Whilst researching for my critical report, I came across French design group Atelier Populaire. Art students, painters, designers and activists decided to take over the Ecole des Beaux Arts during the events of May 1968. The collective printed posters to support workers rights and American-style capitalism. These posters to support political revolt were reminiscent of a Dada and pop art style, particularly unpopular in France at the time. The posters were used during protests, on barricades and plastered all over the city.
These one/two colour screen prints with bold, brave statements really stood out to me aesthetically and as a power. The collaborative and non-hierarchical nature of the studio is also really important here, making sure every aspect of the works stands in the common goal of the collective. During the time, silkscreen was rarely used as an artists tool, rather for the military to produce posters and propaganda. This is interesting as, although the posters were created by art students, these were strictly tools for the cause rather than decorative/design pieces. This view is very strongly upheld by the Atelier Populaire, stating in their manifesto:
The posters produced by the ATELIER POPULAIRE are weapons in the service of the struggle and are an inseparable part of it. Their rightful place is in the centers of conflict. To use them for decorative purposes, to display them in bourgeois places of culture or to consider them as objects of aesthetic interest is to impair both their function and their effect. Even to keep them as historical evidence of a certain stage in the struggle is a betrayal, for the struggle itself is of such primary importance that the position of an "outside" observer is a fiction which inevitably plays into the hands of the ruling class.
An art book of a collection of the posters by Atelier Populiare. https://www.fourcornersbooks.co.uk/books/beauty-is-in-the-street/
‘Atelier Popuaire Oui’ and ‘Atelier Bourgeois Non’. With its refusal of bourgeois social norms and its invocation of the popular, this slogan juxtaposed the productive collective against the creative individual, declared the non-elite audience for the posters, and established the studio as a non-hierarchical space.
Source - https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/24/screen-politics-pop-art-and-the-atelier-populaire
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