The great experience. The commune of Otto Muehl in La Gomera

Proyectos web y gráficos

“The Viennese Actionist artist, Otto Muehl, founded a commune in 1970 with the intention of fusing art and life. The project had an exceptional development, it had more than five hundred members, becoming one of the largest countercultural communities in Europe. of the 20th century. At the beginning of the 1980s, the group lightened its social-revolutionary ideology and went from an economy based on rural collectivism to turning to financial speculation investments. The discipline of scheduled work ended up putting high profitability in contradiction. the hedonistic and collectivist principles that had been the foundation of the commune”. Ralph Kistler

INTRO

The Viennese Actionist artist, Otto Muehl, founded a commune in 1970 with the intention of fusing art and life. The project had an exceptional development, it had more than five hundred members, becoming one of the largest countercultural communities in 20th century Europe. In the early 1980s the group lightened its social-revolutionary ideology and went from an economy based on rural collectivism to investing in financial speculation. The discipline of scheduled work ended up putting high profitability in contradiction with the hedonistic and collectivist principles that had been the foundation of the commune. In an attempt to recover the initial spirit, they decided to invest in a new headquarters dedicated to artistic and leisure activities and integrated into nature. In 1987 they acquired a large isolated and abandoned farm that was once one of the main agricultural farms in La Gomera: El Cabrito. The enclave that the community members had chosen as their holiday center has now become, after the group’s dissolution in 1990, a tourist resort. The Canarian period of the commune constitutes the final scenario where those emancipatory utopias of the sixties, fueled by the great myths of modernity, will be overwhelmed by their own internal contradictions to end up leading, with complete naturalness, into a foreseeable tourist utopia.

Ralph Kistler. Artist and doctor in Fine Arts from the University of La Laguna, Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Master of Art in public spaces and new artistic strategies from the Bauhaus Universität Weimar. As a plastic artist, he is interested in new technologies and their impact on visual culture. He has exhibited his projects at biennials and international festivals. subtours.com

Introduction: The avant-garde of the sixties and the tourist experience
Ralph Kistler y José Díaz Cuyás

Chapters
Algunos antecedentes de la comuna de Otto Muehl en otras comunas utópicas
La evolución artística de Otto Muehl hasta 1971
Historia e ideario de la comuna (1970-87)
El sueño del sur – La comuna en Canarias
El final de la utopía

Arte y turismo series
En colaboración con Turicom y El Cabildo de Lanzarote

Diseño y maquetación: jaume marco – estudi
Idioma: Español
ISBN: 978-84-946891-1-6
Tamaño: 21×14,8cm
Páginas: 336
Precio: 20 euros