A Collective Adventure
- Michelle White -
To celebrate a localized surge of collective artistic activity, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia invited groups of artists—including basekamp, Black Floor Gallery and Fritz Haeg Studio—to temporarily relocate to the museum and set up participatory projects for their spring 2007 exhibition, Locally Localized Gravity. As a visitor, one could partake in role-playing games that satirized the art world, surmount a stagelike platform and play ping-pong or discuss the art of writing bad poetry, among other activities.
Something of an interactive slumber party, the exhibition posited that modeling artistic production upon what the curators described as the “tribal,” utopian, laid-back and communal spirit of the sixties assaults alienation in a global, market-driven art world.1 In his review of the exhibition, New York Times critic Holland Cotter posed a question essential to the discussion of the social relevance of contemporary collective practice. He asks, “[Is this] new kind of politics-as-play a carnivalesque version of an industrial strike, nonparticipation—passivity—as activism?” 2 Within the framework of a museum display, Cotter further suggests that if collective work is truly the nonchalant derivative of a hippy-dippy love-in, it risks forsaking all legitimacy.
Why do Cotter and others propose such a stopgap caveat in terms of the valence of current collective practice? Definitions and historical connotations that surround collective production provide an understanding of his interrogation: collectivity has a longstanding history in the visual arts as a strategy of resistance, most often associated with a tendency for socialist dissent within the avant-garde. The perceived irreverence and hedonism exhibited by the current generation of artists working collectively sometimes comes off as a bunch of cool kids hanging out and goofing off, thus disrupting traditional understandings of the terms collaboration and collectivity.
On the other hand, collectivity, as an artistic method, is based on the simple decision to get together with others to make something. And while community-based new genres that emerged in the early nineties further complicate the notion of collectivity, for this issue of Art Lies we shall define collectivity as not necessarily a strategy for artists to connect directly with the viewer or the community at large but address questions of how and why artists join forces in order to bring something new into being. Under this position, collectivity encompasses collaborative projects, which can exist between two artists, and collectivism, a formal organization of artists on a unified front who share solidarity of vision.3
Cotter first began profiling collectives in 2003, claiming that the social activity of “making art together” was a positive and edgy alternative to the safe and reassuring art that was selling in the galleries destined for domestic space.4 His essay “The Collective Consciousness” followed in March 2006. In this article, Cotter set forth the idea that the critical as well as cultural preoccupation with artists working together under assumed umbrella identities—from formal collectives with polemic manifestos modeled on the Russian avant-garde to artists who decide to work as a team—emerges from critical frustration with art stardom in an inflated art market. He praised collective organization because it subversively throws a wrench in the sacred art machine that protects individual authorship.5 Thus, Cotter’s comments about Locally Localized Gravity are not without grounds; they indicate frustration with a shift in practice that seems to be on the rise.
For skeptics, collectivity has become party-chic. It does not automatically upset a bourgeois system per its historical definition as a political operative of anonymous members. Instead, it participates in the art world’s celebrity-making star system. For some, because collectivity is now complicit with the system, it fails to destabilize the economic and cultural structures of privilege, as well as the cult of the individual genius—key enemies of any serious activist agenda. In his review of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics and Postproduction and Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Interviews, Hal Foster dismissively wrote, “…when has art, at least since the Renaissance, not involved discursivity and sociability? It is a matter of degree, of course, but might this emphasis be redundant? It also risks a weird formalism of discursivity and sociability pursued for their own sakes…today simply getting together seems to be enough.” 6
This contradictory relationship—working both against and in harmony with the art world—is, no doubt, replete with contradictions. It is as if this “radical” and youthful ethos of a new type of collectivity is paradoxically contingent on a system that collectivity has historically critiqued. In New York last June, a little over a year since the 2006 Whitney Biennial (which included eleven collectives and four collaborative duos), these thoughts crossed my mind as I stepped around trodden Fruit Loops on rolls of dirty carpet, spilled bottles of fragrant, fleshy pigment and crushed drywall marked with satanic graffiti at We Are Better Friends for It, a collaboration between Nick Z., a Brooklyn-based graffiti artist, and German artist Kai Althoff at Barbara Gladstone Gallery. With no signage, the artists’ identities were not advertised. In place of a press release or information about the work typically displayed on the gallery’s front counter sat a big jar of cigarettes being sold for a quarter—a gesture of cultivated nonchalance. I had to ask, is it really okay for artists of my generation involved with collective activity to be content with not working against institutional structures?
At the same time, collectivity is given fanfare in Vanity Fair’s infamous diagram of international art power. A list of collectives sits comfortably among the constellations of hip curators and Marian Goodman’s blue- chip art stars—Derraindrop and gelitin in orbit with Gerhard Richter and Philippe Vergne. Or, take the dichotomous language of a London review of Artists Anonymous in last summer’s Artforum. Discussing the group’s wild construction of a video and sculptural installation of fur-lined labyrinths and crawl spaces, Gilda Williams praises the rebellious construction as a fresh alternative within the gallery marketplace. She writes, “While the other galleries traffic in relatively congestible art presented in refurbished white spaces, Artists Anonymous feels reckless, filled with a sort of adolescent energy that makes the other hot new galleries suddenly look tame and middle-aged.” 7
Re-enactment of Benjamin Patterson's Licking Piece (1964), 2007
Pictured left to right: Emily Sloan, Lindsay Burleson, Julia Wallace, Sebastian Forray, Nancy Douthey, Patrick Doyle and Andrea Grover, Instructor Participation Art,
University of Houston
Photo by Shane M. Maberry
Knittas in Action, Houston, 2006
Photo by Debora Smail
In the past few years, scholar Gregory Sholette has also tangled with this problem. In articles and in his recently published book, Collectivism After Modernism: the Art of Social Imagination after 1945,8 he argues that the crux of “new collectivism” is the corruption of the Communist dream, epitomized by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In a contemporary context, intense skepticism about any kind of political or social idealism can be attributed to the failures of past utopian models. The “new collectivity” can therefore be defined as a complex—and sometimes sloppy—negotiation of this historical weight in an art world that has the tendency of seizing the political and churning out a commodified playpen.
What is refreshing about Sholette’s criticality is, unlike some curmudgeons quick to dismiss younger generations’ stabs at serious undertakings, he believes in the potential of collectivity and demands that it still be seen as a vital and democratic form of artistic expression.9 For Sholette, our increasingly alienated world is structured by seemingly democratic, technology-based activities that are paradoxically driven by commercial motives. Think about the individual agency provided by spaces like eBay, Wikipedia, blogs or chat rooms, and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook, which led Time Magazine to claim that the person of the year in 2006 was “you.”
While we may have the power to define—to write and sell for ourselves—our behavior is also choreographed by the motives of the tangled webs of the corporate marketplace. In this historical moment, the use of collaborative strategies to provide alternative and proactive models that question these conditions is paramount as we struggle to define our identities within conforming models of commoditized subjectivity.10 As Sholette urgently asks in the rhetorical question he poses in “Tweleve Notes on Collectivism,” his contribution to this issue of Art Lies, “should we accept this type of involuntarily, serialized collectivity, or actively seek another?”
And what of these contradictions? Ironically, around the same time as my Gladstone Gallery excursion, I began a conversation with Noah Simblist—an artist, critic and assistant professor of art at SMU in Dallas—about collectivity. I was also in the process of working with Franklin Sirmans on an exhibition with Otabenga Jones & Associates at the Menil Collection in Houston. Something Sirmans and I were thinking about, from an institutional standpoint, was the problem of curating a collective. With the threat of “Radical Chic” looming, our challenge became to figure out how to provide a space for a group that uses collectivity as activist strategy.11 We did not want the display to automatically reduce their pedagogical project—an interrogation of the nature of race in today’s society—to simply an exercise in institutional critique.
At the same time, Simblist had just begun collaborating with fellow Dallas-based critic Charissa Terranova on a series of projects about collaboration and collectivity. This fall, they taught a course, held a symposium on the subject and curated a related exhibition at Conduit Gallery, which opens in December 2007. Their efforts will culminate in a panel discussion at the College Art Association Conference in February 2008, also in Dallas.
At the time we first spoke about collectivity, Simblist was examining the relationship between two seemingly opposite ideas: collecting, an individualistic practice of commodity consumption, and collectivity, which is associated with the avant-garde’s resistance to the market system. For him, an important question in this moment of new collectivity, when there is a fluid division between the politics of activist production and the art world, is whether or not collecting can actually foster collectivity as a mode of production, and how the market affects collectivity in a more general manner.
Based on shared interests, we wanted to further our conversation through this issue and pose even more questions. For instance, if we subscribe to Sholette’s idea that there is indeed a “new” collectivism, then looking at different ways artists get together could offer a way to consider how these activities might be like—or unlike—their historical counterparts: the Surrealist parlor game “exquisite corpse,” Futurist avant-garde manifestos, activist protests in the seventies, the Art Workers’ Coalition, Colab, the Guerilla Girls, Group Material, etc. Are the activities of these groups different than, say, the recent practice of activist knitting circles? Houston-based Knittas anonymously “tag” street poles, stop signs and trees with colorful yarn cozies. In a fuzzy inversion of interventionist techniques, they use a traditionally “feminine,” craft-based medium to ask serious questions about the politics of gendered space.
Emily Roysdon, Strategic Form, 2006
Performance stills, New York
Courtesy the artist
Looking at new manifestations of collectivity and collaboration might also provide some type of redefinition of a formal collective. Take Otabenga Jones & Associates’ hierarchical and bureaucratic structure. Controlled by the fictional authority figure Otabenga Jones, the collective is a reflection of the militant educational goals of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense within the African-American community in the early seventies. Their decision to assume a collective identity as a political strategy is also not unlike the subjectivity play that LTTR members Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy address in their recent performance at Tate Modern in London, which also draws from activist politics of the seventies.
At the same time, an artistic organization aligned with activism’s past is quite different than artists who make the decision to establish a partnership but keep their individual identities intact, like Jane and Louise Wilson, Gilbert and George or The Art Guys. Are these artists simply partaking in the sharing of ideas—a creative exercise, an opportunity for intellectual exchange, an antidote for the melancholic isolation of the studio—or does collaboration always connote a political gesture? I once asked Mel Ziegler why he decided to make work with a partner, his late wife Kate Ericson, and he said that they were fascinated by the idea that two people could “see more than one.” While initially a simple exercise, working together did change the meaning of artistic production, he explained. “Suddenly it was not private anymore…we had to converse to develop ideas, and this was the symbolic beginnings of community.”
Otabenga Jones & Associates will participate in Collecting and Collectivity at Conduit Gallery, Dallas, from February 16 to March 22, 2008
Otabenga web project
As a response to this question, in one portion of the issue contributors have been asked to introduce a collective and or collaboration by addressing certain ensembles’ raison d’être. We have Gilbert Vicario on Monterrey-based Tercerunquinto, Tony Matelli on gelitin and Toby Kamps on conceptual artist Mary Ellen Caroll and architect Charles Renfro. In the last case, artistic partnership is described as analogous to sexual chemistry. Like love at first site, Caroll and Renfro frame their collaboration as a process of serendipitous discovery based on mutual admiration and the desire to hash out shared artistic issues. Is collectivity and collaboration, therefore, simply an issue of practice—of labor—of how something is made? If so, does the process of collective production have to manifest in the finished product? This is perhaps an issue we should think about while looking at the projects Martin Beck and Julie Ault, Frances Colpitt and Terri Thornton, and Leslie Hewitt and William Cordova made for this issue.
Another question that arises in this conversation is how to situate informal gatherings of artists that produce together, such as the Royal Art Lodge or I Love You Baby. Houston-based Sketch Klubb, a group of twelve guys who get together every other week and draw, functions in a similar way.12 After a meeting, they produce a self-published book, sometimes based on a theme. Other times, they work blindly off a narrative strain, building on each other’s work in the spirit of the Surrealists. According to member Patrick Phipps, their activity creates an uncensored environment in which they can use vulgar, adolescent humor unapologetically. Operating outside the restraints of the art world that many of Sketch Klubb’s members are a part of, this activity becomes about—or returns the artists to—the simple pleasure of mark making. Working outside the expectations of a market-driven system governed by certain rules of decorum is subversive in its playful rejection.
The premise of this issue of Art Lies comes out of wanting to further explore these types of problems and find out not just what happens when people get together and make stuff but why people decide to get together to do so in the first place. In the following pages, this inquiry also extends to probing the danger (and possibility) of collective activity between artists and institutions, as Jason Hill and Aram Moshayedi discuss in their examination of a recent controversy involving MASS MoCA and artist Christoph Büchel; the political implications of the collective’s relationship to urban space, as Noah Simblist writes about in his look at Miss Rockaway Armada and others; and the goals of spaces that serve to accommodate a multitude of voices, as Sarah Hines presents in her piece on Orchard, a collectively run galley in New York City.
Recalling his collaborative work with Georges Braque, in a moment when modern artists knew they could radically change the way people see, Picasso once remarked, “As soon as we saw that the collective adventure was a lost cause, each one of us had to find an individual adventure. And the individual adventure always goes back to one that is the archetype of our times: that is Van Gogh’s—an essentially tragic and solitary adventure.” 13 If fervent belief in a shared system of logic or political agenda still drives the artistic decision to work as a team or a group, let’s figure out what it is about our historical moment that could fuel collectivity and celebrate its subversive potential, because inevitably, optimism does fade.
1. Jenelle Porter, Elyse Gonzales and Naomi Beckwith, Introduction to Locally Localized Gravity (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2007). Self-published downloadable PDF catalogue (http://www.icaphila.org).
2. Holland Cotter, “Collective Creation, in Philadelphia and Beyond,” New York Times (March 21, 2007).
3. For more on the semantics of collective practice, see Katharina Schlieben, “Polyphonous Language and Construction of Identity: Its Dynamic and its Crux,” in Taking Matters into Common Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices, eds. Johanna Billing, Maria Lind and Lars Nilsson (London: Black Dog Publishing Limited, 2007).
4. Holland Cotter, “Doing Their Own Thing, Making Art Together,” New York Times (January 19, 2003).
5. Cotter wrote, a collective model “may undermine the cult of the artist as media star, dislodge the supremacy of the precious object and unsettle the economic structures that make the art world a mirror image of the inequalities of American culture at large,” in “The Collective Conscious,” New York Times (March 5, 2006).
6. Hal Foster, “Chat Rooms,” Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (London and Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), p. 194. Originally published as “Art Party” in London Review of Books (December 4, 2004).
7. Gilda Williams, “Artists Anonymous,” Artforum (Summer 2007).
8. Edited with Blake Stimson.
9. Sholette writes, “the challenge now is to concoct a counter-vaccine that will render administrated culture helpless before the spread of a radically democratic, participatory collectivism.” Gregory Sholette, “Introducing Insouciant Art Collectives, the Latest Product of Enterprise Culture,” Intelligent Agent (vol. 4, no. 2, 2003).
10. In the visual arts, there has been response: Flash mobs, the sort of “happenings” that began worldwide in 2003, where massive groups gather in public spaces as an ironic statement on social conformity come to mind. So too does the concept of outsourcing in the visual arts. See Andrea Grover, exhibition text for Phantom Captain: Art and Crowdsourcing (New York: Apex Art, 2006). Also, for an interesting account of the history of the flash mob, see Bill Wasik, “My Crowd: Part 1, or Phase 5: A Report from the Inventor of the Flash Mob,” Harper’s Magazine (March 2006).
11. Here I am referencing how Okwui Enwezor evoked Tom Wolfe’s short story “Radical Chic” (1970) to explain why “institutional critique” after 1990 is doomed as a trendy and empty critical device. See Enwezor, “The Production of Social Space as Artwork,” in Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination After 1945 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. 230.
12. Sketch Klubb members include Seth Alverson, Jason Colburn, Rene Cruz, Russell Etchen, Lane Hagood, Michael Harwell, Cody Ledvina, Nick Meriwether, Eric Pearce, Patrick Phipps and J. Michael Stovall.
13. Pablo Picasso, quoted in T. J. Clark, Farewell To An Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 222. With thanks to Bernice Rose for drawing this reference to my attention.