Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

8. The Production of Social Space as
Artwork: Protocols of Community
in the Work of Le Groupe
Amos and Huit Facettes
OKWUI ENWEZOR
Recent confrontations within the Weld of contemporary art have
precipitated an awareness that there have emerged in increasing numbers,
within the last decade, new critical, artistic formations that foreground and
privilege the mode of collective and collaborative production. The position
of the artist working within collective and collaborative processes subtends
earlier manifestations of this type of activity throughout the twentieth century.
They also question the enduring legacy of the artist as an autonomous
individual within modernist art. In this essay, I address the question of collectivization
of artistic production Wrst in terms of its immanence within the
critical vicissitudes of modernist and postmodernist discourses, especially in
the questions they pose on what an authentic work of art and author is. Second,
in offering as my examples two critical positions from Africa, I shall
address the question of the authenticity of the African artist within the Weld
of contemporary art. On both levels, I would argue that the anxieties that
circumscribe questions concerning the authenticity of either the work of art
or the supremacy of the artist as author are symptomatic of a cyclical crisis
in modernity about the status of art to its social context and the artist as
more than an actor within the economic sphere. This crisis has been exceptionally
visible since the rise of the modernist avant-garde in the twentieth
century. For it is the avant-garde that time and again has tested the faith
and power we invest in both the idealized nature of the unique artwork and
the power of the artist as author.
Collective work complicates further modernism’s idealization of
the artwork as the unique object of individual creativity. In collective work
we witness the simultaneous aporia of artwork and artist. This tends to lend
collective work a social rather than artistic character. Consequently, the
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