GRAV, the Nouveaux Réalistes, BMPT and Support-Surface propounded all manner of theories on the ends and means of art and the destiny and political role of the avant-gardes. The Marxist synthesis of structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis did much to shape the deliberately speculative nature of these attempts at self-definition and positioning. The extent and importance of this critical activity during the 1970s is evidenced by the existence of such reviews as Cahiers théoriques, Macula and Documents sur. This linking of art and the human sciences, which still obtains today in somewhat abated form, became the defining characteristic of contemporary art in France. Among its innumerable consequences was the strangely tortuous procedures that artists had to take to express their subjectivity.

Much has been written about the parallels between the critical intuitions of Frank Stella and those of GRAV, and about the different conclusions drawn on each side. The heritage of Duchampian kinetics had a decisive influence on François Morellet, Julio Le Parc and Jesus-Rafael Soto, (although this reading of it has been totally neglected since), as did the Zurich Concrete Artists (including Max Bill and Richard P. Lohse), Auguste Herbin, Jean Dewasne and Victor Vasarely. These figures constituted a unifying matrix for the work of artists from a wide variety of backgrounds.[27] The interest in movement, which was expressed most literally in the work of Jean Tinguely and Pol Bury, moved many artists to translate it into pictorial form, to attempt the simultaneous use of illusionistic and interactive procedures. With its abstract anamorphoses, its ever-more sophisticated apparatus, its games with parallaxes and mirrors, the work of the GRAV group was aimed at the widest-possible public. As they proclaimed in their Manifesto (1963), “We Want to interest the spectator, to remove his inhibitions, to get him to relax.”

Who was in the GRAV group?

"The strangely tortuous procedures that artists had to take to express their subjectivity" alludes to what I was saying about true formalism being a negative, practiced mainly by bores and pedants. I realize there are traditions of French and Russian formalism with critical underpinings, but in the States the term invokes art about the mechanics of art practiced by deluded, literal-minded interpreters of late Greenberg. I would call the French work discussed in that article "socio-linguistic abstraction" or something to that effect.
- tom moody 10-13-2005 9:20 pm [add a comment]