Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

90 Chris Gilbert
role was not also an index of what was going on in the culture more widely
(and was evident in the corporate characteristics of contemporary groups
such as the N.E. Thing Co., Fluxus, and the Factory). A parallel for how an
organization could be preoccupied by structural and organizational issues spurring
its members to greater activism (often outside the group) can be found
in the brief history of Artists Meeting for Cultural Change (AMCC). 28 This
group had been formed as a loose organization (with some overlap with Art
& Language) that was aimed primarily at correcting misrepresentation and
bias in the cultural sphere. The most famous of its undertakings was the anticatalog
project of 1976 that proposed an alternative reading of the Whitney’s
“Three Centuries of American Art” exhibition. At one telling moment the
group was visited by members from the Amiri Baraka–led Anti-Imperialist
Cultural Union (AICU). The presence of representatives from this more
radical group in the AMCC came as a kind of conversion experience for
some of those involved, 29 and may have been a catalyst for a search for greater
ideological unity within AMCC that, as with The Fox, ultimately caused
many in the group to reconsider their participation. In any case, issues of
organization soon took hold of the AMCC and left many participants with
a desire for more direct political action.
In Art & Language, however, this evolution—from concern with
art-related issues to organizational ones to activism outside the art context—
happened earlier and in a more perspicuous manner. What the group’s trajectory
exhibits very clearly in the crucial period of 1968 to 1976 are some
of the problematics and parameters of self-institutionalization as a resistant
practice within the art subculture. Well before the existence and indeed
proliferation of self-institutional projects under that name in the late 1990s,
the group played out many of the challenges and limitations of that form.
NOTES
This essay, written in 2003, reXects my interest in and thinking about self-institutional
practices and collectivism within the art subculture at the time of writing. Despite
the limitations of its analysis of the postwar society and state—which lays emphasis
on bureaucratization and the administration of society at the expense of a clear
view of the class struggle that both produces and resists these societal effects (a class
struggle in which the Wgure of collectivism, loosely deWned, operates at times in the
interest of the working class and at times in the interest of the bourgeoisie)—I am
publishing it as it was written originally, with a few modiWcations for clarity. I do so
in part because of limitations of time and format. The essay’s principal error is one
of focus: that of treating an art collective (Art & Language), the phenomenon of
art collectivity, and also the larger entity that is the art subculture in isolation from
the macropolitical and economic factors that have produced this subculture, this
phenomenon of art collectivity, and this particular collective. As an error that