From 1974 To 1980
In the summer of 1974, Journiac organized a series of meetings at his apartment on Île Saint-Louis in Paris to discuss the initiation of an artist movement engaged with critical and sociological realities. The meetings brought together artists such as Gina Pane, Bertrand Lavier, Thierry Agullo, Joan Rabscall, Jocelyne Hervé, Sonso, Hervé Fischer, Jean-Paul Thenot as well as art critics François Pluchart and Bernard Teyssedre. It was from these meetings that the impulse to form the Sociological Art Collective emerges, and on October 10, 1974, the Sociological Art Collective was officially declared with the publication in newspaper Le Monde of its first manifesto, signed by Hervé Fischer, Fred Forest, and Jean-Paul Thénot. From this date onwards, these artists would alternate between practices claiming this lineage and their own personal practices. Concretely speaking, the collective published a number of texts, including three manifestos; organized and effectuated a series of projects, including four group exhibitions and large-scale urban interventions; and founded the Ecole Sociologique Interrogative.
Their activity instantiates an early moment in the history of what would be called in the mid-1990s relational art or socially-engaged art but also connected with a number of artistic tendencies of the 1970s, such as conceptual art, performance art, and institutional critique. For example, the Collective’s two-week intervention in the southern French town of Perpignan in July 1976, entitled "Study and Animation of Perpignan" began with a study of the conditions and needs of neighborhoods in Perpignan by a thirty-person, interdisciplinary team and then led to dozens of direct interventions, which included pop-up exhibitions, screenings, interviews, parties, and a multi-neighborhood photograph swap, all aimed to, as the press release notes, “bring together different neighborhoods, which although geographically close remain distant at the level of social communication.” After setting out four principles—critique, communication, intervention, and pedagogy—the group proposes sociological art as means to overcome the divide between “a quasi-scientific approach to the environment and a lived connection established among individuals and the studied environment.”
This project and related texts indicate three key aspects that broadly characterized sociological art. First, artistic labor included activities such as organizing, writing, research, and teaching. The expansion of traditional artistic skills to integrate intellectual and white-collar skills related to the broader transition from an industrial economy to service and information economy. Second, projects developed in dialogue with specific sites and their associated audiences. Whether focused on a town or a particular community, sociological art aimed to increase awareness about social conditions of existence through exchange with sites and humans. Third, sociological art was usually time-based and ephemeral and funded primarily by grants, personal finances, and commissions. The remaining material, therefore, consists largely of documentation rather than “rarified” art objects bought, sold, and collected.
For six years, the Collective carried out a handful of collaborative sociological art projects, participated in colloquia and exhibition, generated a community of collaborators, and provided support for independent work. Interlocutors included Henri Lefebvre, Edgar Morin, Vilem Flusser, Jean Duvignaud, Jorge Glusberg, Kristine Stiles, and numerous artists, including John Latham of the Artist Placement Group, Stephen Willats, and Ken Friedman. Tensions developed among Fischer, Forest, and Thenot, and in 1980, Forest and Thenot published an ad in Art Press selling the Ecole Sociologique Interrogative, which was located in Fischer’s apartment, and wrote a tract declaring the end of the Collective.
Read more about this topic: Sociological Art