Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

204 Alan W. Moore
Rican activists had seized a building on New York’s Lower East Side and
opened it as a collectively run cultural center. 29 ABC No Rio was passed on
to successive managements until today it is an anarchist cultural center run
by a collective with close ties to the publishing group Autonomedia.
The longest-lived and best-known of these politicized groups or
collectives was Group Material. The Wrst collective was comprised of thirteen
artists, several of them Joseph Kosuth’s students. After a series of meetings,
Group Material opened one of the Wrst art spaces in the East Village in
1980. There they developed their work as curation, a heady mix of pointed
even polemical political art mixed with popular and folk culture in clean,
strongly styled exhibitions. A show of their neighbors’ objects, “People’s
Choice” (Arroz con Mango), was a key event for the group, driving them
toward a populist program.
After 1981, the group shrank and they gave up the East Village
space. Group Material produced projects in public spaces, including subways
and buses, and on a vacant department store facing Union Square Park.
They began to work from an ofWce in the Taller Latinoamericano run by
FIGURE 7.5. Production still from the collaborative video production Cave Girls, photographed in
the backyard of the art space ABC No Rio, New York, 1983. Pictured are Rebecca Howland, Judy Ross,
Kiki Smith, and Marnie Greenholz. Photograph by Ellen Cooper. Courtesy of Collaborative Projects.