Here's a follow-up to Brian Holmes' 21/10 posting on the Tate Modern
conference, Diffusions. This small conference looked at contemporary
artist collaborations in the light of 2 developments, first, the
trajectory of art since the 1960s into post-studio art practice, into
an art practice without traditional objects, in which the so-called
objects were indexical traces of a working process, an action, an
interaction. Second, the recent move (since the mid-1990s) into
what's been widely called a relational aesthetics, in which artist
and audience interact in games-like, often indeterminate activities
as art (this is a banal over-simplification but let it stand; go to
the Palais de Tokyo website for examples). So, then, at the start of
the 21st century, a new, interactive, participatory and apparently or
ostensibly political art reappeared that engaged with a very
different set of theories to that of the earlier 1990s - in
postcolonial art, for example. We need to revisit this to understand
the art world's 'political" artists, like Thomas Hirschhorn, whose
work incorporates audience interaction, the site as a place to use,
politics and collaborative art-making, usually against the backdrop
of citations of newer writings, usually Hardt and Negri's romantic
book, Empire.Two things to be very clear about out of this. First, all these
trajectories insist or depend in different ways, overt and covert, on
the preservation of the category art OR the preservation of the
institutions of art (museums, galleries, art magazines, documentas,
etc) as venues of choice, or what has been called platforms. Second,
within all this, artistic collaborations haven't necessarily entailed
the dissolution of art or the art object, nor has this been by any
means the dominant or even contending direction in art, its museums,
its galleries, its venues, its art schools, during the last few
years. Artist collaborations remain limited in number, not
necessarily connected with post-artwork activity. This is why the
conference was so interesting. Brian's groups, described in his
posting a few weeks ago, privileged a particular poignant method of
being an artist: an avant-garde idea of the artist as vanguard
leader, as participant at the head of social and political change.
His PowerPoint images included images of artist/street theatre
demonstrators at the big anti-globalization rallies in Europe and
North America, and he spoke passionately about the anachronistic and
regressive identities of institutions like our host, Tate Modern. The
problem of course, as our time-constrained discussions signaled, is
that this avant-garde role isn't necessarily linked with artist
collaboration (including with audiences, as in relational
aesthetics), though it may be marked by collective action and
structures. The second problem, without doubt, is that of
avant-gardism itself, which has been indissolubly complicit (most
recently by the great neo-Marxist art historian TJ Clark) with the
violence and coercion of Stalinism; art for the people; the artist's
job to serve the people; the artist as part of active bolshevist
cadres. The avant-garde nowadays in art has a pretty bad name as a
concept, for its historical genealogical link with left terror has
never been forgotten. One of the realizations artist after artist
great and small reluctantly came to from the 1920s on was that
artists don't have any bolshevist duties as such, they have choices
and the freedom to deny that bolshevist role, especially since
experience has shown the avant-garde's connection with (and
consumption by) Stalinism. The third problem for collective (as
opposed to collaborative) art production with anti-institutional aims
is the sheer confidence, power, inclusiveness, size, and even, yes,
generosity, of the world of contemporary art and its museums,
galleries and art fairs. Naked and lustful though that world appears
at its art fair coalface, it also incorporates and welcomes wide
audiences and the desires (foolish though they may be) of most
artists. The commitment of Tate Modern, for example, to our
conference did not represent any significant institutional response
from any high cultural level to the problem of emerging
anti-hegemonic artistic activities so much as the diffuse but genuine
(since funded with actually scarce cash) desire to represent all
types of activity to both general and specialist audiences, and to
work with universities and academics, not to give itself credibility,
but to give the participants credibility and exposure to a wider
audience; thus the collaboration with Wolverhampton University, with
whom the conference was planned, thus the absence of anyone like Nick
Serota, Tate's director, from the audience (he's not threatened by
conferences); thus the presence of a pleasing number of idealistic
younger artists. Similarly, my own experience as a curator and
trustee on contemporary art spaces shows me that the presence of
businessmen on art museum boards isn't evidence of control so much as
of art curators and director's attempts to relieve these people of
their money by way of donations and support. The presence of bio-tech
logos next to aged American surrealist sculptor Louise bourgeois on
an exhibition program, for example, doesn't mean anything so crass as
bourgeois legitimizing bio-tech, so much as the museum sponsorship
person finding a sponsor after the artist is chosen by curators.
Accurate event sequencing avoids confusion; the art world is riven by
corruption, but the stakes aren't high enough to justify conspiracies
past venality; true conspiracy dwarfs anything the art world can
offer. What I'm driving at is that the oppositional status of
collectivist group action within the art world (which means within
conferences such as Tate Modern's) exists solely as symbolic and
decorative-as a style, and even a potentially saleable one. This was
more or less the salient point of French sociologist Eve Chiapello's
presentation, for she was completely alert to the decorative
possibilities of oppositional avant-gardism.
For myself, the bankruptcy of avant-gardist models lies in the use of
art as instrumental-as the means to an end in which the end justifies
the means-and bohemia, collaboration or collective identities have
all to deal with this criticism, which is based on the necessity of
ethical action, a notion familiar to Buddhists, for example. This is
why I presented a paper on the difference between two models of
artistic collaboration. The first is the popularly held view of
collaboration as reconciliation, implying both profit and loss. This
bookkeeping sense of the word sees artistic collaboration as a
balance. A deficit in one part of the relationship is compensated by
a surplus somewhere else-a partnership or a cooperative to which
individuals bring something that can also be taken away. There is a
cultural problem implicit at the core of my insistence that
difference is not necessarily of foremost importance and I need to
anticipate this objection. I'm not arguing for naïve aestheticism,
nor equally do I think that artistic collaboration is a good in
itself. This is the problem-the problem of a non-aesthetic set of
criteria-that many contemporary artist groups in search of social
authenticity through interactivity are grappling with.Charles Green
--
Dr Charles Green
Senior Lecturer in Contemporary International and Australian Art,
School of Art History, Cinema, Classical Studies and Archaeology
University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia
tel 61 3 8344 4429 fax 61 3 8344 5563
email c.green*at*unimelb edu.au
http://www.sfca.unimelb.edu.au/profiles/charles-green/index.htm
Senior Curator Adjunct, 20th and 21st Century Art, National Gallery of Victoria
This email is confidential information for the attention of the named
addressee only and may contain information which is protected by
legal professional privilege and the law of confidentiality. If you
have received this email and you are not the addressee you are
requested to advise us immediately, delete the email from your system
and destroy any hard copies thereof. You are advised that the
distribution or copying of the email is unlawful and prohibited.