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Art & Language and the Institutional Form 91
reaches to the core of the essay’s project (and in my view carries over to the project
of the volume in which it appears), it could not be corrected through mere revision.
The reason for publishing the essay at all is that its problematically narrow focus
proves redeeming in a small way when the essay arrives at its conclusions; these
remain valid within their modest sphere of application, while the larger question of
the signiWcance of struggles within an art subculture and indeed the political valency
of the art subculture in which these struggles take place looms outside the frame of
the essay—looms outside of it with much greater urgency than what the essay and
the book itself address.—CG, 2006
[The foundational premise of this volume is that neither art nor collectivism ever
exists in isolation from macropolitical and economic factors. While Chris Gilbert’s
essay does not address these larger realities as directly as most of the other chapters
do, we feel it makes a signiWcant contribution by eloquently rendering the desire to
withdraw from these larger inXuences—a desire that modern art has struggled with
since its inception—as a period cultural symptom.—Eds.]
1. For two loosely concurrent, if very different voices on societal change in the
postwar period, see Gilles Deleuze, “Post-Script on Control Societies,” in Negotiations
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), and Raymond Williams, “Base
and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory,” in Problems in Material Culture
(London: Verso, 1974), 41: “I am sure that it is true of the society that has come
into existence since the last war, that progressively, because of developments in the
social character of labour, in the social character of communications, and in the social
character of decision, it extends much further than ever before in capitalist society
into certain hitherto resigned areas of experience and practice and meaning.”
2. The discussion of postwar collectivity here is informed by Gregory Sholette’s
“Counting on Your Collective Silence: Notes on Activist Art as Collaborative
Practice,” published in Afterimage (November 1999). In this essay, Sholette writes
of the pervasiveness of de facto collectivity in modern society and distinguishes
between two kinds of collectivity—an active and a passive one: “Instead of the
individual opposed to the collective or the artist deciding to work with the ‘community,’
my contention is that ‘collectivity,’ in one form or another, is virtually an
ontological condition of modern life. Two consequences follow from this supposition.
First it guarantees that there is no location out of which an individual, an
artist for example, can operate alone, in opposition to society. . . . [which allows us]
to reconWgure the often stated opposition between collective and individual as that
of a displacement between two kinds of collectives: one passive, the other active.”
3. The two important aspects of institutions, Wxity and purpose, appear in the following
Oxford English Dictionary deWnitions: “6.a. An established law, custom, usage,
practice, organization, or other element in the political or social life of a people”;
“7.a. An establishment, organization, or association, instituted for the promotion of
some object.”
4. Scottish artists Mark Boyle and Joan Hills formed Sensual Laboratory in the
late 1960s, a key project of which was Journey to the Surface of the Earth. Begun in
1969, this was an enormously ambitious project that involved casting portions of the
earth. The work on Journey eventually involved their son Sebastian and daughter
Georgia. By 1971, Sensual Laboratory had morphed into the Boyle Family. This name
was appropriate insofar as, according to Charles Green, “The democratic, communal
artistic ‘family’ was their overriding model, displacing all other collaborative