Dearraindrop, Left: "New Sync = 1", Middle: "O X DF", Right: "Works with Knobs, 2 Better" , Video Intercom, Electronics, Acrylic
Revealing the inner workings and emotions of the artist's mind through visual representation is romantic, traditional and - most importantly - marketable. The idiosyncracies of the individual have long been celebrated in the artistic practice. This is the establishment which collectivism intends to subvert.
Art collectives have an historical affiliation with the avant-garde and sociopolitical dissent. Today Artists Anyonymouss and Paper Rad, yesterday the Situationists International and Dadaists. The goals of such collectives have often been to stir up societal habits and to dissolve the barrier between art and everyday life through imagery, materials and techniques of intervention.
In the famed Notre-Dame Affair of 1950, the Lettrists (A French avant-garde collective) infiltrated a member dressed as a monk at an Easter mass. The member, Michel Mourre, read an anti-catholic pamphlet proclaiming God as dead. Seeking agitation soley, the act questioned authoritative positions and social moral standards. This type of reckless, unrestrained intervention is characteristic of early 20th century European avant-garde artists who acted out either politically, in protest of facist regimes or philosophically, in question of rationality, and many times both.
Art collectives today seem to fall into one of two categories, neither of which follows suit with this early 20th century model. While the Guerilla Girls and Otabenga Jones and Associates are sending out a highly focused and serious message about discrimination through works and projects that favor the message over the media, Paper Rad and Dearraindrop are shaking up societal habits with a more playful inspiration and technique.
Meanwhile the subjective, personal practices (a term I still favor despite Roberta Smith's recent disparagement) of contemporary artists indicate either a sort of solipsism or a yearning for communication tunneled through the lexicon of art. Both inspirations set the work apart from everyday life and therefore both reinstate the barrier between art and life and undercut the contemporary, global movement towards accessability and transparency of communication.
The subjective approach to a work either becomes a statement of solipsism itself or a personal exploration or reverie - the latter of which is quite common a manifestation today. Seeing elements of the external world as unjustified leaves an artist with either a lack of material world references to use in constructing their reality (besides a Zen like reflection of the world immediately and ephemerally around them) or an Idealist preference of pure conception over material.
Robert Morris, Card File, metal and plastic wall file mounted on wood, containing 44 index cards, 1962
Less literal in communication than conceptualism, works by artists such as Sara Sze, Paul Villinski and Chandra Bocci use debris and crass commercial items and transcend these materials into beauty, creating intuitive, rambling - even doodled - constructions or forms. This use of intuitive form indicates the artists' statement of the correlative between the organic functions of the mind and ultimate beauty (whether as a socially decided upon conception or a personal one).
Chandra Bocci, installation shot, mixed media
Though these works make reference to the commercial world of materials, and are therefore an admission of significance and meaning immanent in materials, the imagery is subjective. The mind uses imagery from the outside world only as it is peripherally absorbed into one's perception. The subjective realities created by these artists are manifestations of both the functions of the mind which organize the material world as well as of the autonomous intuition.
Just as installation and conceptual artists avoided the art market by creating works that resisted treatment as decorative items for a home, art collectives set out to resist the idea of art stardom which coheres splendidly with the exposure of the individual mind. As well, collectives avoid the economic structure of the art world by venturing into realms of project and performance based collaborations. But like so many of these movements that set out to subvert capitalistic processes, it's only a matter of time before the practice becomes spectacle in all its avant-garde glory and gets privatized via gallery representation.
For example, looking for critical information or some sort of mission statement by gelitin on their website is like looking for articles in Art Forum.
As the article Twelve Notes of Collectivism and Dark Matter, by Gregory Sholette in the current issue of Art Lies, commands before giving in to the stronghold of the institution:
Cut the power and storm the museum. Barricade its entrance with a Richard Serra sculpture. Cover its windows with Gerhard Richter paintings. Transform the sculpture garden into an organic produce cooperative; refurbish the boardroom to serve as a daycare facility; place the cafeteria under the supervision of homeless people.
In the days of waning optimism in unchecked acts of revolt, this passage is nostalgic and mocks the avant-garde ethos of early collectivism.
While individual artists are exploring their reality, art collectives are reflecting a social reality. Both individual artists as those discussed earlier and many contemporary art collectives use a sort of reverie in their excecution. Though collectives such as Paper Rad and Dearraindrop are radical both simply in being collectives and in creating pioneering projects that are not directly marketable, they are also not directly anything but flippant and teasing. They are both playfully contrary and mocking but with the historical backdrop of revolution, imbuing the work with a revolutionary tone no matter how the work operates otherwise. These collectives become more Radical Chic than radical.
The act of play does of course serve as a tool for agitation in the political context within which collectivism resides. Play agitates in being contrary to progress and has been an element in even the most political early 20th century Russian and German collectives. However Dadaists, for example, used play as one component of their questioning of rationality as a response to the attrocities of World War I and to the rigidity of the Weimar Republic - not as the central theme.
Is this contemporary reverie in both personal and collaborative works indicative of an inevitable complacency? When the tactics of subversion, revolution and anti-facism have all been played out and still total privatization envelopes our culture, are artists then inspired to play with the materials as a response to the captivity of the capitalistic machine?
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