Conversations on collaborative arts practise

Irit Rogoff
The History of Modernism is, it would seem, inscribed with collaboration and collectivity. The
succession of international, interlinked avant-garde movements which make up the historical
and mythical trajectory of modernist art is founded in a perception of artists coming together with
a mutual and coherent project in mind. The very notion of artistic movements bearing a
collective label intimates the noble abandonment of individual identity in the name of forging an
heroic artistic breakthrough which is greater than the sum of its individual artistic parts. Have
we not been told repeatedly that Fauvism liberated color from the prison house of naturalism?
That Futurism mobilized the newly available resources of massmedia communication to
publicize itself as a polemical entity? And that the frantic activity of several dealers and critics
transformed 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 the
process of privileging a dominant talent, an artistic leader, or a guiding light from within the
group, begins in earnest. The chosen artist then represents those artistic and formal features
thought to be the most significant and innovative contributions of the group to the linear
progression of Modernism as a cultural movement, and the other members of the group are
relegated to the margins as lesser examples of the same shared artistic aspirations.
Collaboration, then, as perceived from within the orthodox narrative of Modernism, is a
contradictory entity, at once useful and redundant for the methodological practices of the history
of art. As it stands, this concept of collaboration is exceedingly limited. It assumes a coming
together of talents and skills which cross-fertilize one another through simple processes, neither
challenged by issues of difference nor by issues of resistance. The discourse of Modernism
claims that these processes, which are always the result of lucky historical accidents that take
place in atmospheric cafs, ultimately culminate in a triumphant form of artistic activity so
vigorous 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 dominant
ideological discourses, and from the hegemony of centrist cultural practices played out primarily
by male, centrist, cultural practitioners) represents little more than an animated form of affinity-a
banding 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 have
in fact witnessed is a multiplication of heroic artistic entities within the symbolic formation of their
artistic project, rather than the relinquishing of individual cultural heroics. Above all, what this
traditional modernist perception of collaboration ignores are the inherent radical possibilities for
a revision of the relation between imagination, cultural activity, and artistic institutions. For, as
Charles Harrison so astutely observed, The critical theory of Modernism is a theory of
consumption 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 the
above-mentioned positivist cooperation which serves to expand the field of possibilities and
resources while furthering the progress of art. David Sylvester has characterized its combination
of optimism and enthusiasm as resembling the Hollywood musical genre of the kids getting
together in the barn to put on a show.[2] This mode is not the exclusive prerogative of the
historic avant garde, but it has continued to play a substantial, if not substantive, role in
contemporary art practices. In a recent article, Craig Bromberg elaborated what he calls that
collaborating 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 artist
Barbara Kruger who differentiated between the following initiatives.
Sometimes collaborations are about a sense of procedure, about concrete social
relationships-the conversational quality of day to day exchange. Others take place in the realm
of 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 like
that. 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-media
culture, and who has entirely abdicated the claim to a traditional, male, authorial voice of
individual uniqueness, Kruger is particularly well situated to characterize such differentiations.
Rather than reveling in the romantic sentiments of historic meetings, artistic affinities, and
kindred spirits, what she reveals are the the market forces that operate beneath the facades of
the joint collaborations of named entities.
The second perception of collaboration, which emphasizes a critical interrogation of the
processes of production through artistic practice, the loss of the so-called autonomy of the work
of art, and the subjugation of the heroic, individual artist to the cultural embeddedness of the art
work, is the one with which we are preoccupied here. The importance of Harrisons insistence
on a theory of consumption which masquerades as a theory of production is that it assumes the
point of reception, rather than the point of production, as an analytical vantage point. Thus it can
begin to dismantle the seeming contradiction between the cultural construction of tendencies for
stylistic group identities and the actual supremacy of the individual heroic artist within the same
modernist 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 developed
only the most limited theories of artistic production while allowing market values to construct an
extensive series of legitimating narratives that masquerade as a set of canonical masterworks
and the superior aesthetic values they represent. The second issue concerns the centrality of
the author to the discourse of art as a form of consumption. While historical periodization and
the random and erratic division of visual culture into named stylistic groupings continue to
operate as what Michel Foucault has termed dividing practices through which the institutional
organization of knowledge gains both its power and its internal coherence, both market values
and 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 affiliation
but on their attribution, beyond all doubt, to the hand of a named author, to their point of origin
within the creative consciousness of Romanticisms unique individual. This postEnlightenment
prestige of the individual has, in Roland Barthes analysis, rendered it logical that in literature it
should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached
the greatest importance to the person of the author. The author still reigns in histories of
literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of
letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of
literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his
life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that
Baudelaires work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Goghs his madness, Tchaikovskys
his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if
it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice
of a single person, the author confiding in us.[4]
Barthes wrote his famous radical essay, The Death of the Author, in 1968 when Modernism
was facing its most acute crisis and traditional Western culture was being subjected to one of
the 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 in
Europe and the United States. The invasion of Czechoslovakia, the intensification of the
anti-Vietnam War movement, the rise of international terror organizations aligned with nationalist
movements 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 activist
critique of Western democracy. Parallel to these movements, ethnic minority groups within
Western societies began organizing with the purpose of articulating separate political and
cultural identities and questioning the social and political systems which had excluded them on
their home ground, as in the case of the Black Panther movement in the United States.
Throughout the world the womens movement and feminism began to interrogate critically the
cultural and economic terms that worked toward the oppression of women across the
boundaries of class and race, and to articulate an alternative set of analytical methods based on
the recognition of gender difference. The importance of 1968 as an historical moment is that
issues of class, race, gender, and knowledge converged across a much wider set of allegiances
than had occurred previously within strictly national or cultural debates. The predominance of
mass-media culture and the emergence of its formulation as Counter Culture indicated the
degree to which everyone, across divergent nationalities and traditions, was to some extent
subject to the influence of a Western modernist ideology of progress, technology, and
universalism.
In France this critical revision interrogated not only inherited meanings but also the way they
had 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 traditional
narrative devices and codes of social acceptability. In Britain and the United States the many
artists affiliated with Pop Art took on the world of representation, conflating high art and
mass-media culture and acknowledging the centrality of the communications media in the
construction of visual worlds. Women artists began experimenting with autonomous art forms
such as performance, video, and actions which could work against the burdensome grain of
cultural tradition and serve to redefine some of its terms. In Europe, Australia, and the United
States 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 as
articulated by the German philosopher J urgen Habermas.
bq. By the public sphere we mean first of all the realm of our social life in which something
approaching public opinion can be formed. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in
every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body This process
marks an important transition from mere opinions (i.e., cultural assumptions, normative
attitudes, collective prejudices and values) to a public opinion which presupposes a reasoning
public, a series of public discussions concerning the exercise of power which are both critical in
intent 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. In
mobilizing cultural practices for political struggle Walter Benjamin decreed that the place of the
intellectual in the class struggle can be identified, or better chosen, only on the basis of his
position in the processes of production.[7] This critical interrogation of the processes of
production was pursued in the wake of the late 1960s through the introduction of collectivity, of a
non-individualist collaborating practice which affected a transition from art to artistic practice and
attempted to erode some of the market value invested in the unmediated relation between the
work and the named author. In the shift from what Barthes called Work to Text not only could
the 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 be
contained in a hierarchy, even in a simple division of genres. What constitutes the text is on the
contrary (or precisely) its subversive force in respect of the old classifications.[8] Here a model
begins to emerge for a mode of critical and interrogative artistic activity which could question the
very terms that could work against the grain of artistic creation. Furthermore, the emergent
theories of ideology which were sparked by Louis Althussers famous essay, Ideology and
Ideological State Apparatuses, produced models for the analysis of ideology as the lived
experience of everyday life rather than the expression of clearly articulated explicit political
doctrines. Such a form of lived experience was the production, display, criticism, and trading of
art which could no longer be wrenched out of the institutions which were covertly determining its
course. As Victor Burgin wrote, contrary to the dogmas of our new, dissent-free Romanticism,
the artist simply does not createinnocently, spontaneously, naturally-like a flowering shrub
which blossoms because it can do no other. The artist first of all inherits a role handed down by
a particular history, through particular institutions, and whether he or she chooses to work within
or without the given history and institutions, for or against them, the relationship to them is
inescapable.[9]
All of the strategies which make up this strand of collective and collaborating work have been
influenced by the legacy of Saussurian linguistics and by the critique of cultural hierarchies and
dominant 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 by
showing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without
there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutor. Linguistically, the
author is never more than the instance of writing, just as I is nothing more than the instant of
saying I: language known to a subject, not a person, and this subject, empty outside of the
very enunciation
which defines it, suffices to make language hold together, suffices that is to say, to exhaust
it.[10]
Barthes wrote this observation from within the linguistic legacy of the second half of the
twentieth century which has strived to revise traditional concepts of signification, working against
a realist tradition which viewed the sign as a transparent entity which allowed an unproblematic
access to the field of reference.[11] If language is perceived as is imagery, as a signifying
system which operates within the framework of the concept of discourse (i.e., the rules of
formation), then the author/artist can no longer be its subject. Instead we have evolved an
understanding that the author also functions within a certain set of rules of formation, the
discourse of artistic production. Thus, the demise of the culturally heroic author who exists
outside of the discursive formations of culture has brought about a recognition of a reflexive
artistic entity who occupies a set of subject positions vis it vis both culture and ideology. The
strategies of collaboration used by different artistic groups over the past twenty years vary
greatly. Their commitment, however, remains largely to reevaluate the ways in which meanings
are constituted in culture through the dual, interrelated framework of authorial subject positions
and the workings of the institutions of culture. A recent discussion of the work of Art & Language
states,
Art & Language [have] kept their project strictly within the proposition of how art comes to have
meaning and specifically, how their work functions in terms of meanings. A moment of
consolidation for the group, Art & Language exhibited their first index-a series of file cabinets
containing all the materials published or considered for publication in ArtLanguage .. . . This
labyrinthine installation can be understood as an index map where the theoretical domain within
Art & Language was constituted. This room of file cabinets materialized a critique of modern
arts idealist project and served as
a 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 place
within this communal and publicly posted system generated by quorums of readings. A
paradigm of the systematic and collaborating character of conceptual art in general and of Art &
Language in particular, the project provided a radical critique of Modernisms investment in
liberal humanism and the orthodoxy of the unfettered will of the indivdual which has traditionally
been understood as finding its release in art. [12]
Since then the linguistically inspired model has been further extended by feminist cultural
analysis and by the discourse on race. The work of the New York-based collective Guerrilla Girls
provides a particularly poignant example. While seemingly simple and theatrically effective as a
set of strategies aimed at exposing the inherent and pervasive discrimination against women
within the more official mainstream institutions of visual culture, theirs is in fact a subtle
reworking of some of the critical elements discussed so far using the tools of an analysis of
gender roles within cultural production. Thus, for example, they are one of the few groups who
mask their identity and carefully guard the confidentiality of their membership. While this could
be attributed to pragmatic motives concerning their vulnerability to various forms of pressure, it
is far more interesting as a radical strategic gesture against the invisible reconstitution of the
artist as subject and the extreme ways in which women artists, in particular, have been subject
to demeaning narratives which equate biography with the work produced. The unadorned and
simply presented bodies of information which the Guerrilla Girls research, display, and
disseminate-with shocking evidence of the way in which institutions of culture see themselves
as entirely divorced from the shifts and changes taking place within the very societies they
inhabit-gain great strength from their refusal to expose their personal identities and narratives
for 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 the
traditional way in which they could be incorporated, becoming traditional authorial entities.
Another strand of contemporary revision has come from the discourse on race and class
manifest in the work of Tim Rollins +K. 0. S. While a member of Group Material, another
collaborative effort whose work takes the form of a cultural bricolage which wrenches objects
out of the linguistic structures that constitute their meanings, thus achieving what Walter
Benjamin called the unfunctioning of form, Rollins claimed, what is rarely discussed (in the
world of art) is the crucial question of method in the production of radical art. The most
interesting new work is that which embraces social means of production and distribution. A
political art cant really be made at working people or for the oppressed. A radical art is one that
helps 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 social
disenfranchisement derives from both their class and race, Rollins has moved on to an
engagement with the facilitation of those traditionally privileged vehicles of expression as a
strategy in the formulation of counter-hegemonic, alternative identities. Although many of the
processes of interrogation which I have briefly sketched in this context have their genesis in the
severe crisis of Modernism following the social upheaval of the late 1960s, they must
nevertheless be firmly located within the sphere of the Postmodern. For it is there that the
politics of identity-in the extensive process of unnaming, in the insistence on unfixed and shifting
meanings, 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 perspective
is not simply the image of the person but an interrogation of the discursive and disciplinary
place from which questions of identity are strategically and institutionally posed.[14] The
enthusiastic celebration of collectivity has thus been transformed, rupturing the authority
previously held by the aura of the unique individual known as the artist without any attempt to
reinscribe it in an alternative, expanded group identity. While in some arenas the death of the
author facilitated the birth of the reader, in others it has begun to bring about the emergence of
an 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 Sylvesters introduction to the catalogue
Dada 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. J urgen Habermas, Structural Transformations in the Public Sphere (Cambridge,MA: MIT
Press, 1989).
fn7. Walter Benjamin, The Author as Producer, reprinted in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After
Modernism (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 (J anuary 1989), p. 24.
fn14. Homi K. Bhaba, Interrogating Identity, in The Real Me-Post-Modernism and the Question
of Identity, ICA Documents, no. 6 (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1989), p. 5.

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