The Invisible Prison: Art, Collectivity, and Protest in 1960s France.

摘要

This dissertation investigates the attempts by artists in France to formulate a political role for art prior to, during, and immediately following the May 1968 student-worker revolutionary movement. In particular, it focuses on those activities in which artists experimented with collective forms of art-making in the hopes of connecting with a broader public. The different ways in which formerly unexamined groups such as the Salon de la Jeune Peinture, the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel (GRAV), and the Atelier Populaire rejected traditional criteria of artistic value are considered and compared to other, more well-known groups, such as the Situationist International and the Nouveau Realistes. Of central importance is the priority placed by these artists on the public space of the street as the possible site of a collective entity beyond the divisions and determinations of institutions. Rejecting the twin notions that the visual culture of May '68 was a spontaneous creation of the movement itself and that formal and epistemological radicality was the only appropriate artistic response to the political, social, and economic changes of the 1960s, this dissertation insists on the distinct, though often problematic, connections between forms of popular protest and the work and concerns of certain artists of the period.;The dissertation recounts the trajectories of the Salon de la Jeune Peinture and GRAV during the 1960s as they each formulated particular ideas, production methods, and visual styles that critiqued notions of individual expression and aesthetic value. The third chapter assesses the work of the Atelier Populaire, the revolutionary poster workshop organized by artists in the occupied School of Fine Arts in Paris during May--June 1968. An epilogue focuses on the Souffles, a collectively produced sculptural installation organized by Jeune Peinture and Atelier Populaire participant, Gerard Fromanger in October 1968.