Work About Working Together: On Collaboration and Activism in Contemporary Art
By Jonathan Kaiser
What can be accomplished when many individuals answer to a single name – or namelessly act together? Group entities are powerful and charismatic forces regardless of how they choose to structure themselves: global corporations and off-the-grid communes, digital networks and hip hop crews, flash mobs and street gangs, insurgents and armies, parliament and protesters. For any given social configuration, there is probably a group of artists who has chosen that model as a means of artistic production. Denmark’s N55 operates as a non-commercial architecture and design studio. Minneapolis’s Hopsack Painting Company operates like a typical housepainting company that pays artists a wage for their work. Pop-culture-obsessed groups like Providence’s Paper Rad or Minneapolis’s Hardland/Heartland resembled multimedia rock bands. Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative functions as a cooperative distribution network for printmakers. In Minneapolis, Works Progress and Red76 recently presented a project, Public Engagement, that resembled an outdoor focus group on the economy. In the late ‘60’s, Guerilla Art Action Group (aka Black Mask) operated as a performative radical protest group whose fiery rhetoric would probably be labeled as a terrorist threat in our current political climate. The list could go on and on, through partnerships, collectives, and mini-corporations.
Although this month’s issue is devoted to the subject of gallery criticism, I’m going to stretch that theme a bit. My essay focuses on a lecture that took place at an art gallery, but I’m thinking broadly about creative production in groups – whether it happens inside or outside of a gallery. I want to raise some questions about our understanding of collaborative art practice in relation to influences from non-art contexts and non-collaborative forms of group behavior. I’m especially interested in the ways that artists and art institutions use activist or collectivist tactics as raw material.
Art Gangs and History
On October 12th, Midway Contemporary Art in Minneapolis hosted a public discussion between Alan W. Moore and David Little. Moore, an artist, critic, and historian based in Madrid, and Little, the curator of photography and new media at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, met to talk about Moore’s new book, Art Gangs: Protest and Counterculture in New York City, and more broadly to discuss practice of collectivity in contemporary art. Moore’s book chronicles the activities of a handful of art collectives in New York City between 1968 and 1984, including Art Workers’ Coalition, Guerilla Art Action Group, Colab (a group with which Moore himself was affiliated), Artists Meeting for Social Change, and Group Material.
Art Gangs draws repeated connections between group activism and group art-making. As the title suggests, the groups in question were all motivated toward self-organization by a desire to respond to social or political issues. From the Vietnam War, to the gentrification of New York’s Lower East Side, to problematic curatorial practices, each of these groups responded to specific issues with their own blend of protest and creative output. Especially for the earlier groups, the very act of working together was considered to be a radical and risky venture in an art world that was still primarily focused on a solo artists’ autonomous genius as the measure of his/her cultural value. Obviously, the landscape has changed considerably since then; major museums routinely exhibit collaborative and interdisciplinary projects, and even program their own events inspired by collective activity – like the Walker Art Center’s “Open Field.”
This fascination with group participation, interaction, and cooperation is not unique to the art world. Inspired by access to ever-expanding digital networks, it seems that everyone is eager to harness the potential energy of groups. Workplace collaboration is discussed as a strategy for corporate productivity and innovation. A host of software products and smartphones promise to help us collaborate from afar. Open source is a household term, and crowdsourcing is a buzzword. Much of today’s rhetoric around collaboration focuses on our ability to produce bigger results or know more information when we work in groups. This is certainly one of the great advantages of working together. But I’m interested in the aspect of social experimentation inherent in truly collaborative work – not just a group teaming up to complete a project for the same boss, but a group teaming up to articulate what problem they all want to solve in the first place, as well as how they’ll go about solving it.
Self-Organization and Crisis
There are as many types of collective as there are individuals to constitute them; there are few generalizations to be made about why collectives form in the first place. In her essay, “Thoughts on Artists’ Collectives,” Michelle Grabner states that “the rationale of a collaborative or collective is primarily to cultivate a base of power” (Grabner 23). This is certainly true, but I would venture to add that in many cases, that search for power is a reaction to a situation of urgent need, crisis, or perceived disempowerment. At its most ordinary level, self-organizing that stems from a shared sense of need should be familiar to many people working in the arts today (and to many who struggle economically for reasons other than voluntary involvement in low-paying arts careers). I suspect that for many people who engage in creative collaboration, our first negotiations with collectivity come from shared living space, studio space, tools, or materials – arrangements that we may not consciously define as a response to a political issue. Or, in disciplines like music, theater, or film, working with a group might be an essential part of the established production process. On the other hand, perhaps we’ve been involved in organized political activity that eventually inspired new partnerships and methods for creative practice.
Moore introduced his talk at Midway by suggesting that collectivity, rather than being an anomaly in the arts, is actually a seldom-acknowledged norm. He claimed that the activity of art making in Western society has long depended on conditions of collectivity among artists. In Art Gangs, he writes: “The process of production is continuously or intermittently collective as artists come together in teaching situations and workshops, sharing ideas, techniques, and processes. In the workshops of major artists production is more or less collectivized, as many artist assistants work to realize the designs of one. The collective nature of artistic production is routinely overlooked, since the branded artistic product and the individual producer alone is valued” (Moore 4).
Moore makes a good point about the interpersonal synergy that feeds a lot of creative work, even that which is characterized as solitary. And, as he pointed out in his talk, barter economies, mutual aid, and shared space – tactics I might characterize as collective or community-oriented – are common among poor artists (just as they are common sense solutions among poor people everywhere). But, I’m puzzled by Moore’s open-ended use of the word “collective.” There’s nothing wrong with hiring studio assistants (I’ve worked on both sides of that arrangement myself), but this form of employment has nothing to do with collectivity aside from a headcount. The point of a true collective is to negotiate a more horizontal power structure between members. Even if assistants share considerable creative input, their work serves primarily to empower the artist who manages them. Collectives and collaboratives are formed in order to subvert this very production model.
In any case, groups that organize around political activism are clearly often motivated by a sense of crisis – a problem they hope to solve. But what about groups that band together around an aesthetic affinity or a sense of absurd play, without articulating a social or political agenda? In her essay, Grabner slams these groups for their lack of social consciousness, comparing them to children’s playgroups “where parents take their youngsters to be schooled in a safe and protected environment, to be creatively stimulated, to learn language and to learn how to socially interact with others” (Grabner 25).
This raises a couple of questions for me. First, are artists’ groups held to different standards of social responsibility than solo artists because of the historical entanglement between collaboration and activism? Second, does a group social experiment need to theorize its own position in order to be read as a response to larger social conditions? I have to admit, I’m not familiar with all of the collectives that Grabner mentions, but I recognize the youthful impulse toward heterotopic community that she describes. Playing together might seem like a frivolous agenda for a group, an isolationist stance. But absurd and childish behavior has a longstanding precedent as an artistic response to social crisis – it was an important element of Dada, Fluxus, and the Situationist International. If one of these playgroups manages to figure out how to work together and get along with each other, they will at least have done one thing better than the aforementioned groups.
Besides the obvious overwhelming crises of ongoing war, economic instability, and environmental degradation, we’re faced with a host of popular paradoxes in our digitally mediated relationships; network = community, physical isolation = social connection, friendship = transaction. To strive for a tangible sense of community on a small scale is no frivolous goal, even if a group refuses to succumb to demands for rational, functional procedure. In his essay, The Unthinkable Community, Paul Chan describes the value of a kind of group dreaming that can produce models for new social relations.
“For the collective, the figure of community holds the potential for saying and doing it all differently. So what ultimately distinguishes community from society is the difference between imagining that reality can be transformed and realizing that it can only be managed. In this sense, politics becomes a form of groundskeeping. To rise above the ground, and stand with the strength of common purpose, gives the communal figure a definitive shape and enables the collective to remake existing politics so that it may serve a future life where substantive relations are the rule rather than the exception” (Chan 6).
Working on Working Together
At this point, the Occupy Wall Street movement has been evicted from most of their encampments but their momentum persists. Although they exist completely outside of an art context, their project is essentially a large-scale, real-life version of the sort of largely symbolic experiments with social practice that have taken place in museums and galleries for the last decade. In the ongoing cultural dialog between activism, art, and politics, the idea of consensus decision making has once again found its way into direct practice – but on a much larger scale than we’ve seen before in the United States. In a sense, the OWS project is an embodiment of the type of community that Chan describes. OWS galvanizes small-scale communities in order to enact a functioning teaching model of direct democratic self-government.
Occupy Wall Street has not only reintroduced radical ideas about collectivity into mainstream discussion, they have managed (for a while at least) to convincingly frame those ideas as the common-sense goals of the majority, rather than as the irrational demands of a countercultural fringe. Any public demonstration has to be concerned with public presentation and media representation as much as its own internal process and ideology. But by combining the two and trying to construct a transparent micro-example of direct democracy, OWS is showing a glimmer of positive direction in a long lineage of protests that can’t seem to be heard beyond the prefix “anti.” In a piece for one of the movement’s publications, Occupied Wall Street Journal, anthropology scholar David Graeber writes, “We may never be able to prove, through logic, that direct democracy, freedom and a society based on principles of human solidarity are possible. We can only demonstrate it through action.”
Collectives have a reputation for being short-lived, especially in the art world. But as our cultural attitudes toward collaboration shift, the idea seems to replicate itself with increasing frequency. Perhaps this is because so many collective groups approach their projects as experiential education. For groups resistant to hierarchy, whether they are artists, businesses, or political entities, this idea of learning and leading through example recurs.
Don’t just look at what we are doing. Look at how we are doing it. Our work is about working together. We may not figure it out, but someone else will pick up where we left off.
Works Cited
Chan, Paul. “The Unthinkable Community.” E-flux Journal. May. 2010. Web. 23 Apr. 2011
Grabner, Michelle. “Some Thoughts on Artists Collectives.” X-TRA 6.2 (2003): 22-27. Print.
Graeber, David. “Enacting The Impossible: On Consensus Decision Making.”
The Occupied Wall Street Journal. 23 Oct. 2011. Web. 12. Nov. 2011. Moore, Alan. Art Gangs: Protest and Counterculture in New York City. Autonomedia. 2011.
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