General Introduction to Collectivity in Modern Art
(continued 1, 2) by Alan Moore

After the Second World War, there had been a resurgence of collectivity among artists in Europe, as transnational groups formed in various countries to reinvent the avant-garde. These formations included the neo-expressionist painters of CoBrA, concrete poets of the Lettrist International, anarcho-communist theoreticians of the Situationist International, the Imaginist Bauhaus and the Viennese Actionists. These groups of artists, poets, architects, filmmakers and theorists took up the heritage of the Surrealists and executed numerous collaborative projects. Surrealism itself, a movement widely seen as decrepit in its later phases, had nevertheless become very useful to post-colonial artists and women.

In this parade of the collectivized neo-avant-garde, Fluxus followed Dada. Other artists formed collectives which emulated the Constructivist example, like those in Latin America. Some of these groups, like Zero in Europe, moved into technology art – kinetic, electronic, systems-based, and early work with computers. Collectives in the U.S. like USCO and Pulsa made work that paralleled the research and development interests of advanced industry, government and academia.

The May events in Paris '68 were picturesque, and they galvanized public attention in the west. The spectacle of bourgeois life as Situationist theorist Guy Debord described it had been expertly interrupted by a mass event, a rising of multitudes -- students joined by workers, and those kind of jobless young hippies the Dutch called the “Provotariat.”

In Paris artists rushed to the national fine arts school to set up an Atelier Populaire which turned out over 300,000 street posters, and the Situationists’ messages were carried to the street in the form of provocative graffiti by the Enragés – the enraged ones.

But the event that probably galvanized the most collectivity in the Americas was Cuba’s 1959 revolution. The new government moved to reconstruct their society from mafia rat pack stomping ground to people’s paradise of cultural and educational opportunity. The victory of Fidel Castro inspired artists throughout Latin America, and the near-simultaneous arising of the U.S. Civil Rights movement to put an end to southern apartheid galvanized artists across this country.

Oppression is the laboratory of collectivity, and in the ghettoes of U.S. cities, Black Panthers, Young Lords and Brown Berets formed militant revolutionary political collectives that drew many members from youth gangs. Artists of color responded to this broad based nationalist organizing by forming exhibiting societies, mural collectives and centers to carry out cultural education. Mao’s 1968 Cultural Revolution in China buoyed these movements and introduced new techniques into the repertory of collective method, especially consciousness raising in groups, which became a key tool of the feminist movement.

Much of this cultural collectivity came into public view in New York with the founding of the Art Workers Coalition in 1969. This group began with a spectacular protest action at the Museum of Modern Art which was closely covered in the New York Times, Village Voice and the East Village Other. The AWC was an anti-hierarchical, democratically open organization of artists. They drew up an agenda to transform the artworld and pressure museums to change. The demands of the group were grounded in the civil rights struggle -- equal exhibition opportunities for artists of color and women, and expanded legal rights for all artists. This reform agenda was summarized, refined and deranged during “Open Hearings” in which artists and critics spoke.

The Art Workers Coalition was started by cosmopolitan “tech-artists” and included critics, minimal and conceptual artists, painters and sculptors. ``Destruction artists'' committed to street theater formed the Guerrilla Art Action Group as a fraction within the AWC.

The Art Workers Coalition was a crucible for institutional change within the art world. Like a “great spinning wheel,” as Jon Hendricks called it, the AWC spun off and recirculated other artists’ groups. These included the band of Puerto Rican artists who came to found El Museo del Barrio and the group of feminists called Ad Hoc Women Artists which struck the Whitney Museum. Faith Ringgold recalled the scene at the coalition meeting space Museum: "There was this big sort of loft space and … all the artists sat around in a circle and you brought flyers of whatever your thing was… To find out what was really going on in the art world, you had to go … down there to the AWC [meeting] and see what was happening. Everybody came. I mean, the famous and everybody mixed in.”( Archives of American Art, interview with Faith Ringgold by Cynthia Nadelman, September 6-October 18, 1989.)

The AWC marked the beginning of a long series of collective art groups in New York. These included producing groups, political organizations, innumerable artist-founded exhibition spaces and service organizations, and hybrid combinations of these. Again, although I’ve only studied New York, this movement was national and international, although how it unfolded is still not clear. The Art Workers Coalition itself split in early 1970. One large faction was swallowed up by the anti-war movement and soon ceased to exist, while another group called itself the Art Workers Community. This fraction of the AWC persisted for many years as a service organization, running health insurance, a credit union and the Art Workers News.

The principal collective construction of New York City artists in the 1960s and ‘70s however, was the downtown community of Soho. Soho was carved out of a declining factory district; an area slated for urban renewal – that is, demolition and rebuilding. The cross-town expressway planner Robert Moses had envisioned was strenuously resisted by neighborhood coalitions including many artists. Fluxus artists played a key role in the process of inhabiting and saving Soho through the Lithuanian émigré George Maciunas. Maciunas was the New York Fluxus chef d’ecole, inspired by Lef, the ultra-revolutionary group of Russian Constructivists. He ran a “Fluxshop” to sell the group’s signature artists’ multiples. He also began to organize co-ops for his compatriots to live in the downtown warehouse district of Soho. Between 1966 and 1975 he did 15 of them – without filing prospectuses, which indemnify capital and add hugely to a co-op’s cost. For a time, Maciunas lived in hiding from the state attorney general in the basement of the Anthology Film Archives.

The Anarchitecture group at 112 Greene Street most clearly expressed the collective spirit of that model artists’ space. Anarchitecture included artists (mostly sculptors), musicians and dancers, most active among them the late Gordon Matta-Clark. In his own sculpture, Matta-Clark relied on the collectivity of the construction work crew.

The exhibition spaces opened by artists in the Soho community were quickly institutionalized by state and federal funds. They became today’s demi-institutional alternative spaces for contemporary art exhibition.

The English Art & Language group of conceptual artists began to meet in New York in the mid-1970s. They launched a sustained collaborative critique of formalist art criticism and the structure of art markets and institutions. With the convening of the group Artists Meeting for Cultural Change, Art & Language’s process of discussion and critique was brought to a local public of artists and activists. Journals like The Fox, Red Herring and the Anti-Catalog reflect this moment.

Collaborative Projects, the artists’ organization I was involved with, came together during the Punk music movement, and so its early group shows were perceived by critics, as “punk art – three chord art anyone can play.” More to the point than stylistics were the structures of collectivity that informed the group – the rock and roll ensemble, and the film crew. Many in early Colab were filmmakers, inspired by Warhol who started a Factory to one-up Claes Oldenburg who only had a store. Colab’s “glamor faction” as we called them admired Warhol’s corporate appropriation of the bohemia drag and drug life. Others in the group were more straight arrow. My friends admired Fashion Moda, the South Bronx art space which broke the graffiti art of the emerging hip-hop culture to the downtown avant-garde. We started ABC No Rio on the Lower East Side in emulation of Fashion Moda, then passed the place off to successive managements until today it really is what we so quixotically envisioned in 1980 – an anarchist free space, run by a collective with close ties to the publishing group Autonomedia.

Colab is remembered in art history for the Times Square Show, a groundswell exhibition of popularly accessible socially concerned artworks held in a former erotic massage parlor. But more influential at the time was the exhibitionary reprise with international media flourishes called New York New Wave at P.S. 1. The curator Diego Cortez essentially did to Colab what the music industry did to Punk when Sire Records redubbed it New Wave – he cleaned up the scene so its products would be market ready.

The 1980s was a sort of golden age of artists’ groups. Genuine self-described producing collectives emerged, groups which made of their coherence a point of principle and purpose, and in the process greatly refined the models of artistic collectivity. With the rise of conservative governments under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the left went on the defensive.

Political Art Documentation and Distribution (PADD) in New York quickly became an organizing and archiving resource for a network of groups in the United States which worked under the banner of cultural democracy. Today these archives are in the Museum of Modern Art library. PADD produced work as well, regular lectures and discussions, performances and projects. Among these was Not For Sale, propagandizing on city streets against the gentrification of the Lower East Side, then becoming known as the East Village. They often worked in tandem with Group Material on broad based cultural organizing efforts like the Artists Call Against U.S. Intervention in Central America.

Resistance to the New Right agenda became urgent when the AIDS epidemic turned a civil rights crisis for gay people into a struggle for survival. ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) included numerous action cells of artists, collectives which made graphics and video for the AIDS struggle. One of these, Gran Fury, was named for the New York Police Department’s favorite model car for undercover work. These groups used art institutions as a base to bring their message to the public. They worked like advertising agencies for their cause, laying the basis for far more sophisticated collective cultural production in social service.

Also during the early 1990s, RepoHistory evolved from PADD to become a public art collective specifically concerned with the artistic recovery of lost pasts. Their sign project, marking sites of past conflicts like the location of old New York’s slave auctions were important in helping turn public historical representations towards a reflection of this nation’s often uncomforting past.

This outline must sound to some suspiciously like a course syllabus. Such was not my intention. Still it has seemed to go the way of many survey courses, we run out of time without discussing much of the last 30 years, and nothing of the last 10. This is a period of remarkable growth and differentiation of artists’ collectivities – Group Material, Guerrilla Girls, Border Arts Workshop, RTMark, Etoy, Rhizome just to name a few -- is the subject I was signed on to cover here, and I hope you can forgive me for having neglected it. If you still feel I have cheated you, read Lucy Lippard on the 1980s and ‘90s. She has written on the work of these groups, since she was central to many of them.

I’ll say generally about this period that artists build their organizations and collectives in the space between two chairs – the progressive movement and art institutions. Progressives are concerned with peace, social justice and economic democracy, the fate of the powerless and the voiceless oppressed. Art is nice, but you can’t eat roses. Art institutions care about maintaining a consensually validated cultural heritage – that is, mounting blockbuster exhibitions. They are also conscientiously enlarging the civil society of liberal democracy, since elites too need visions of possibility.

The ground between the street and the museum has always been narrow, and it frequently vanishes. Just now this space seems to be enlarging, as a movement of peoples arises worldwide to oppose the excesses of globalizing corporate rule. A very visible part of this movement uses tactics derived from the Situationists, Provos, Diggers and Yippies of the 1960s. And, through the medium of the worldwide web, this movement is visible to itself as never before.

So two of the preconditions of successful activist artistic collectivity are in position – new communications technology favoring group work, and a burgeoning social movement.

Yet the forces of reaction are rising. The enterprise of war is exciting both the poorest and the richest, as unemployed men rush to join armies and industrial-age extractive industries gleefully stir the stinking antique soup made from the bones of Gaia.

And now my aside, for 68er Daniel Cohn-Bendit who today is a Green, and member of the Gerrman Parliament - It’s a clear matter of survival to grow down human consumption, and move toward a bioregionally based conservation economy. What stands against this is precisely global capital –, the monetization of every resource which presents a distorted template of the human project. Art as it imagines alternative possibilities, and artists as they make work and live their lives outside a strictly monetized economy can provide leads towards this better world.

To return to the lovely arrangements of flowers at the Metropolitan Museum with which I began, artists’ collectives do not so much make the flowers as the soil. And the soil is not usually seen in the museum. Collectives do not supply generous quantities of the things we delight in, the idols through which we express our love of art. Artists’ collectives do not make objects – they make changes. They make situations, opportunities, realizations, understandings. They work with our desires, and these have profound implications for the objects of art. Collectives work on the public relation to art. They work on the problem of the audience. They work to keep the experience of art collective, rather than ceding all territory to solipsistic reverie and the reification of investment capital.

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