Abstract
The 1960s in Denmark were a rich, experimental period, exemplified in the radical approaches to art education at Copenhagen’s Experimental Art School, or Ex-School, an “anti-academy” created in response to a context of political, social, and cultural change. Established by art historian Troels Andersen and artist Poul Gernes, the School had no teachers, the work was largely meant to be ephemeral, and collective creation was valued over individual works of art. Yet, for practitioners of the school, whatever form their work may have taken – above all else, it had to have a social function. My paper considers the various phases of artistic development within the Ex-School’s temporal framework - spanning roughly 1961 to 1972. What began with a rhetoric of artistic experimentation that drew from surrealism, Constructivism and the Bauhaus, later gives way to more radical notions of collaboration, performance, and protest. I argue that these shifts in visual production were driven by the intense social and political climate of the period, operating along the lines of what Herbert Marcuse theorized to be the revolutionary potential for art to counteract the repressive societal forces that inhibit liberation. In doing so, my research aims to reposition the work taken up by the Ex-School within the ideological context of its production to demonstrate that these artists were taking more nuanced approaches towards revolutionary art than what is currently written.
Presenters
Wylie SchwartzAssistant Professor, Art History, State University of New York at Cortland, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
COLLECTIVITY, COLLABORATION, EXPERIMENTAL PEDAGOGY, EXPERIMENTATION, CREATIVITY, SOCIAL PRACTICE, NEO-AVANT-GARDE
