Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

3. Art & Language and the Institutional
Form in Anglo-American Collectivism
CHRIS GILBERT
BrieXy, by bureaucracy, I do not allude to a massive centralized
organization but to the fact that major cultural decisions (which
for example determine fundamental things like the way we learn,
the practical relations between people) lie out of our control and
are now all basically directed through the impersonal operation
of market institutions (e.g. commercial galleries) and private
administrative control (e.g. here Artforum, the MOMA, etc.).
—Mel Ramsden, 1975
Despite the above reservations, a community still seems the only
means by which we can overcome the extreme isolation of our
vacant subjectivity, and begin to deal with the larger world. Such
communities, based initially on professional groupings, could
form the basis for the de-structuring of the present artworld; its
institutions and authorities.
—Karl Beveridge, 1975
The date 1945, somewhat arbitrarily, may serve to mark a quantum
heightening in the organization of civilian societies of the United States
and Great Britain. These societies, once mobilized for armed conXict (by
means of rationing, extension of government, spontaneous conformity), were
never subsequently fully “demobbed” in the peace that followed. Hence begins
a postwar condition in which participation in what Theodor Adorno
and Max Horkheimer termed the “totally administered world,” and so taking
part in a kind of mass collectivity, was a pervasive and ongoing condition,
while the question of how collective matriculation takes place supercedes
the earlier question of whether one is to be matriculated at all. 1 A societal
change of this kind could not fail to have consequences for artists’ collectives.
In the prewar period, artists’ organizations had most often been loose
associations geared for the support of avant-garde artistic practices (think of
the impressionists, futurists, constructivists), which was a reasonable stance
given the relatively open modes of agency in the society. Now, in the wake
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