Counting on Your Collective Silence: Notes on Activist Art as Collaborative Practice
1999; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1543-3404
Autores Tópico(s)Art, Politics, and Modernism
ResumoHi Greg, As I'm thinking about your questions on collective practice, I'm disturbed but not surprised to sense that it would be far easier for me to speak about difficulties of collaborative than to outline things which draw me to it. Here are a few of positive aspects...that are important to me: Working as a collective or collaborative means that we can do projects on a scale that one person could only do with great difficulty. Resources, skills, interests, knowledge and ideas are pooled. This contributes to overall political and aesthetic complexity, diversity and effectiveness of projects. Working on these projects involves developing collaborative practices which, however problematic, visibly reject a culture of hyper-individualism in favor of other models of work and of social (and personal) responsibility. David Thorne, Resistant Strains, New York, NY, 1999 [1] From swipe of a plastic debit card at grocery store to surveillance of public spaces to labels in your undergarments, an administered collectivity hides everywhere in plain view. Every conceals an involuntary belongingness, every gesture a statistic about purchasing power, education or market potential of your desire. A new IBM computer program called detects what its designers call communities in their nascent stages. Clever locates these Web-based fraternities even before members are aware of their community's existence by tracing electronic links spontaneously generated between users. [2] Therefore if collective incorporation is so relentless that it can be revealed by a machine, one might question why non-individual cultural activity is treated as exception. Conversely, how can artist be defined as an autonomous producer detached from politics, history and market? While postmodernism may have deflated status of auteur, art industry and its discourse nevertheless remain dependent upon a litany of individual name-brand producers that circulates like global aesthetic currency. As collective Critical Art Ensemble succinctly puts it: The individual's signature is still prime collectible, and access to body associated with signature is a commodity that is desired more than ever--so much so, that obsession with artist's body has made it into progressive and alternative art networks. Even community art has its stars, its signatures and its bodies. [3] By contrast, when a group of artists self-institutionalize themselves to produce collaborative or collective work, critical response, if any, can fall into one of only a few distinct categories: 1. Art world duos like Gilbert & George, Komar and Melamid or Sophie and Hans Arp in which a methodology grounded on individual art practice is indiscriminately applied to two; 2. Collective authorship as a backdrop for discussing evolution of an individual's career: e.g., Kiki Smith as former member of Collaborative Projects or Joseph Kosuth as cofounder of Art & Language; 3. The art collective as representative of an entire historical mise en scene, as when 1980s became decade of activist art group. When efforts are made to define collectivism on its own terms these descriptions tend to psychologize process, setting it apart from any specific social and economic context. In her essay Connective Aesthetics: Art after Individualism, critic Suzi Gablik argued for a new kind of artist who understands that the boundary between self and Other is fluid rather than fixed: Other is included within boundary of selfhood. [4] However, boundaries both real and imaginary are historically determined and often harshly material. By contrast I understand conflict and difference, rather than merging, to be necessary for formation of collective. Furthermore such incipient abrasiveness must carry over to routine functioning of group possibly sparking violent repercussions both inside collective and between collective and existing institutional forms. …
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