Johan Lundh
Collective Conscious
In recent years, the art world has shown a renewed interest in collective creative practices. But the desire to speak in a collective voice has long fueled artistic production. Collectivism has continuously called into question how we view art works that do not represent the voice of a single individual and how collective production affects the concept of art as a means of self-expression. In contrast to individualism, collectivism connotes community, solidarity, proximity, and trust. But it can also signal authority, surveillance, and censorship, depending on the circumstances. Despite its recent popularity, collectivism is not a value in itself. Its value is determined by the quality of relations among those who maintain it and the density of the work produced.
Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 engages the history of art collectives during the second half of the twentieth century. The ten essays in the volume offer a diverse rich cross-section of collectives in Africa, Cuba, Europe, Japan, Mexico, Russia, and the United States. The book is welcome, since it sheds light on a largely unwritten and unexamined history. The editors, Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, draw upon collectivism’s inherent ambiguities and contradictions in order to explore and examine collectively produced art across an array of cultural, economic, and political contexts. Although the book is missing examples from major parts of the world, it is a first step toward a deeper understanding of collectivist practices in the postmodern era.
The book’s first essay, Jelena Stojanovic’s “Internation-aleries: Collectivism, the Grotesque, and Cold War Functionalism,” is a survey of four influential European art collectives in the 1950s and 60s: CoBrA IAE, Internationale Lettriste, Mouvement International pour un Bauhaus Imaginiste, and the Situationist International. Stojanovic exposes a paradigm shift in the deployment of avant-garde strategies after World War II. By inventing a new mode of encrypted artistic practice, these collectives undermined functionalistic Cold War modernism, pointing out its ideological pitfalls. Their “grotesque” or “carnivalesque” interpretations of the ideals of the time became tactics for interventions into everyday life. “The Internationaleries,” Stojanovic writes, “took upon themselves the immense and utopian task of re-imagining collective subjectivity. That is, of redefining the very notion of utopia for the Cold War era, a time when the ‘colonization of everydayness’ first took on an unconditional presence.” Although the Internationaleries’ collectivism wasn’t able to realize a critique of capitalist and communist systems that stretched beyond the historical circumstances of the Cold War era, their artistic rhetoric (the “Trojan horse,” “institutional critique,” etc.) appears in numerous texts throughout the volume.
During the Cold War there was a lack of institutional links that could have fostered an international cultural exchange that could bridge the gap created by politics. Because of this, most collectives remained enclosed within the borders of their immediate local, national, and geopolitical contexts. Instead of constructing utopian world visions like the modernist collectives, they focussed more on addressing local concerns. Nevertheless, the structural similarities between the collectives featured in the survey are more striking than the differences. From the late 1960s until today, two key notions have been self-organization and knowledge production. In “Art and Language and the Institutional Form in Anglo-American Collectivism,” Chris Gilbert discusses how the group explored the challenges and limitations of self-institutional projects long before they became fashionable in the art world.
Attention! What you see here is only an excerpt of a longer article. The full text appears in printed copies of the magazine. To purchase the issue of Fillip in which this article appears, please visit one of our many retailers worldwide, or contact us directly. You can also purchase a PDF of the full text of this article for $2cdn via Paypal. The PDF will be emailed within 24 hours of your received payment.
About this Article
Collective Conscious was first published in Fillip 7 in Winter 2008. For more articles from this issue, see the Table of Contents.
Johan Lundh is an artist, curator, and writer who splits his time between Stockholm and Vancouver. His research-based projects explore connections between social interaction and the mechanics of contemporary art. He is currently working on an interview project as well as a series of collaboratively produced posters with Vancouver-based artist-curator Alissa Firth-Eagland.
Notes
image: Irving Petling, Lucy Lippard, Leon Golub, and Cindy Nemser join Hans Haacke’s demonstration protesting art censorship at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City, 1 May 1971. Photograph by Jan van Raay. Courtesy of the artist
The views expressed in Fillip are not necessarily those of the editorial board or the Projectile Publishing Society.
All content appearing on this website is copyright to the authors, artists, editors, and the Projectile Publishing Society, or is published with permission of the copyright holders. No part of this site may be reproduced, copied, or transmitted in any form or by any means without express written permission.