Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

Art & Language and the Institutional Form 79
debates it ceased to exhibit a paradigmatically institutional character, while
shrinking in numbers and acquiring a more directed, extrinsic purpose.
In a culture that primarily values acts of individual creation, it is
understandable that histories of collectives would be tumultuous. Looking
at the Wrst eight years of Art & Language’s institutional life, what is perhaps
most remarkable are the levels of strife that existed inside the group
over demands for internal reform, arguments about orthodoxy, or (not infrequently)
seemingly trivial matters. Mayo Thompson, a musician associated
with the group from the early 1970s through the 1980s, remarked that
whereas in most groups internal conXict is the exception, in Art & Language
“conXict was a norm of conversation.” 5 Others inside the group, like
Thompson, were bafXed by its members’ tendency to take issue with anything
and everything, speculating that Art & Language’s internal discord
was a positive form of working out contradictions that were latent within
the larger culture. 6
One could speculate that Art & Language’s internal strife was an
effect of two givens: (1) the group’s producing work under the aegis of corporate
authorship and (2) its not having a presiding individual (a George
Maciunus, Andy Warhol, or Mark Boyle) empowered to resolve conXict.
Yet it follows from the group’s institutional character, as outlined above—in
particular Art & Language’s uniquely self-reXexive instantiation of the artists’
group idea—that concerns with internal issues of organization cannot have
been anything but integral to the group’s functioning. By the same token,
the tendency to decry or dismiss such internal struggles for legitimacy involves
a signiWcant misunderstanding: if Art & Language’s central purpose was to
establish and maintain its own orthodoxy as an institution, then the strife
that “plagued” it almost from the beginning in fact instantiates the iterative
act by which it attempted to constitute itself as a group apart from administered
culture. In a similar manner, the need for Art & Language to establish
its correctness over the work of other conceptual artists, and in relation to
critics and historians who take it as an object—which has led to a vast body
of critical responses to almost every attempt to locate Art & Language within
history—is not mere prickliness. Instead, it must be related to the group’s
search for an autonomous legitimacy, a legitimacy that is not to be conferred
from without. Was Art & Language then an institution without a cause
other than the ongoing, if limited aim of setting its house in order? Perhaps
a more accurate way of wording this is to say that the group’s key purpose,
however “solipsistic,” was to assert its own institutional character as an ongoing
resistance to a larger sociality within which it would otherwise be,
and was to a large extent, inscribed.