Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

224 Okwui Enwezor
collective imaginary has often been understood as essentially political in
orientation with minimal artistic instrumentality. In other instances shared
labor, collaborative practice, and the collective conceptualization of artistic
work have been understood as the critique of the reiWcation of art and the
commodiWcation of the artist. Though collaborative or collective work has
long been accepted as normal in the kind of artistic production that requires
ensemble work, such as music, in the context of visual art under which the
individual artistic talent reigns such loss of singularity of the artist is much
less the norm, particularly under the operative conditions of capitalism.
Over the centuries there have been different kinds of groupings of
artists in guilds, associations, unions, workshops, schools, movements. However,
each of these instances always recognized the individual artist as the
sine qua non of such associational belonging. In fact, the idea of ensemble
or collective work for the visual artist under capitalism is anathema to the
traditional ideal of the artist as author whose work purportedly exhibits the
mark of her unique artistry. The very positivistic identiWcation of the artist
as author leads to a crucial differentiation, one that represents the historical
dialectic under which modern art and artists have been deWned: the former
on the basis of originality, qua authenticity, of the work of art and the
latter on the authority and singularity of the artist as an individual talent
and genius. To designate a work as the product of a collective practice in a
world that privileges and worships individuality raises a number of vexing
issues concerning the nature and practice of art.
To the extent the discourse of collectivity has been circumscribed
by the above issues, debates on today’s collective artistic formations and collaborative
practices tend to be unconcerned with the questions of “who is
an artist?” 1 and “what is an author?” 2 The current positive reception of collectivity,
in fact its very fashionability, may have something to do with the
historical amnesia under which its recent revival operates. While collectivity
portends a welcome expansion of the critical regimes of the current contemporary
art context that has been under the pernicious sway of money, a
speculative art market, and conservative politics to make common cause with
its counterintuitive positionality and therefore avoid participation in the
cooption and appropriation of its criticality, it is important to connect collectivity
today to its historical genealogy. This may mean going as far back
as the Paris Commune of the 1860s, the socialist collectives of the Russian
Revolution in 1917, the subversive developments of Dada, the radical interventions
of “neo-avant-garde” movements such as the Situationist International,
and activist-based practices connected to issues of class, gender, and
race. The nature of collectivity extends also into the political horizon constructed
by the emancipatory projects of the liberation movements of the