Antoni Tàpies and Grup de Treball: A Story of Institutional Critique

"In truth, it's all a way of conceiving artwork, an entire attitude, as we see it's not exclusive to anyone. [1]”

The artistic scene within the national territory during the final stretch of Franco's dictatorship, particularly in Catalonia, was characterized by a period of change and experimentation, coexisting with fear and inherited conventions from previous decades. Events like the ICSID Architecture Congress in Ibiza in '71 and The Pamplona Meetings of '72 opened up and redefined a new landscape within art.

 

From the realm of Informalism in art, where many artists found space to critique the policies unfolding in Europe, the political power of artworks was also underscored as arenas for criticism and confrontation. This occurred within an institutional framework that endorsed them as symbols of national art. However, from more radical perspectives, there emerged an urgent need to push artistic practice into the realm of object-based and bodily experimentation. Consequently, artworks weren't perceived solely through their material and visual aspects but rather through their procedural nature, granting them a multitude of potential interpretations. This notion stemmed from the belief that any artistic act involving the body constitutes a political and constitutive act in itself. As if echoing a "second death of painting" post-Malevich, conceptualism or conceptual art emerged in Europe, inheriting elements of the Fluxus spirit with the aim of challenging the very ontology and tautological condition of certain artistic practices. Conceptualists advocated for prioritizing attention to the process over the outcome, thereby stripping artworks of any fixed plastic conception.

 

The epistolary confrontation between Antoni Tàpies and Grup de Treball in 1973 laid the groundwork for questioning artistic practice while also sparking debate around discourses and statements regarding art as a space for political and social resistance. This questioning doesn't solely target societies but also the very position of the artist and their working conditions, now recognized as sites of resistance and struggle against established powers.

 

Let us delve into some of the issues addressed in Antoni Tàpies's article "Arte conceptual aquí," published in 1973 in La Vanguardia Española, and the subsequent "Documento-Respuesta a Antoni Tàpies," signed by Grup de Treball and published seven months later in issue 21 of the Madrid-based magazine Nueva Lente. Both texts took opposing positions to tackle an issue that still remains at the center of artistic debate today.

 

Indeed, it would be futile to speak from a position of sides between one and the other, because what actually transpired during those months was the urgent need to question the very foundations of art.

 

As a precedent, Carlos Santos wrote in a text following the Banyoles meeting of 1973, where the artistic encounter "Informació d’art concepte" took place, pointing out: "The latest trends in the plastic arts have brought forth a series of proposals that have been moving experiences towards an analytical reflection of the artistic act itself. This entails a new point of view regarding the mechanism of plastic celebration, which is replaced by a mechanism of questioning art within art."

 

Santos and those who took part of with Grup de Treball proclaimed the need of putting artistic practice itself into crisis—a questioning that was also occurring in some European societies undergoing reconstruction, but was even more profound in the Spanish state. For them, art had to respond to the new social and political situations by abandoning and reconsidering the foundations of a culture in crisis. It is precisely in this realm of change where conceptual practice resides: in the process, in action, in that new perspective, where the artwork operates not with an aesthetic or plastic purpose but from a procedural standpoint. It is within this process that the focus shifts to the restoration of art's role as a social agent. However, Grup de Treball didn't just advocate for a procedural and object-based practice but also for a collective and community-oriented approach. They were convinced that, in art as in societies, reconstruction can only occur from the plural and communal—meaning, under Marxist-Communist principles.

 

These propositions aimed to challenge Informalism, among other movements, which were also recognized as sites of political struggle and critique. Coined by the critic Michel Tapié in the 1950s following his article "Un art autre" (1952), this term emerged from the need to respond to artistic practices within the European continent that questioned the aestheticization of some of them. Moreover, the significant development of Informalism occurred after World War II, posing a rupture with previous European art and running parallel to the Abstract Expressionism movement in the United States.

 

Here, Dau al Set were the precursors of Informalism, whose significant development came afterward with figures like Antoni Tàpies, Antonio Saura, or Manuel Miralles, who succeeded European artists such as Wols or Hartung. This new movement aimed to be understood as a space for experimentation from which to systematically critique the political and social context. It didn't adhere to established codes but rather utilized recognizable plastic formulations in each of the different artists' works.

 

Despite their theoretical and practical differences, both Informalism and conceptual art were built upon positions that demanded a space for critical discourse: "We wouldn't want what we've said to be interpreted in a derogatory sense towards conceptualism itself because the truth is that we're also accustomed to similar demagogueries from other movements," [3] mentioned Tàpies.

 

However, it seemed impossible for different stances to coexist to launch a frontal attack on Francoism and the delicate political situation at hand. Thus, both practices demanded their space of representativeness without necessarily seeing themselves as complementary in many cases. Likewise, today we find ourselves in a moment of equal importance when it comes to reclaiming different spaces of discourse, from which to question power or society itself. Criticizing the system or the institution from multiple places, instead of pooling efforts collectively, individualizes them, perpetuating the fragility of the practice against the capitalist system.

 

It is interesting to address another important point that fuels the controversy between Tàpies and Grup de Treball, which as we were discussing, revolves around the Marxist positions of the group or the working conditions of the artists themselves:

 

"... to achieve this, the political insertion of conceptual artistic practice is foreseen as very necessary, in the development of class struggle from the masses and in line with its leading vanguard, towards the revolutionary transformation of all structures emanating from capitalist systems and ours in particular [...] there is a rejection of this by that and the use of means of expression (production) and dissemination (communication) is denied to it due to the very nature of its ideological production (cultural object), placing the artist in the position of needing to reassess their situation from the perspective of marginalization. [4]"

 

"From marginalization, goods are not offered but rather work proposals (co-creation) and materials. Economic remuneration is required to be demanded under the concept of providing labor and services. [5]"

 

Many are the concepts and diatribes we encounter in these last lines of the "Documento-Respuesta a Tàpies": the class condition that entirely determines the artist and their practice; capitalism and post-Fordism as production systems where artwork is understood in terms of surplus value rather than as a space of creation; and finally, the need for artists and creators to have dignified economic and labor conditions. Unfortunately, nearly fifty years later, these premises remain at the center of artistic debate; there is still a demand for recognition of creation as a form of work and the creation of an artist's statute that protects their activity.

 

This statute should outline working conditions that lift artists out of precarity. Artists, as a collective, are vulnerable to institutions and the system as they often lack contractual recognition and proper labor conditions. Grup de Treball and Tàpies highlighted the tensions and friction within the artistic debate, but more importantly, they paved the way for self-reflection within artistic practice, the role of artists, and the creative process. These conversations, initiated within a context of repression, opened the possibility of recognizing art as a space for social repair. They pointed towards a critique that would continue in the future, with premises that still lack consensus to this day.