Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

78 Chris Gilbert
of the Second World War these organizations took a turn toward bureaucratization,
mirroring but also instantiating this turn taken by postwar U.S. and
European culture. In this context, the decision of a group of artists to organize
on their own terms itself embodied resistance, since in doing so they
presumed to dictate the terms of their own sociality. 2
A key concept for this new form of collectivity is the “institution.”
As a matter of deWnition, an institution may be considered an organization
that, though formed for an external purpose, also enjoys a relative Wxity and
autonomy, as well as a capacity to sustain and reproduce itself. 3 Hence,
while institutions have goals—and there are probably as many goals as institutions—each
also takes itself in some measure as an end-in-itself, giving
the organization an organic character or “institutional life.” A number of
explicitly institutional art collectives emerged in the late 1950s and early
1960s. For example, the Fluxus group, which exhibited the branding tendency
characteristic of corporations (evident in its production of everything
from Fluxkits to FluxWlms and Fluxmeals), began in 1962. In the second
part of the decade, the Art Workers Coalition (1969–71), a group with an
anti–Vietnam War agenda, was formed and had a later offshoot in Women
Artists in Revolution (1970–78). Both were organizations that, making no
pretense of having a common artistic project within the group, coalesced
instead around an extrinsic, oppositional political agenda. In the late 1960s
and early 1970s, conceptualist duos and trios became widespread, such as
the Vancouver-based N.E. Thing Co. (Iain and Ingrid Baxter), Gilbert and
George, the Harrisons, and the Boyle Family. These latter, like Warhol’s
Factory, represented institutions of a limited kind since their corporate qualities
were tempered by a close association with an individual or a family
unit (though the majority had nominal pretenses to being self-sustaining
institutions). 4
Such coalitions, duos, and family groups were important components
of the experimental, politicized art scene of the late 1960s and early
1970s. However, by far the most inXuential artists’ group of the time was Art
& Language. Formed in Coventry in 1968, Art & Language is the focus of
the present essay—a case study in postwar institutional collectivity. Parodying
as well as instantiating the noninstrumental character of institutions,
the group could be described as an institution that, if not wholly without a
purpose, was at least one that allowed the issue of its own organizational
structure and constitution to keep pace with almost any external raison d’être
during its Wrst eight years. This was the period from 1968 to 1976 during which
Art & Language grew from a small group in the British art teaching system
to a network of as many as thirty people. Then, following a series of internal