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Title: Group Anarchy Author: Rik Lina Date: 1994 Language: en Topics: surrealism, cooperative art, art, The Oystercatcher Source: The Oystercatcher #16, Mayday, 2019, page 30 Notes: Reprint from Droomschaar nr.5--Amsterdam 1994. Scanned from The Oystercatcher #16, Mayday, 2019, page 30.
Our COLLECTIVE AUTOMATIC PAINTING AMSTERDAM (CAPA) has been organized in
order to research collective automatism. Automatism meaning undismayed
spontaneous action in the painting process. For these experiments we
come together and work together. The research is something we are all
interested in NEXT to our personal work, our personal discoveries in our
own disciplines, these are different for all of us, as are our
backgrounds, both personal and cultural. We do have in common much
experience with automatic techniques and a curiosity in the collective
exploration of these. Everyone, in his or her way, found out that by
working automatically you are lifted to a terrain which is no longer
personal: the collective subconscious.
History also taught us that a collective of freely joined individuals is
dangerous for any kind of authority, artistic or otherwise, the more
when this collective is not fixed into a steady group. CAPA is not a
group. We did not fall into the trap of official group-organizing with
its unavoidable goals, regulations, ins & outs, leaders, quarrels and
power-games. We do want to stay free and prefer the "free-jazz" model.
In modern jazz-music these free improvising styles developed, in the
Americas as well in Europe, into styles that sometimes do not even sound
like jazz anymore, but where constantly changing ensembles of creative
personalities are working together in an original and often "automatic"
way. Of course, painting and music are different, but for us, the
connection between free painting and free music is situated in what
happens on the moment of creation, the moment when this strong upsurge
of impulsive thought and action comes directly from its unconscious
source.
This liberating force shows in every collective automatic work, and - as
we assume--what is liberating for us may be liberating for all. When we
are working together, we are using our individual freedom of choice and
expression to work together, and not to express our own unique artistic
qualities. We step in and out of this process as we feel. It is not a
question of restriction, but of "opening-up" and honest curiosity to the
surprise of the unexpected. Every personal "hand" will show anyway,
everybody leaves his or her tracks, but the most important is the
unexpected, in all its surprising combinations, the unthinkable inputs
and outputs appearing during these experiments, which are leading us
into unknown aesthetic levels.
We do not claim to be innovative, this is only a fashionable word
invented by art-critics. We do want to change the meaning of art itself.
But in a natural, organic way: to use all the combinations of change
during the work-process itself, by direct interaction in totally free
association.
With these two weapons we are trying to destroy one of the most fixed
ideas of art-history: the idea of "the individual genius".
(from Droomschaar nr.5--Amsterdam 1994)