Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

7. Artists’ Collectives: Focus on
New York, 1975–2000
ALAN W. MOORE
The question of collectivism in recent art is a broad one. Artists’
groups are an intimate part of postmodern artistic production in the visual
arts, and their presence informs a wide spectrum of issues including modes
of artistic practice, the exhibition and sales system, publicity and criticism,
even the styles and subjects of art making. Groups of all kinds, collectives,
collaborations, and organizations cut across the landscape of the art world.
These groups are largely autonomous organizations of artistic labor that, along
with the markets and institutions of capital expressed through galleries and
museums, comprise and direct art. The presence of artistic collectives is not
primarily a question of ideology; it is the expression of artistic labor itself.
The practical requirements of artistic production and exhibition, as well as
the education that usually precedes active careers, continuously involves
some or a lot of collective work. The worldwide rise in the number of selfidentiWed
artist collectives in recent years reXects a change in patterns of
artistic labor, both in the general economy (that is, artistic work for commercial
media) and within the special economy of contemporary art. This
has to do primarily with technological change in the means available to art,
but also change in the scope and purview of contemporary art. At the same
time, a public is growing for art produced outside the paradigm of individual
authorial production.
This chapter considers a range of artistic collectivity, principally
in New York City, 1 and mostly politicized. Two groups are discussed in more
detail, the Art Workers Coalition (AWC) and Group Material. Most artists’
collectives formed up behind social movements; they were produced as a result
of them and were inXuenced by them. Artists’ groups are usually thought of
in connection with politicized art. A clear instance of this is the Art Workers
Coalition of New York City, a large, heterodox, and short-lived group
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