Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

The Production of Social Space as Artwork 225
mid-twentieth century. They are registered today within the strategies of antiglobalization
movements.
If we look back historically, collectives tend to emerge during periods
of crisis, in moments of social upheaval and political uncertainty within
society. Such crises often force reappraisals of conditions of production, reevaluation
of the nature of artistic work, and reconWguration of the position
of the artist in relation to economic, social, and political institutions. There
are two types of collective formations and collaborative practices that are
important for this discussion. The Wrst type can be summarized as possessing
a structured modus vivendi based on permanent, Wxed groupings of practitioners
working over a sustained period. In such collectives, authorship represents
the expression of the group rather than that of the individual artist.
The second type of collective tends to emphasize a Xexible, nonpermanent
course of afWliation, privileging collaboration on a project basis rather than
on a permanent alliance. This type of collective formation can be designated
as networked collectives. Such networks are far more prevalent today
due to radical advances in communication technologies and globalization.
How do we place the history of collectivity within the history of modernism?
Nearly a century has passed since that fateful turning point in the epic
march toward the redeWnition of the concept of the work of art. We could
all chuckle today in self-satisWed bemusement and disinterest at the provincialism
of the British Minister of Culture Kim Howells’s castigation of the
work of four artists shortlisted for the Turner Prize for the poor quality of
their work. 3 Howells’s review of the exhibited works reduced them to nothing
more than so much “conceptual bullshit.” In 1917 such bullshit was
received as nothing short of heretic. Marcel Duchamp’s insertion of the
ready-made into the discursive frame of art has acquired its own impressive
inventory of epithets and dumbstruck admiration. In fact its legacy has been
called upon in the defense of so much more than the legitimacy of a number
of discursive strategies that insist on the idea that they are works of art.
The genealogy of such strategies (which consistently attempt an improvement
of our understanding of the nature of the artistic object or statement)
is fundamental to the historical discourse of modern art. It also furnishes the
fundamental dialectic between modernist art and contemporary art, not
least because the distinction between them remains at once porous and tendentious.
Modernist art is said to have its roots in the myth of originality, 4
in the idolatry of images and objects whose very physical existence was
dependent on the reiWed nature of their objecthood. Or, if we speak speci-
Wcally about images, we tend to relate to their iconicity and uniqueness on
the basis of aura as one would religious images or objects. 5