The issues raised by the case studies in Block 4 of A844 are said to exemplify “categories of the visual and material that have demystified the role of the artist, and challenged the notion of what is an art object and who can produce art.” Nowhere was the role of the creative individual artist more challenged than in the political artefacts of the political communities that emerged around the May 1968 popular-political events in France. This may be because the artefacts were essentially ‘owned’ collectively, in their process and products, or because their nature was seen as constituted by an ephemeral intermediate state between plan and political action, even where that action is intersubjective.
My concern is not only with the demystification of art but of the active opposition to how ‘artefacts’ can be distorted in being understood as a category of art. These thoughts formed part of the self-definition of May 1968 artefacts. This extends to ways of consciously reassembling the role of making, displaying, using and re-using visual and material artefacts, both from the points of view of makers, distributors and receptors. This includes resistance to the desire to turn such artefacts into ‘gallery art’ but also to absorbing it into a discursive structure such as academic art-history, with its own conventions for circumscribing and disarming the purposiveness of artefacts in the political moment. Such ideas were expressed in terms of fears of the ‘co-optation’ of politically framed artefacts for aims that sustain and maintain the status-quo and its current power-holders and administrators thereof (the later identified in May 1968 as ‘bureaucrats’). Their artefacts were to be protected from such use. It is posited that such ideas were captured in Debord’s analyses of bourgeois ‘spectacle’.
Of course now ‘original’ Poster ‘art’ from May 1968 has quantitatively huge exchange-value in the bourgeois art-market, is displayed in public galleries and has already been ‘included’ into ‘inclusive’ art-history. This review of how to research such a topic will necessarily examine sub-questions directed at parts of this evidence: For instance, starting with a case-study of academic inclusion of May 1968 in academic art-history. My choice has come deliberately from an art-historian, with empathy for the political aims of the May 1968 movement as she conceived them at time of writing, Claire Bishop (2012). This will examine how Bishop places May ’68 artefacts in a discursive art-history that spans artistic contexts before and after it.
It will proceed to querying alternative constructions of the periods artefacts – explored in terms of their contexts in a more interdisciplinary approach, that is across academic disciplines, including archaeology, oral-history and politics that attempt to give an ontological description (a haecceity or ‘thisness’) of these artefacts. Of course such descriptions may reveal that it is the constructions demanded by the academic per se rather than any one discipline of the academic that in absorbing artefacts to themselves betray the values that in fact make them what they are within in their genesis in places and times understood outside academic contexts. I will however aim to stress that phenomenological approaches will form a bridge (even if potentially one no less compromised by the language and forms of the academic) between the academic and the lived experience of artefacts.
It will finally look at the artefacts themselves, choosing different phenomena – from posters, street or interior graffiti (or graffiti that bridges interiors and exteriors) and phot-records – to analyse in detail. The aim here is to see if sustained analysis of the ‘thing’ is enhanced by being contained in art-history or whether the latter so distorts what is attempted to be understood that it changes its nature in a way that is antagonistic to its roots in political action, as was feared at the time.
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