St. Petrischnee

“Of all the affairs we participate in, with or without interest, the groping search for a new way of life is the only aspect still impassioning.”
Guy Debord

“St. Petrischnee” is a variety of positions from the 1960s and 1970s, the age that sought to expand or to move beyond the old rules of art history and of society. Seldom have there been such radical advances, causing older generations so much anxiety and alarm. An entire generation of youth was in upheaval, attacking the fallout of the Cold War, attacking petit-bourgeois hypocrisy and parochialism, attacking nuclear rearmament and the Vietnam war. Subversive strategies were debated and experimented with: the postulation of free love, sit-ins, the peace movement, consumption of mind-expanding drugs, conspiratorial Maoist cells, the politicisation of the working classes, support for guerrilla operations in the Third World, the counter-culture of the communes... For the young, it was all about tolerance, but ultimately the views of individual groups led to divisions, radicalisation of political ideas or to a politically passive party culture.

Out of this mood of upheaval, the young generation sought to escape the dictates of Modernism, and also to break away from Minimal Art, at the time the predominant trend in art. There were already early signs of participatory environments, but these were largely disregarded until some years later.

Curated by Heike Munder