New Tendencies

It might seem surprising that the wave of retrieval and globalization of art phenomena from socialist Europe has managed to largely bypass New Tendencies, an international art movement anchored in a series of exhibitions and symposia organized between 1961 and 1973 by the Zagreb Gallery of Contemporary Art, which became a hub for instituting new art trends and posing new questions on the relation between art, science and society. But it is precisely NT’s decided internationalism, as well as its “constructive approach,” as Jerko Denegri characterized both its stance towards the man/machine interaction and towards the promise of the then young, socialist, self-managed, and non-aligned Yugoslav state, which made it unsuitable for the exoticizing narratives of invisibility and suffering behind the Iron Curtain, popular in the first post-socialist decade or two. In the last few years, however, the interest in NT is on the rise, and for reasons that thankfully surpass recovering regional histories. While A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine, and the Computer’s Arrival in Art: New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961-1973 (ed. Margit Rosen, The MIT Press, 2011), a result of artist and curator’s Darko Fritz long-term research project and exhibition series, still flirts with the appeal of the tales from the margins, the bigger story it tells is the seminal position of NT within the histories of computer art. Its most recent MIT Press “sequel,” Armin Medosch’s New Tendencies. Art at the Threshold of the Information Revolution (1961-1978) (2016), does away with the recourse to marginality (at least in the title!) and places NT at the center of one of the greatest transformations of the twentieth century: the transition from Fordist to post-Fordist economy, and the ensuing consolidation of global information society.

Medosch connects the almost twenty years of the varied artistic developments that came together at the five NT exhibitions with the notion of “information aesthetics,” whose transformations he traces through the three phases that can roughly be labeled as constructive art (until 1965), computer art (1968/69), and conceptual art (1973). To counter the absorption of this aesthetics by “neoliberal informational capitalism” (234), the book’s main agenda is to reactivate for the present age the utopian politics behind NT, which the author calls “cybernetic socialism” or “a claim by the artistic left on an optimistic technological civilization.” (4) The motif of the grid populating the early NT exhibitions marks the initial attempt to demystify, decommodify, and collectivize art: as the anonymous visual elements displace the content/form dichotomy in favor of the structuralist relation between code and its materialization, so the relation between hand and head in art – now defined as “visual research” – is transformed. It is easy to imagine how this early version of information aesthetics transmutes with the introduction of computers in 1968, and how the centrality of the “idea” in conceptual art can still be read according to the logic of programming. Medosch, however, warns against a linear reading of the history of NT, and in contrast to A Little Known Story, presents the “computer” edition (1968/69) not as its apex, but the sure sign of its decline. On the one hand, this is because NT failed to respond to challenges posed by the global 1968 revolts – together with their anti-technological sentiment – and on the other, because it embraced blindly the promise of machine labor, without taking into account its social and political basis. It thus made explicit the fetishization of immaterial labor that was already implicit in constructive art, which ultimately brought NT in line with the growing hegemony of the post-Fordist paradigm.

The decision to organize the book around five core themes that ground the author’s interpretation and contextualization of the five NT exhibitions is a great methodological solution for the challenges posed by the vast geopolitical and temporal spread of the NT networks and its activities, as it helps keep the main narrative from sinking under the weight of the truly numerous references from the histories of art, politics, social movements, science, cybernetics, philosophy, economy. This wealth of context (or, as the author says, context as content) – and the awareness of his own present context – is simultaneously the greatest strength and weakness of the book. Strength, because his reading of NT, while introducing many seductive, but inadequately theorized, interpretative frameworks (“politics of form,” “climate of modernization,” “non-aligned modernism,” “dreamworlds of cybernetic socialism,” “visual structuralism,” “technological unconscious”) is not fundamentally different from the one already offered by, for example, Denegri. But the idea to make the history of NT into a sort of parable of the origin of contemporary information society and its political economy is certainly original, brave, and against the grain of so much play-it-safe/don’t-speculate art-historical writing. But in order to do this, Medosch practically needed to retell the twenty years of European (and beyond) history, which unsurprisingly resulted in relying on many common places, not many sources per topic, and languid use of theory. However, this book did leave me with the feeling that it was worth it and that there are a lot of good reasons to tell nuance to go fuck itself.