’art moderne on May 18, 1968.11 On the occasion of the protest, they wrote, “The student revolt opens our eyes. All cultural sectors are in solidarity. We must denounce power’s ‘new-look’ culture, the false and promotional politics.” No longer the “marginal maker of ‘beautiful products,’” artists must realize their “new social function that will shape the future society.”12 Restany and Pluchart envisioned a radical overhaul of the art world that included reforming art education, abolishing the art market, re-imaging galleries and museums, and redefining their own roles as critics.13 Marking this potent moment, their critical lexicon began to change. They increasingly assessed art according to its utility, accessibility, and acknowledgement of the physical, social, and economic environments. Sociologique (sociology, most often in its adjectival form) populated their writing about art. While the term sociologique was initially used inconsistently, it gradually became aligned with a loose group of little-known Parisian artists working with their bodies, performance, mass media, video, and expanded forms of event- and concept-based practices.14 It was out of this micro-milieu that the Sociological Art Collective formed.
In addition to providing much of the theoretical grounding, Pluchart and, to a lesser degree, Restany also fostered these emerging artists by creating what the critics termed a “parallel network”: sites for critical discourse, exhibition, and promotion that operated parallel to institutionally sanctioned ones.15 Most importantly, Pluchart founded the experimental art magazine arTitudes in the fall of 1971 and then opened Espace 640, a small gallery in Saint-Jeannet outside Nice, in May 1972, and through these he sought to constitute a “socio-corporeal” group.16 Then, in the fall of 1973, he organized a conversation on the topic with artists Michel Journiac, Gina Pane, Fischer, and Thenot and published the transcript in arTitudes.17 In many ways, this conversation planted the seeds for the collective, which would form just a year later. While the discussion grew heated at times, the artists agreed on the social orientation and critical function of their approaches and frequently employed the collective “nous” (“we”) to convey their affinity. Their positions diverged, however, according to the methods employed and the rationality of art sociologique associated with Fischer and Thenot in contrast to the subjectivity of art corporel (body art) associated with Pane and Journiac. In Fischer’s summary, “Gina Pane and Michel Journiac criticize the language that they are trying to surpass at the level of the suffering of the body, at the level of the cry, at the level of the lived thing. Me, I critique the artistic imaginary, subjectivity, sentimentality, and the domain of the irrational through a reduction to the level of rational analyses.”18 Despite these apparent differences, the conversation revealed a common ethic and set of concerns about art’s relationship to society, which became the organizing impulse for a series of meetings that Journiac convened at his apartment the following summer.
The first meeting took place in the beginning of July and was followed by meetings on September 16 and October 11, 1974, at Journiac’s apartment on rue Le Regrattier on Ile Saint-Louis. In addition to the five participants of the arTitudes discussion, the group included Forest, the Spanish-born video artist Joan Rabascall, text artist Jean-François Bory, sculptors Thierry Agullo and Betrand Lavier, as well as Serge Oldenbourg, Jocelyne Hervé, and Bernard Teyssèdre.19 The meetings (signs in and of themselves of a shared desire to determine new working relations among artists) focused on the French trajectory of what had become a global phenomenon of socially engaged art, pursued in such recent European exhibitions as Harald Szeemann’s Documenta 5 (June–October 1972), entitled 100 Days of Inquiry into Reality, and Kunst im Politischen Kampf (Art in the Political Struggle), first shown in 1973 at the Kunstverein Hanover. The group of Paris-based artists and critics hoped to foment a French movement of socially committed work and plan a series of related exhibitions.
Sometime in late September 1974, the trio of Fischer, Forest, and Thenot, jaundiced by the larger group’s apparent lack of action, decided to splinter and form a collective. The three artists arrived at the October 11 group meeting with a copy of the previous day’s Le Monde newspaper in their hands. On page twenty-one of the Arts et spectacles (Arts and Entertainment) section, in a simple black box nestled among the advertisements for performances and art supplies, they had published a manifesto declaring the formation of the “Collectif d’ art sociologique” (Sociological Art Collective)20 (Figure 12.1).
Through the declarative stance of the manifesto—the celebrated platform of the modernist avant-garde—Forest, Fischer, and Thenot set out the principles of their socially engaged art. And even if those principles remained relatively vague, the exclusion of certain approaches, especially art corporel and conceptual art, demarcated divisions between the trio and the other artists who had been meeting since July. Rabascall described the manifesto as the “mini coup d’état of Forest–Fischer–Thenot.” “We were all aware that sociological art existed,” he wrote; “it was simply a reality that necessitated being rendered evident.”21 Sociological art’s formalization marked a turning point in a long process that began sometime after May 1968 through Pluchart and Restany’s work as critics and curators. The collective emerged from and against this alternative arts milieu, fracturing the larger community and sparking six years of collaboration.
Printed in the advertisements section of the “Arts and Entertainment” section of Le Monde, the manifesto begins, “[We] have decided to constitute a Collective of Sociological Art that can operate as a refuge and a working group for all whose research and artistic practice concern social facts and the link between art and society.”22 It goes on to describe the collective’s intent to use the theory and methods of sociology to develop an active practice of inquiry, animation, and pedagogy. By announcing the Sociological Art Collective, the manifesto formalized existing allegiances, but it also revealed a deep tension between the collective as an open versus closed entity, especially as it related to the immediate Parisian community. While the first paragraph conveys a receptive spirit (the authors describe the collective as a structure d’ accueil, literally a “structure of reception”), the subsequent paragraphs outline the group’s agenda to elaborate “a sociological theory of art” through recourse to the “theory and methods of the social sciences.”23 In a short text written weeks after publishing the manifesto, the members of the collective sought to remedy this indeterminacy by declaring the group’s inclusion of artists (“especially foreign”) working in the direction of sociological art. The “working cell” (cellule de travail, a description often used in the sciences), the artists explain, is “destined to rapidly grow on the basis of a shared theory that privileges sociological research.”24 These early documents evidence the artists’ aspirations to identify a common orientation and ethic called sociological art and to strengthen the identity of the collective, all the while preserving their individual approaches. Frictions between these two levels (the individual and the group as well as the collective and a broader movement of sociological art) ultimately eroded the collective’s exterior relationships as well as interior cohesion.
But let us return to the decision by the artists to constitute the collective in the first place. The group’s formation occurred amid a frenzy of new collective models that accompanied the break-up of the French Communist Party and subsequent growth of smaller leftist groups—or groupuscules. When the collective officially incorporated on November 13, 1974, under France’s association law of 1901, it was one of about 24,000 groups created in that year alone, compared to 20,000 created in the preceding sixty-nine-year period.25 One important though generally overlooked subcategory of groups is the artist collective. Indeed, even a partial list of artist groups formed in this period attests to an unprecedented energy in this direction:
Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) (1960–1968) (Julio Le Parc, Sobrino, Jean-Pierre Yvaral, François Morellet, Joël Stein, Horacio Garcia-Rossi); BMPT (1966–1967) (Daniel Buren, Olivier Mosset, Michel Parmentier, Niele Toroni); Groupe Automat (1967–?) (Berthale, Gamarra, Lanati, Marces, Vanarsky); Utopie (1967–1978) (Jean Aubert, Isabelle Auricoste, Jean Baudrillard, Catherine Cot, Charles Goldblum, Jean-Paul Jungmann, Henri Lefebvre, René Lourau, Antoine Stinco, and Hubert Tonka); Atelier A (1969–?) (François Arnal, Olivier Boissière, Serge Benbouhouche); Coopérative des Malassis (1970–1977) (Henri Cueco, Lucien Fleury, Jean-Claude Latil, Michel Parré, Gérard Tisserand, Christian Zeimert); Supports/Surface (1970–1974) (Claude Viallat, Marc Devade, Philippe Solers, Marcelin Pleynet, Louis Cane, Daniel Dezeuze, etc.); Vidéo Out (1970–1981) (Carole and Paul Roussopoulos); Groupe DDP (1971–1998) (François Derivery, Michel Dupré, Raymond Perrot); Les Cents Fleurs (1973–1981) (Martine Barrar, Annie Caro, Danielle Jaeggi); Collectif antifasciste (1974–1977); Vidéa (1974–1976) (Anne-Marie Faure, Isabelle Fraisse, Syn Guerin, Catherine Lahourcade); Untel (1975–1980) (Jean-Paul Albinet, Philippe Cazal, Alain Snyers); and Les Insoumuses (1975–1982) (Carole Roussopoulos, Delphine Seyrig, Ioana Wieder).
Such an inventory makes clear the fertile period between 1968 and the early 1980s, during which more than a dozen artist groups formed and disbanded.26 The curators of the 1969 Paris Biennale recognized this emerging trend, devoting the biennial to art collectives. “Today,” they wrote, “there is a natural movement that pushes artists to group together, to complement each other, or to contradict each other in order to move beyond the expression of individual sentiments and to encounter the collective demands of a new society in formation.”27
The dramatic increase in the association of groups in the early 1970s paralleled the expansion of discourses around alternative management and governing structures. In France, the freedom of individuals to form groups without royal or governmental authorization was made a law in 1901 (Loi d’association de 1901) and made a constitutional right in 1971. The law—part of a suite of laws enacted during the Third Republic that assured the basic rights of man—stipulated that groups had to have two or more members and a non-profit agenda.28 In the months after May 1968, a flood of declarations of small-scale, radical political groups drew the attention of the government. In 1970, the Minister of the Interior, Raymond Marcellin (retained by Pompidou from de Gaulle’s cabinet), attempted to stem the proliferation of groups by modifying the law to require administrative authorization.29 These changes led to the outlawing of the Gauche Prolétarienne (GP, Proletarian Left) on May 27, 1970, a Maoist-inspired, far-left workers’ association formed in September 1968 by militants from Nanterre and authors of the paper La Cause du peuple (The People’s Cause). Eleven days after the dissolution of GP, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Leiris, and Simone de Beauvoir deposited a request for an association called Les Amis de la Cause du Peuple (The Friends of the People’s Cause) that Marcellin intervened to deny. The dispute was ultimately brought before the National Assembly, and on July 16, 1971, the constitutional council declared the Loi d’association a constitutional right. Detractors of the constitutional change warned that “tomorrow, the government will have to approve groups proposing to encourage drug addiction, promote homosexuality, or simply overturn the Republic.”30 This episode in the early 1970s illustrates the perceived threats that such small-scale groups posed to controlling bodies, but the unequivocal affirmation of the right to associate fostered their ongoing formation.
To form a collective thus constituted a political act, even as that act was simultaneously impinged by the kinds of bureaucratic operations that accompanied group formation and governance. This is an important distinction because during the Sociological Art Collective’s eight years of existence, the artists undertook only a handful of truly collective projects that had identities distinct from the members’ individual work. These included a series of manifestos and exhibitions, a two-week intervention in the town Perpignan in 1976, a project at the Venice Biennale in 1976, and the creation of the École Sociologique Interrogative in 1977 (Figure 12.2). More often, the collective served as an identity and framework to refocus the artists’ individual pursuits. Indeed, maintaining the collective—whether internal relations among the threesome or external recognition from without—entailed an immense amount of self-organization, management, and promotion. The artists spent their time planning, meeting, budgeting, conducting research, writing and editing, and performing a series of other white-collar tasks that largely replaced traditional artistic labor. The collective’s central purpose in its first years was to establish and maintain itself as a collective, an act that, in and of itself, models autogestion.
The artist-curated exhibition
The first projects undertaken by the Sociological Art Collective consisted of a series of group exhibitions. The conception and implementation of these exhibitions were central to the group developing its working relations and its understanding of sociological art practice. The artist-curated exhibition—a tool to signal opposition and wrest power from forces within the art world—has a long history, especially in France. Most famously, in 1855, Gustave Courbet erected a temporary exhibition space for his work, which he designated the pavillon du Réalisme (pavilion of Realism), just outside the grounds of the Exposition Universelle (World Exhibition) after some of his canvases were rejected by the jury. By the 1970s, the arrangement and rearrangement of pre-existing content was quickly becoming a recognized creative strategy and artistic practice. Artists such as Marcel Broodthaers utilized the artist-created museum and artist-curated exhibition as critical and expressive mediums (a trend that continued into the 1980s and 1990s with New York-based collectives such as CoLab and Group Material and artists like Fred Wilson, Mark Dion, and so forth). Furthermore, artists closely associated with the emergence of institutional critique used museums, galleries, and systems of display and explanation such as vitrines and labels as platforms for their work. In France, the model of the “artist-curator” attracted artists who felt dispossessed by an art system that was still strongly hierarchical despite efforts toward more horizontal or egalitarian arrangements in the post-1968 period. By taking over the role of curator, artists could subsume the powerful role of judge and arbiter of taste and, in so doing, change the nature of curatorial practice and exhibitions. The 1970s are populated by many examples of artists organizing exhibitions, opening galleries, launching magazines, and writing criticism as attempts to participate in the institutions and discourses that structured their professional lives.
The collective’s first thematic exhibitions functioned foremost as spaces of research. Through these projects, the artists investigated issues and searched out artists that they perceived as interrelated with sociological art and from which they would draw inspiration for subsequent projects. The first exhibition, Art et ses structures socio-économiques (Arts and Its Socioeconomic Structures, January 9–28, 1975, Gallery Germain, Paris), brought together documents, videos, and performances by thirteen artists who considered art’s relationships to the financial market and speculation.31 Many of these artists, including Willi Bongard, Bernard Teyssèdre, and Hans Haacke, employed discursive and research-based approaches in their work, often to analyze the art market. Other artists, such as the New York branch of Art & Language and John Latham, reflected on the economic repercussions of their involvement in the art world. Such economic questions and critical practices would become central to the collective’s work. In the second exhibition, Problèmes et méthodes de l’ art sociologique (Problems and Methods of Sociological Art, March 5–22, 1975, Galerie Mathias Fels, Paris), the collective explicitly sought out artists with interests close to the group’s own, assembling work by seventeen artists, many of whom were included in the first exhibition, including Art & Language, Hans Haacke, Les Levine, and Léa Lublin. The collective hoped to catalog possible strategies of sociological art.32 The three primary trajectories that emerge in Problèmes et méthodes de l’ art sociologique—participation, socially engaged media, and urban intervention—would come together to form the basis of the collective’s most significant subsequent projects, including the group’s work in the towns and communities of Neuenkirchen (July 1975) and Perpignan (September 1976), its proposal for the Venice Biennale (June 1976), and its formation of the École Interrogative Sociologique (May 1976). The openness of these early exhibitions soon narrowed as the collective focused its curatorial projects on the work and theories of the three members. By late spring and early summer of 1975, the collective initiated a series of solo presentations. Art et communication (Art and Communication, May 6–31, 1975, Institut Français, Cologne) included only work by the three artists, as did subsequent exhibitions at the International Cultural Centrum (ICC), Anvers, Belgium, in April 1975 and Musée Galliera, Paris, in June 1975. Once the collective had strengthened its bonds, working methods, and profile, exhibitions became platforms for the promotion rather than formulation of “sociological art.”
Although difficult to reconstruct, the processes by which the collective located, selected, and presented the artworks reiterates the informational functions of the exhibitions themselves. In addition to the micro-milieu of French artists with whom the collective was already familiar, the members actively researched artists from other countries, discovering them by word of mouth, magazines, mail art, and other exhibitions. The collective ultimately constructed the displays through its investigative process. Adrian Piper, for instance, had exhibited as a very young artist in the 1971 Paris Biennale, and the collective included Piper’s statement about no longer attending art world events (Withdrawal Statement, 1970) in Art et ses structures socio-économiques (Art and Its Socioeconomic Structures).33 A copy of her statement may have been taken from Lucy Lippard’s 1973 book Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object (New York: Praeger, 1973). Although not translated into French, the book had an immediate and international following because Lippard and John Chandler had published an essay by the same name (the starting point of the book) in Art International in February 1968.34 After securing a copy of the recently published book, the collective could have produced an enlarged version at a local copy shop and to this reproduction attached a short explanatory text to create the exhibition panel.35 As for Wolf Vostell, a German Fluxus artist known for his happenings and environments, the artists probably knew of his work before his first major retrospective at ARC from December 17, 1974 to January 27, 1975, a show that both Fischer and Forest saw.36 The collective corresponded intermittently with Vostell, who was active in European mail art and sympathetic to the idea of sociological art, as evidenced by his response to Forest’s 1976 questionnaire published in Art Sociologique.37 For the January exhibition, Vostell may have sent the group a copy of his photomontage Drive-in Museum (1970) or possibly brought a copy with him on a visit to Paris. Such procedures of procurement, enlargement, and preparation—rarely recalled in detail by the artists—must have taken place for every object or document displayed in the collective’s exhibitions.
Although none of the display panels of these early exhibitions have been conserved, a few installation photographs as well as the remaining panels from the collective’s solo exhibition at Musée Galliera convey a sense of the rudimentary arrangements and unadorned aesthetic of the shows. Gray cardstock panels of about four feet by three feet covered with black-and-white photographs, texts, and diagrams lined the walls (Figures 12.3 and 12.4).
Additional documents, pamphlets, and books were laid out in an orderly fashion on tables in the center of the space, and although not pictured in any of the remaining installation shots, a smattering of small-scale monitors placed on pedestals or directly on the floor transmitted artists’ videos. The visual poverty of the objects coincided with their informational richness; content and didacticism overpowered pleasure and aestheticism. The young collective organized these group exhibitions as provisional explorations of sociological art, as study materials to be digested and then discarded, and the exhibitions had a direct impact on the group’s nascent conception and practice of sociological art. The collective’s exhibitions did not garner much of a reaction in the art press, but they put the artists in touch with an international network of like-minded artists, spread word of this marginal artistic movement afoot in Paris through the distribution of cheaply produced catalogs, and endowed the collective with a stronger conception of sociological art.38 For the collective, these exhibitions and the curatorial process served as open arenas of research and as platforms for self-promotion and legitimation.
Conclusion
The energy that Fischer, Forest, and Thenot expended in the mid-1970s to form and to promote the Sociological Art Collective’s institutional identity was immense. By “institutional identity,” I mean an identity that eclipsed the individual trajectories of the three artists and telegraphed that greater vision to an expanded public. The artists were often criticized by their peers for zealous self-promotion in the name of the collective rather than in the service of sociological art, understood as an ethical and artistic set of practices. However, viewed in the context of politicized and community-based organizing efforts, the artists’ organizational work and its related ephemera (the multitude of budgets, letters, pamphlets, photos, posters, media events, exhibitions, discussions, and so forth) speak powerfully to a desire on the part of the artists to manage their representations in a demonstrably hierarchical and unequal art world.
Writing about Art & Language, a group founded in 1968 and in frequent contact with Sociological Art Collective member Hervé Fischer, Chris Gilbert has insightfully proposed what he terms a “postwar institutional collectivity.” Gilbert argues that while the group may have replicated bureaucratic and administered culture (or in Benjamin Buchloh’s influential words, “the operating logic of late capitalism and its positivist instrumentality”), it does so in order to achieve an oppositional self-sustaining freedom.39 “The group’s key purpose,” writes Gilbert about Art & Language, “was to assert its own institutional character as ongoing resistance to a larger sociality within which it would otherwise be, and was to a large extent, inscribed.”40 The impulse to self-determination was an end in itself. Taking into account Gilbert’s argument, acts of administration may well be a “methodology of resistant organizational form,” even as they replicate aspects of dominant organizational forms.41 The collective’s formation and organization of exhibitions—as well as the labor and promotion of these efforts—might be viewed as coterminous with rather than in opposition to the collective’s critical and socially committed artistic practice. Such a position gains even more potency when situated within the specific cultural policies of the Fifth Republic and the state’s many attempts to treat, as a 1971 policy states, “cultural action as a social action.”42 Given this political and cultural climate, the existence and work of the Sociological Art Collective should be seen as important, though little-known, acts of autogestion.
1 “Toute vie, toute culture, tout art n’est qu’un seul et vaste processus d’apprentissage. La technique et la faculté d’organisation transforment sans cesse les moyens de production, les possibilités de communication, les habitudes de travail, les conditions de création et de vie.” Fonds Fred Forest, Inathèque, Paris.
2 Pierre Rosanvallon, L’Age de l’ autogestion (Paris: Seuil, 1976). While there had been many experiments in the management of an organization by its workforce—the basis of autogestion, in 1960s and 1970s France, it was the example of Titoist socialism in Yugoslavia, which since the 1950s had promoted an economy based on workers’ self-management, that captured the attention of the labor movement, theorists, and many others in France. For instance, “autogestion” finds its way into the 1970 program of the trade union CFDT (Confédération française démocratique du travail). For an excellent account of the history and emergence of this term in France, see Franck Georgi, “L’ autogestion en France, des ‘années 1968’ aux années 1980. Essor et déclin d’une utopie politique,” La Pensée, no. 356 (December 2008): 87–101.
3 Other key journals that explored and championed models of autogestion were Arguments, Socialisme ou Barbarie, Internationale situationniste, and Cause commune, as did a number of influential sociologists, including Edgar Morin, Alain Touraine, and Jean Duvignaud.
4 Lucien Goldmann and Serge Mallet discuss the breadth of interest in autogestion in “Débat sur l’autogestion,” Autogestion 7 (December 1968): 57–75. Kristin Ross outlines the proliferation of small-scale collective endeavors and argues that these attest to the impact of May 1968 on social organization. May ’68 and Its Afterlives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), esp. 25.
5 “Cette autogestion a traversé comme une météore le ciel politique français des années 1970.” Pierre Rosanvallon, La démocratie inachevée. Histoire de la souveraineté du peuple en France (Paris: Gallimard, 2000), 385, quoted in Franck Georgi, “L’ autogestion en France, des ‘années 1968’ aux années 1980,” 101.
6 Most trenchant in tracing this shift is Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their influential book Empire (2000), which outlines the metamorphosis from productive to immaterial labor, citing the increasing predominance of affective and creative work.
7 Helen Molesworth, Work Ethic (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art; Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), 18.
8 For example, Terry Eagleton describes the late 1970s as “post-radical” in “Afterword,” Literary Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008, originally published in 1983), 190–195.
9 Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Jean-Paul Thenot, “Collectif d’art sociologique, manifeste 1,” Le Monde, Arts section, October 10, 1974, 21.
10 Pierre Restany (French, b. 1930, d. 2003) wrote art criticism for a wide range of magazines, including Libre propos, Combat, Cimaise, and Domus, and curated exhibitions throughout Europe from the mid-1950s until his death. During his life, Restany tended to launch artistic movements—including “Espaces Imaginaires,” “Nouveau Réalisme,” and “Mechanical art” (or “Mec’Art”)—by identifying commonalities among the work of contemporary artists to form a group and then authoring manifestos and organizing exhibitions in that group’s name. See Restany’s account of his life in Une vie dans l’art: entretiens avec Jean-François Bory (Paris: Neuchatel, 1983). François Pluchart (French, b. 1937, d. 1988) began writing art criticism in 1959 for the journal Combat and in its pages criticized the late Surrealist and lyrical abstraction of the École de Paris. See a selection of Pluchart’s writings with commentary in Sylvie Mokhtari, ed., L’art: un acte de participation au monde, François Pluchart (Nîmes: CNAP and Éditions Jacquiline Chambon, 2002).
11 They envisioned this action as in solidarity with the May 16 occupation of the Odéon theater and the May 13 occupation and transformation of the École des Beaux-Arts into the Atelier Populaire. See Pluchart’s overview of the events in “Les Hyènes du musée d’art moderne,” Combat, May 27, 1968, 10.
12 François Pluchart and Pierre Restany, “Une autre Bastille à abattre: le Musée d’art moderne,” Combat, May 18–19, 1968, 16.
13 By Pluchart, see “Les flics de l’art moderne,” Combat, May 21, 1968, 7; “Le système des galeries est à abolir,” Combat, May, 28, 1968, 11; “Le combat commence!” Combat, June 3, 1968, 9; “Non à la culture calibre 22,” Combat, June 17, 1968, 11; “La Biennale de Venise est morte,” Combat, June 25, 1968, 11; and “Les derniers points chauds rendus au pouvoir,” Combat, July 8, 1969, 10. See a summary of Restany’s writing during this time in Rosemary Buteault, “L’ Activité critique de Pierre Restany” (master’s thesis, University of Rennes 2, 1990–1991). Archives de la critique d’art, Rennes.
14 C.f. “[L]a force indiscutable et essentielle de Journiac réside dans le caractère sociologique de son travail.” François Pluchart, “Au Non de Journiac,” Combat, May 4, 1970, 8–9.
15 Pierre Restany calls for a “parallel network” in “Pour l’avenir d’un réseau parallèle,” Combat, October 14, 1968, 8–9.
16 Jean Forneris, Artitudes de François Pluchart: une revue international à Nice (Nice: Galerie d’art contemporain des musées, 1978).
17 The conversation took place on November 18, 1973 at the apartment of Pane and was published in “Dix questions sur l’art sociologique,” arTitudes no. 6/8 (December 1973–March 1974): 4–17.
18 Ibid., 6.
19 The first meeting in early July brought together Jean-François Bory, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Jocelyne Hervé, Michel Journiac, Gina Pane, and Jean-Paul Thenot. The second on September 16 included Thierry Agullo, Jean-François Bory, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Jocelyne Hervé, Michel Journiac, Bertrand Lavier, Gina Pane, Jean-Paul Thenot, and François Pluchart. The third took place on October 11 and included Thierry Agullo, Jean-François Bory, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Jocelyne Hervé, Michel Journiac, Bertrand Lavier, Serge Oldenbourg, Gina Pane, Joan Rabascall, Jean-Paul Thenot, and Bernard Teyssèdre (with whom the collective would work closely).
20 Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Jean-Paul Thenot, “Collectif d’art sociologique, manifeste 1,” October 10, 1974, 21.
21 Joan Rabascall, “Mini coup d’état de Forest-Fischer-Thenot,” as quoted in Blaise Galland, L’Art sociologique (Genève: Georg, 1987), 119.
22 Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Jean-Paul Thenot, “Collectif d’art sociologique, manifeste 1,”October 10, 1974, 21.
23 “Le collectif d’art sociologique, par sa pratique artistique, tend à mettre l’art en question, à mettre en évidence les faits sociologiques et à ‘visualiser’ l’ élaboration d’une théorie sociologique de l’art. Il recourt fondamentalement à la théorie et aux méthodes des sciences sociales.” Ibid.
24 See unpublished “Individual/Group Text” (Fall 1974) in Fonds Fred Forest, Inathèque.
25 Michèle Grandlaudon-Leblanc and Michel Leblanc, “Associations Loi 1901: gestionnaires ou citoyennes?” in Pour une Nouvelle Donnée Associative (Paris: ESF Editeur, 2001), 155–157.
26 François Derivery reaffirms this period of heightened collective activity in the 1970s. François Derivery, Art et travail collectif suivi de la politique d’art officiel en France (Paris: E.C. Éditions, 2001), 20–23.
27 Jacques Lassaigne, ed., Sixième biennale de Paris, manifestation biennale et internationale des jeunes artistes du 2 octobre au 2 novembre 1969 (Paris, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1969), 11.
28 Jean-Claude Bardout, L’Histoire étonnante de la loi 1901: le droit d’association en France avant et après Waldeck–Rousseau (Lyon: Édition Juris-Service, 2000), 145–146.
29 Ibid., 211–219.
30 Jean Foyer, “Déclaration de 16 juillet 1971,” Le Monde (July 18–19, 1971), quoted in Bardout, L’Histoire étonnante de la loi 1901, 220.
31 The included artists were Art & Language, Willy Bongard, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Hans Haacke, John Latharn, Les Levine, Léa Lublin, Jacques Pineau, Adrian Piper, Klaus Staeck, Bernard Teyssèdre, and Jean-Paul Thenot.
32 The included artists were Art & Language, Jean-François Bory, Jacques Charlier, Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, Hans Haacke, Les Lévine, Léa Lublin, Antonio Muntadas, Joan Rabascall, Maurice Roquet, Jean Roualdes, Jean-Michel Sanejouand, Sacha Sosno, Jean-Paul Thenot, Tomek Kawiak, and Horacio Zabala.
33 Piper was included in the “Concept” section of the Biennale, and she contributed an instruction piece (“Paris Proposal for Biennale et International”) to be performed during the course of the exhibition. She proposed that twelve volunteers make physical alterations to their bodies and then go about their everyday activities. The alterations, both of which Piper had herself undertaken in New York City, were to “stuff as much cloth as possible into cheeks” and “tie large pillows around hips, stomach, thighs, calves under street clothes.” Georges Boudaille, ed., Septième Biennale de Paris, Manifestation biennale et internationale des jeunes artistes du 24 septembre au 1er novembre 1971, Parc Floral de Paris, Bois de Vincennes (Paris: A. Lerouge, 1971): 58.
34 Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” Art International 12, no. 2 (February 1968): 31–36.
35 These are my speculations based on photographs of the exhibition panels. For the most part, the artists do not recall how they acquired the works by non-French artists. Beginning in the early 1970s, photocopiers were present in France.
36 I assume the artists saw his exhibition based on the fact that the card announcing the exhibition is located in the archives of both Forest and Fischer. For more information on Vostell’s work throughout Europe, see Rolf Wedewer, ed., Vostell. Ausstellungen, Bonn, Köln, Leverkusen, Mannheim, Mülheim an Der Ruhr (Heidelberg: Braus, 1992).
37 Fred Forest, Art Sociologique vidéo: Dossier (Paris: Union générale d’ éditions, 1977), 347–350.
38 The artists carried on correspondence with numerous artists, such as John Latham, Art & Language, and Les Levine, included in these early exhibitions. See “Correspondences” in Fonds Hervé Fischer, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris, and “Correspondence 1970–1979” in Fonds Fred Forest, Inathèque, Paris. The group mailed the cheaply produced catalogs to museums, libraries, and artists throughout the world. See, for example, the “Artist Files” for Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, and Jean-Paul Thenot at the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
39 Chris Gilbert, “Art & Language and the Institutional Form in Anglo-American Collectivism,” in Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination After 1945, ed. Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 77–93. Gilbert writes, “What [Buchloh’s] account does not seem to allow for, and would follow from the arguments above, is that appropriation of hegemonic bureaucratic or administrative methods was not simply a move against aesthetic transcendence. It remained, I have contended, an ethical move and a strategy that, while at times mimetic of the culture it opposed, was certainly also carried out in the name of and with a view toward forming a resistant self-determination” (89). See, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–143.
40 Chris Gilbert, “Art & Language and the Institutional Form in Anglo-American Collectivism,” Collectivism After Modernism, 79.
41 Ibid., 89. This proposal seeks to avert the rather unproductive cul-de-sac regarding whether or not (and to what degree) the artistic and political left recapitulate the structures they initially resisted, a process documented, discussed, and disparaged by numerous writers. In the early 2000s, the artist Andrea Fraser and others described the “institutionalization of institutional critique”—that is, the request for artists to proffer critique about institutions by those very institutions.
42 “Comme l’a dit jeudi soir M. Duhamel, ‘avec le VIe Plan se dégage l’idée de traiter l’action culturelle comme une action sociale.’ Vue sous cet angle, la culture va au-delà des arts traditionnels, s’élargit à tout ce qui concourt à ‘la qualité de vie’ à l’aménagement de l’espace, à l’architecture, au logement et à la culture scientifique, etc.” “L’action culturelle conçue comme une action sociale.” Le Monde, May 8, 1971. This article is archived in “BVC MI pol 1960–1973 / Politique culturelle en France / Presse 1960–1973 / Les années Pompidou, Duhamel, Droun …” Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Paris.