Collaborative Arts » Essays » Production Lines

Conversations on collaborative arts practise

Irit Rogoff

The History of Modernism is, it would seem, inscribed with collaboration and collectivity. Thesuccession of international, interlinked avant-garde movements which make up the historicaland mythical trajectory of modernist art is founded in a perception of artists coming together witha mutual and coherent project in mind. The very notion of artistic movements bearing acollective label intimates the noble abandonment of individual identity in the name of forging anheroic artistic ‘breakthrough’ which is greater than the sum of its individual artistic parts. Havewe not been told repeatedly that Fauvism liberated color from the prison house of naturalism?That Futurism mobilized the newly available resources of massmedia communication topublicize itself as a polemical entity? And that the frantic activity of several dealers and criticstransformed the disparate efforts of a few Parisian painters into a movement called Cubism?

But no sooner are such supposedly collective entities established by the historians than theprocess of privileging a dominant talent, an artistic leader, or a guiding light from within thegroup, begins in earnest. The chosen artist then represents those artistic and formal featuresthought to be the most significant and innovative contributions of the group to the linearprogression of Modernism as a cultural movement, and the other members of the group arerelegated to the margins as lesser examples of the same shared artistic aspirations.Collaboration, then, as perceived from within the orthodox narrative of Modernism, is acontradictory entity, at once useful and redundant for the methodological practices of the historyof art. As it stands, this concept of collaboration is exceedingly limited. It assumes a comingtogether of talents and skills which cross-fertilize one another through simple processes, neitherchallenged by issues of difference nor by issues of resistance. The discourse of Modernismclaims that these processes, which are always the result of lucky historical accidents that takeplace in atmospheric cafÃ©s, ultimately culminate in a triumphant form of artistic activity sovigorous and so coherent that it must necessarily make its mark on the realm of culture. In fact,this concept of collaboration (extracted from social and historical specificity, from dominantideological discourses, and from the hegemony of centrist cultural practices played out primarilyby male, centrist, cultural practitioners) represents little more than an animated form of affinity-abanding together of a group of artists around a series of formal moves which in turn,presumably, serves to ‘bond’ them in a cultural and ideological consensus. Thus, what we havein fact witnessed is a multiplication of heroic artistic entities within the symbolic formation of theirartistic project, rather than the relinquishing of individual cultural heroics. Above all, what thistraditional modernist perception of collaboration ignores are the inherent radical possibilities fora revision of the relation between imagination, cultural activity, and artistic institutions. For, asCharles Harrison so astutely observed, “The critical theory of Modernism is a theory ofconsumption masquerading as a theory of production.”.[1] The following discussion is intended,at least in part, to distinguish between two different perceptions of collaboration. The first is theabove-mentioned positivist cooperation which serves to expand the field of possibilities andresources while furthering the progress of art. David Sylvester has characterized its combinationof optimism and enthusiasm as resembling the Hollywood musical genre of ‘the kids gettingtogether in the barn to put on a show’.[2] This mode is not the exclusive prerogative of thehistoric avant garde, but it has continued to play a substantial, if not substantive, role incontemporary art practices. In a recent article, Craig Bromberg elaborated what he calls ‘thatcollaborating itch’, the modernist approach to collaboration without the desire for an integration

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of elements. He describes a projected collaboration between novelist Stephen King and artistBarbara Kruger who differentiated between the following initiatives.

Sometimes collaborations are about a sense of procedure, about concrete socialrelationships-the conversational quality of day to day exchange. Others take place in the realmof the symbolic, in a repository of power where the proper names of individuals come together,and this is an essential part of the product. This collaboration [with Stephen King] was more likethat. It was put together like a movie deal, and that was fine by me.[3]

As an artist who works within the language of representation constructed through mass-mediaculture, and who has entirely abdicated the claim to a traditional, male, authorial voice ofindividual uniqueness, Kruger is particularly well situated to characterize such differentiations.Rather than reveling in the romantic sentiments of historic meetings, artistic affinities, andkindred spirits, what she reveals are the the market forces that operate beneath the facades ofthe joint collaborations of named entities.

The second perception of collaboration, which emphasizes a critical interrogation of theprocesses of production through artistic practice, the loss of the so-called autonomy of the workof art, and the subjugation of the heroic, individual artist to the cultural embeddedness of the artwork, is the one with which we are preoccupied here. The importance of Harrison’s insistenceon a theory of consumption which masquerades as a theory of production is that it assumes thepoint of reception, rather than the point of production, as an analytical vantage point. Thus it canbegin to dismantle the seeming contradiction between the cultural construction of tendencies forstylistic group identities and the actual supremacy of the individual heroic artist within the samemodernist trajectory. In this argument and in numerous analyses Harrison, who is a founding(non-painting) member of the Art & Language collective, makes clear two fundamental points.The first is that, within the history and theory of visual culture, we have traditionally developedonly the most limited theories of artistic production while allowing market values to construct anextensive series of legitimating narratives that masquerade as a set of canonical masterworksand the superior aesthetic values they represent. The second issue concerns the centrality ofthe ‘author’ to the discourse of art as a form of consumption. While historical periodization andthe random and erratic division of visual culture into named stylistic groupings continue tooperate as what Michel Foucault has termed ‘dividing practices through which the institutionalorganization of knowledge gains both its power and its internal coherence’, both market valuesand interpretative values have continued to depend on the undisputed centrality of the author.We are all aware that the actual value of art works does not depend on their stylistic affiliationbut on their attribution, beyond all doubt, to the hand of a named author, to their point of originwithin the creative consciousness of Romanticism’s ‘unique’ individual. This postEnlightenmentprestige of the individual has, in Roland Barthes’ analysis, rendered it logical that in literature itshould be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attachedthe greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author. The author still reigns in histories ofliterature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men ofletters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image ofliterature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, hislife, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying thatBaudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’shis vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as ifit were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voiceof a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.[4]

Barthes wrote his famous radical essay, “The Death of the Author,” in 1968 when Modernismwas facing its most acute crisis and traditional Western culture was being subjected to one ofthe most extensive critiques experienced in the Modern era. The events of 1968, the so-called


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‘year of the barricades’,[5] went far beyond the protests of the various student movements inEurope and the United States. The invasion of Czechoslovakia, the intensification of theanti-Vietnam War movement, the rise of international terror organizations aligned with nationalistmovements engaged in anti-colonial battles of liberation, the emergence of European Maoism,and the rising of traditional unions and labor movements all came together into an activistcritique of Western democracy. Parallel to these movements, ethnic minority groups withinWestern societies began organizing with the purpose of articulating separate political andcultural identities and questioning the social and political systems which had excluded them ontheir home ground, as in the case of the Black Panther movement in the United States.Throughout the world the women’s movement and feminism began to interrogate critically thecultural and economic terms that worked toward the oppression of women across theboundaries of class and race, and to articulate an alternative set of analytical methods based onthe recognition of gender difference. The importance of 1968 as an historical moment is thatissues of class, race, gender, and knowledge converged across a much wider set of allegiancesthan had occurred previously within strictly national or cultural debates. The predominance ofmass-media culture and the emergence of its formulation as ‘Counter Culture’ indicated thedegree to which everyone, across divergent nationalities and traditions, was to some extentsubject to the influence of a Western modernist ideology of progress, technology, anduniversalism.

In France this critical revision interrogated not only inherited meanings but also the way theyhad been constructed and communicated. The works of Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Barthes,Lacan, and Foucault examined language, sign systems, cultural hierarchies, class, ideology,and sexuality as socially constructed systems. New Wave cinema dispensed with traditionalnarrative devices and codes of social acceptability. In Britain and the United States the manyartists affiliated with Pop Art took on the world of representation, conflating high art andmass-media culture and acknowledging the centrality of the communications media in theconstruction of visual worlds. Women artists began experimenting with autonomous art formssuch as performance, video, and actions which could work against the burdensome grain ofcultural tradition and serve to redefine some of its terms. In Europe, Australia, and the UnitedStates collectives and socially and politically engaged art initiatives made an effort at populism,accessibility, and an attempt at self government and wider representation. This was an attempt,however optimistic and naive, to revive a cultural politics of the historic public sphere asarticulated by the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas.

bq. By the ‘public sphere’ we mean first of all the realm of our social life in which somethingapproaching public opinion can be formed. A portion of the public sphere comes into being inevery conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body … This processmarks an important transition from mere opinions (i.e., cultural assumptions, normativeattitudes, collective prejudices and values) to a public opinion which presupposes a reasoningpublic, a series of public discussions concerning the exercise of power which are both critical inintent and institutionally guarantied.[6]

Within the much older Marxist critique of culture that had been part of the historical avant garde,great emphasis had been placed on the modes and processes of cultural production. Inmobilizing cultural practices for political struggle Walter Benjamin decreed that “the place of theintellectual in the class struggle can be identified, or better chosen, only on the basis of hisposition in the processes of production.”[7] This critical interrogation of the processes ofproduction was pursued in the wake of the late 1960s through the introduction of collectivity, of anon-individualist collaborating practice which affected a transition from art to artistic practice andattempted to erode some of the market value invested in the unmediated relation between thework and the ‘named author’. In the shift from what Barthes called “Work to Text” not only couldthe former work of art be opened up to a plurality of meanings which would recognize a plurality


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of viewing positions but “in the same way the text does not stop at (good) literature; it cannot becontained in a hierarchy, even in a simple division of genres. What constitutes the text is on thecontrary (or precisely) its subversive force in respect of the old classifications.”[8] Here a modelbegins to emerge for a mode of critical and interrogative artistic activity which could question thevery terms that could work against the grain of ‘artistic creation’. Furthermore, the emergenttheories of ideology which were sparked by Louis Althusser’s famous essay, “Ideology andIdeological State Apparatuses,” produced models for the analysis of ideology as the livedexperience of everyday life rather than the expression of clearly articulated explicit politicaldoctrines. Such a form of lived experience was the production, display, criticism, and trading ofart which could no longer be wrenched out of the institutions which were covertly determining itscourse. As Victor Burgin wrote, contrary to the dogmas of our ‘new’, dissent-free Romanticism,the artist simply does not ‘create’innocently, spontaneously, naturally-like a flowering shrubwhich blossoms because it can do no other. The artist first of all inherits a role handed down bya particular history, through particular institutions, and whether he or she chooses to work withinor without the given history and institutions, for or against them, the relationship to them isinescapable.[9]

All of the strategies which make up this strand of collective and collaborating work have beeninfluenced by the legacy of Saussurian linguistics and by the critique of cultural hierarchies anddominant cultural modes articulated by the discourses on gender and race. As Barthes put it,linguistics has recently provided the destruction of the author with a valuable analytical tool byshowing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly withoutthere being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutor. Linguistically, theauthor is never more than the instance of writing, just as I is nothing more than the instant ofsaying I: language known to a ‘subject’, not a ‘person’, and this subject, empty outside of thevery enunciationwhich defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold together’, suffices that is to say, to exhaustit.[10]

Barthes wrote this observation from within the linguistic legacy of the second half of thetwentieth century which has strived to revise traditional concepts of signification, working againsta realist tradition which viewed the sign as a transparent entity which allowed an unproblematicaccess to the field of reference.[11] If language is perceived as is imagery, as a signifyingsystem which operates within the framework of the concept of ‘discourse’ (i.e., the rules offormation), then the author/artist can no longer be its subject. Instead we have evolved anunderstanding that the author also functions within a certain set of rules of formation, thediscourse of artistic production. Thus, the demise of the culturally heroic author who existsoutside of the discursive formations of culture has brought about a recognition of a reflexiveartistic entity who occupies a set of subject positions vis it vis both culture and ideology. Thestrategies of collaboration used by different artistic groups over the past twenty years varygreatly. Their commitment, however, remains largely to reevaluate the ways in which meaningsare constituted in culture through the dual, interrelated framework of authorial subject positionsand the workings of the institutions of culture. A recent discussion of the work of Art & Languagestates,

Art & Language [have] kept their project strictly within the proposition of how art comes to havemeaning and specifically, how their work functions in terms of meanings. A moment ofconsolidation for the group, Art & Language exhibited their first index-a series of file cabinetscontaining all the materials published or considered for publication in ArtLanguage .. . . Thislabyrinthine installation can be understood as an index map where the theoretical domain withinArt & Language was constituted. This room of file cabinets materialized a critique of modernart’s idealist project and served asa visual model for the production of meaning that was collaborating, relational and


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disseminative. The sovereignty of individual creation and unmediated expression had no placewithin this communal and publicly posted system generated by quorums of readings. Aparadigm of the systematic and collaborating character of conceptual art in general and of Art &Language in particular, the project provided a radical critique of Modernism’s investment inliberal humanism and the orthodoxy of the unfettered will of the indivdual which has traditionallybeen understood as finding its release in art. [12]

Since then the linguistically inspired model has been further extended by feminist culturalanalysis and by the discourse on race. The work of the New York-based collective Guerrilla Girlsprovides a particularly poignant example. While seemingly simple and theatrically effective as aset of strategies aimed at exposing the inherent and pervasive discrimination against womenwithin the more official ‘mainstream’ institutions of visual culture, theirs is in fact a subtlereworking of some of the critical elements discussed so far using the tools of an analysis ofgender roles within cultural production. Thus, for example, they are one of the few groups whomask their identity and carefully guard the confidentiality of their membership. While this couldbe attributed to pragmatic motives concerning their vulnerability to various forms of pressure, itis far more interesting as a radical strategic gesture against the invisible reconstitution of theartist as ‘subject’ and the extreme ways in which women artists, in particular, have been subjectto demeaning narratives which equate biography with the work produced. The unadorned andsimply presented bodies of information which the Guerrilla Girls research, display, anddisseminate-with shocking evidence of the way in which institutions of culture see themselvesas entirely divorced from the shifts and changes taking place within the very societies theyinhabit-gain great strength from their refusal to expose their personal identities and narrativesfor the purpose of publicity. While decrying the staunch commitment to a policy of ‘no change,no representation’ which the museums seem to manifest, the Guerrilla Girls also resist thetraditional way in which they could be incorporated, becoming traditional authorial entities.Another strand of contemporary revision has come from the discourse on race and classmanifest in the work of Tim Rollins + K. 0. S. While a member of Group Material, anothercollaborative effort whose work takes the form of a cultural bricolage which wrenches objectsout of the linguistic structures that constitute their meanings, thus achieving what WalterBenjamin called the “unfunctioning of form,” Rollins claimed, what is rarely discussed (in theworld of art) is the crucial question of method in the production of radical art. The mostinteresting new work is that which embraces social means of production and distribution. Apolitical art can’t really be made at working people or for the oppressed. A radical art is one thathelps organize people who can speak for themselves, but lack the vehicles to do So.[13]

In working in a South Bronx school with the so-called Kids of Survival, whose position of socialdisenfranchisement derives from both their class and race, Rollins has moved on to anengagement with the facilitation of those traditionally privileged vehicles of expression as astrategy in the formulation of counter-hegemonic, alternative identities. Although many of theprocesses of interrogation which I have briefly sketched in this context have their genesis in thesevere crisis of Modernism following the social upheaval of the late 1960s, they mustnevertheless be firmly located within the sphere of the Postmodern. For it is there that thepolitics of identity-in the extensive process of unnaming, in the insistence on unfixed and shiftingmeanings, in the critical interrogation of the implications inherent in differentiating between ‘self’and ‘other’-have finally come into their own. “What is transformed in the postmodern perspectiveis not simply the ‘image’ of the person but an interrogation of the discursive and disciplinaryplace from which questions of identity are strategically and institutionally posed.”[14] Theenthusiastic celebration of collectivity has thus been transformed, rupturing the authoritypreviously held by the aura of the unique individual known as ‘the artist’ without any attempt toreinscribe it in an alternative, expanded group identity. While in some arenas the ‘death of theauthor’ facilitated the birth of the reader, in others it has begun to bring about the emergence ofan author grounded in the collective and social politics of identity formation rather than in the


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traditional and rarefied realm of identity affirmation.

h2. notes

fn1. Charles Harrison, “On the Surface of Painting,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 5, no. 2, 1986, P. 306.

fn2. This is my somewhat clumsy paraphrase of David Sylvester’s introduction to the catalogueDada and Surrealism Reviewed, Arts Council of Great Britain (London: Hayward Gallery, 1984).

fn3. Craig Bromberg, “That Collaborating Itch,” ARTnews, vol. 87, no. 9 (November 1988), p.161.

fn4. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang,1977), p. 143.

fn5. David Caute, The Year of the Barricades (New York: Harper and Row, 1988).

fn6. Jurgen Habermas, Structural Transformations in the Public Sphere (Cambridge,MA: MITPress, 1989).

fn7. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” reprinted in Brian Wallis, ed., Art AfterModernism (Boston: David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc., 1986), p. 303.

fn8. Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image-Music-Text, p. 157.

fn9. Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory (London: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1986), p. 158.

fn10. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, p. 145.

fn11. Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory, p. 11.

fn12. Mary Anne Staniszewski, “Conceptual Art,” Flash Art, no. 143 (December 1988), p. 95.

fn13. William Olander, “Material World,” Art in America (January 1989), p. 24.

fn14. Homi K. Bhaba, “Interrogating Identity,” in The Real Me-Post-Modernism and the Questionof Identity, ICA Documents, no. 6 (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1989), p. 5.


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