Intersections Exhibition Catalog (PDF) - Minneapolis College of Art ...

ESSAY
CROSSINGS | Intersections presents aesthetic experiments in collaboration
that suggest we revisit our basic assumptions about art making.
Collaborative art practices are significant because they challenge the
way that we define the artist as an individual in the modernist sense,
a singular, self-contained, free agent. Philosophers call this framework for
understanding identity the “autonomous subject.”
Within critical debates inside and outside the
art world, alternative models of subjectivity
consider identity to be fragmentary, fluid,
and collaborative have largely displaced the
“autonomous subject.” In the world of the visual
arts we still conceptualize the “artist” as
essentially singular and autonomous: Artists are
loners, outsiders, expressionists, individualists.
The truth is that although many of us intellectually
accept the critical consensus that there is no
such thing as an “autonomous subject,” we have
not developed robust alternative collaborative
models of art production to use in our studios
and classrooms. Intersections mobilized fourteen
teams of artists to experiment over the course
of a year with collaborative practices. Their
presentations and writing provide us with
practical examples for developing art-making
strategies that push beyond our usual default,
the solitary individualist.
INTERSECTIONS