Topografia DIY na Baía de São Francisco (1945-1965) : do Surgimento da Cultura Activista às Práticas Artísticas em Painterland no Vórtice de Jay DeFeo

• Autor(a) principal: Barreira, Rita Andreia Bernardes de Almeida
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/37652
• topic: Activismo; Boémia; Expressionismo; DeFeo, Jay; Crítica, Curadoria e Teorias da Arte

This thesis aims to critically map the cooperative galleries, communes and alternative spaces of Post-war San Francisco. I start by introducing the keys for interpreting this topography in the first chapter “The Regional Tradition of Artistic and Political Organization in San Francisco.” In this chapter I establish the propositions of the argument I develop in the thesis. I start by laying out the state of the art of the research on cooperative galleries, communes and alternative spaces address in the thesis, and examining the aesthetics of the groups of artists that constituted them. Next, in the first part of the chapter titled “The Imagination of the City” I discuss two main topics present in the literature on this topic. The first is the notion of the geographical isolation, or the syndrome of the periphery of the art market in San Francisco. The second is the iconography of the artist as rebel, in the context of the Beat Generation. In this discussion I show some problems that arise when taking these two variables as absolute causes of the phenomenon I analyze. Namely, to adopt the facets and characteristics of the art market in the East, New York, to analyze the creation of an art market in the West; and the dissonance between the Beat cultural imagination and the materiality of the group of artists discussed in this dissertation. In order to solve these contradictions and incongruences I explore the conceptual and cultural elasticity of the concept of the bohemia, a concept that I use to draw the aesthetic sculpture of the artistic the particular recursive spaces of the city discussing their performative agency, and the artistic objects in mutual interrelation and vitalization. I relate the materiality of this circuit with the metaphysics of the bohemia, integrating it in the paradigm of parasitism, put forward by Rexroth. This exercise presents us with the proposition of an art market particular to San Francisco which I argue should be analyzed as an affirmative proposition of an alternative to the commercial art market being created during the same Post-war period. In order to fundament this argument, I reread the performativity of this artistic community within the frames of activism and artistic collectivism, and of the alternative and self-organized spaces, submitting them to the larger field of DIY (Do It Yourself) culture. Next, I show that there is a symbioses between bohemia, market and artistic practice, revealing the modern persistence of the artistic object and the simultaneous contemporary dematerialization. This symbiosis is encapsulated within the codes of communalism, originating the urban performativity, natural to the bohemia, and an artistic selfreflexive intentionality in the practices, spaces and objects. Finally, and having drawn this map and created the topography of DIY in San Francisco, I follow to the last chapter: “Artistic Practices in Painterland in Jay DeFeo’s vortex”. In this chapter, I close my argument with a case study of Jay DeFeo’s (1929-1989) work, as an in-depth analysis of the materiality of artistic objects and processes. DeFeo’s fundamental working language is Abstract Expressionism, which allows us to explore the expansions, derivations and technical migrations among the community where her work is placed, while also connecting them with the urban performativity in which DeFeo takes part as member of the artistic community of Post-war San Francisco. community here discussed. In order to structure the artistic bohemia outside of the imagination of the city, I dive into the historical past of San Francisco to point out its political traditions and, accordingly, relate them with the artistic traditions. Following a chronological course from the communal impulse in the Californian geography, to the Unions of workers and artists; to the New Deal policies and the Federal Art Project with its systematization of public art, I establish a regional mark in which the artist is not a flaneur of the city, but a participant member of it. I draw on the philosopher Kenneth Rexroth to define the Post War aesthetics that connects the artist-asparticipant with San Francisco’s unique and fundational cosmopolitanism. The imagination of the bohemia (Beat Generation) is thus replaced by practical ethics of the bohemia in the second part of the first chapter, titled “The matter of the City”. After collecting the keys to interpret this map, I follow to the second chapter, “From North Beach to Fillmore Street: Collectivism, Cooperative Galleries; Self-Organized Spaces and DIY Culture.” In this chapter I draw a picture of the art system marked by this community. I point out