I’ve always been attracted to collective work. When I was a student, I was actively participating to protest movements and I was fighting against the arbitrary education system;
I was analyzing with my mates our background and our situation towards modern art’s panorama. Then, when I was living in Paris, I participated to the creation of the GRAV and everything it had realized collectively. After its dissolution, my interest in collective work didn’t vanish, on the contrary! The collective work achieved with different group had different issues depending on circumstances, objectives and modes of realization. In most of the cases the participation was anonymous.
Collective analyses of the role of the artist today, group talks, public speeches, meetings with artists in La Havana or those organized by the FAP (Plastic Art Front) etc..
To fight in the cultural field and to mobilize artists, as for the boycott of the Biennale of Sao Paulo in 1969, when the repression was increasing in Brazil.
“No to Pompidou‘s exhibition", when many artists, invited or not, were denouncing the artists manipulation by the art functionaries officials, for a prestigious operation serving the power in 1972 and which ended up into a police intervention during the flop of the exhibition’s opening; the denunciation of the black mail of the CAVAR (a sort of pension funds which forced the artists to join, even confiscating their tools work without any compensation) and the occupation of official exhibition places to ask for their elimination.
To use professional capacities either to support local protests (popular workshop of posters makers, “painter’s red rescue”) or popular protests for Latin America (protest “non official Latin America” etc...) using graphic works or organizing spaces during exhibition to denounce oppression, repression and torture in Latin America. I also in some other cases, use the recognition and prestige of my work.
Realisation of collective works:
An experience conceived in common with Fromanger and Merri, where the viewer is the director, with the help of his imagination and the elements given (drawing material, papers, magazines, scissors etc...); postcards to be sent to personalities or not, all over the world
(Nixon, Mao, girlfriend, professors, friends, Pie XII Cassius Clay etc...)
By the time those images were born, they were projected in a big format in the game room in Düsseldorf.
- Collective work taken from a family photos album of a mining worker’s widow, who died at the bottom of a mine with 15 others miners in 1970. Like in many others cases, the cause of the accident was not fatality, but the exigency of a maximum tenement to increase the benefices to the detriment of the miners’ security. This collective work listed: a photo album print in offset, a bigger one in serigraphy, and an ensemble of 16 paintings. Here’s the list of the participant of this collective work: Aillaud, Arroyo, Bira, Chambaz, Fanti, Fromanger,
Gradas, Le Parc, Mathelin, Merri-Jolivet, Pancino, Rancillac, Rieti, Rougemont, Sarrazin, Schlosser and Spadari. This work was exhibited in Paris in different places and in the mining area in north of France.
- Collectives work with students of arts faculty in 1973-74, while I was teaching there.
Some of the works were realized on the buildings walls, based on the theme related to the life in the university and the protests that were happening there. Another work in two parts, related to the theme of labour. One had 16 panels in black and white, relating the hardship and the fights of the working class man, and another piece of five paintings relating the dehumanising of work (some hands in white, black and grey).All those pieces were presented in Paris and in provincial France, notably at the congress of the CFDT( workers federal democratic confederation ).
- Collective work of the Denuncia group(Gamarra, Le Parc, Marcos et Netto) in 1972 on the theme of torture, realised in 7 panels, white, black and grey 2X2 meters, which helped to support the denunciation campaign of torture as a government method in Latin’s American countries.
- Collective realisations of the international brigade of antifascist’s painters gathered in Venice and composed of: Balmes, Basaglia, Boriani, Eulisse, Cueco, Gamara, Le Parc, Marcos, Netto, Nunes, Perusini, Ernest Pignon, Van Meel. The brigade has realised 3 collective works; the first 12 meters high in Venice’s harbour, to support the sea freight boycott to Pinochet’s Chili by the harbour workers, and a second one in Athens for the international solidarity congress with Chili and a third one of 20 meters realised in Paris of Salvatore Allende’s resistance museum.
- Collective works realized by the Collective antifascist’s painters; for instance: he PSU’s fair (unified socialist party) on the theme: “a world to destroy, another to create”; we realized a series of mobiles panels, the participants had carried all around the fair.
In May 1976, the collective has confectioned a huge poster of 10 meters wide on the theme “Art Centre Pompidou” and has carried it with the workers in the demonstration of May 1st in Paris. The collective is composed of: Bezard, Bouvier, Brandon, Colin, Counil, Deriver, Dupre, Fromanger, Lazar, Lecloarec, Le Parc, Matieu, Netto, Perrot, Picard, Riberzani, Vigliente, Vignes, Yvel and Dego.
This kind of collective work is asking for a will, a disponibility and a work capacity which is not always easy to have. Each one has to confront the problem of its own relation with researches and personal work. The collective work is not a guarantee of good results, but in the artistic panorama’s monotony where everyday life is fed by quarrels between different aesthetic tendencies and individual fight to succeed, working together, for a positive goal, in spite of lacunas and many difficulties, is comforting.
Through collective work, there are all sorts of problems, as the relation between social reality and its insertion in reality. From it, all the other aspects related to the way to apprehend the collective work is made; the decision system, the common practical realisation, the choice of themes, the opportunities of intervention, the application of the outcome, the way its perceived, its efficiency, or not, depending on the chosen objective etc…
