Collaborative Arts

Nothing, I think, is more interesting, more poignant, and more difficult to seize than the intersection of the self and history - Linda Nochlin, describing the first “Women and Art” seminars at Vassar in 1969

Collaboration as Symptom

Artists appear in their art, voluntarily placing themselves center stage in self-portraits but also at the margins of all their other works, constructing themselves through brush marks, in signature style, by individual preferences, and through repeated motifs — in short, from the intersection of subjectivity with medium. As a basic tenet of connoisseurship, this seems obvious, but there are degrees of self-conscious intention that complicate this process, especially during the latter half of the twentieth century, for many artists have thought carefully about the way they code themselves into their art, manipulating the way they appear. This is not to suggest that artists are narcissistic, or that they are necessarily even interested in the politics of identity; rather, artists have always conceded and exploited the inevitability of implicit self-representation. Artists are thieves in the attic: They far from innocently try out different, sometimes almost forgotten identities in the chaotically organized attic of history, rummaging in dusty, dark rooms where variations of authorial identity are stored away from view. This runs counter to the conventional idea of the lonely artist passively waiting for inspiration’s light bulb to be turned on. Such a cliched figure is deeply embedded in media representations of artists, in market valuations based on authenticity and originality, and in so much public discourse that it is generally perceived as “normal.” If this is normal, then the deliberate, careful construction of authorial alternatives described in my book must be aberrant. Artistic collaboration is a special and obvious case of the manipulation of the figure of the artist, for at the very least collaboration involves a deliberately chosen alteration of artistic identity from individual to composite subjectivity. One expects new understandings of artistic authorship to appear in artistic collaborations, understandings that may or may not be consistent with the artists’ solo productions before they take up collaborative projects.

I propose that collaboration was a crucial element in the transition from modernist to postmodern art and that a trajectory consisting of a series of artistic collaborations emerges clearly from late 1960s conceptualism onward. The proliferation of teamwork in post-1960s art challenged not only the terms by which artistic identity was conventionally conceived but also the “frame” — the discursive boundary between the “inside” and the “outside” of a work of art. I would argue that artistic collaboration in the late 1960s and during the 1970s occupies a special position: Redefinitions of art and of artistic collaboration intersected at this time.

Just what, though, were the stakes in these different methods of collaboration? Who benefited, who got marginalized, who was eventually obliterated from the historical record? If, as I think, these teams re-created themselves as embodiments of textual mimicry, then we need to pay close attention to both artistic text and context. I will answer these questions through a very selective history of artistic collaborations after 1968emdash;specifically, those collaborations that involved unorthodox models of authorship-in a series of case studies. I focus on artistic collaborations in international art that came to notice in the 1970s, locating them within the evolution of conceptualism: conceptual art, Earth art, systems art, land art, body art, and many other stylistic labels. Because of this narrow focus, however, I have not written about many teams whom I admire greatly, including Group Material and Komar and Melamid.

Each of the three parts of this book looks at a different type of collaboration, for three overlapping modes of artistic teamwork developed from the mid-1960s onward. First, between 1966 and 1975, the future members of Art & Language constructed highly bureaucratic identities. Second, at the end of the 1960s, Boyle Family, the Poiriers, and the Harrisons separately developed close-knit collaborations based on marriage or lifetime, family partnerships. Finally, artist couples developed a third authorial identity effacing the individual artists themselves: From the start of the 1970s onward, Christo and Jeanne-Claude developed a transitional author figure that varied from traditional patriarchy, to a corporation, to a trademark; from 1969, Gilbert & George identified their artistic collaboration with their art; between 1976 and 1988, Marina Abramovic and Ulay consciously developed their “third hand.” These categories overlap to a considerable extent. The Poiriers, for instance, did evolve a third hand — their “architect/archaeologist.” They did not literally identify themselves with their art.

Aims, Methods, Objections, and Exclusions

A study of artistic collaborations is a telescope onto a larger study: that of a shift to a new understanding of artistic identity that emerged from modernist notions of artistic work-both radical and conservative-and progressed toward alternative and quite extreme authorial models, a long way from the simple paradigm of the single lone artistic originator and creator. The process problematizes straightforward suppositions about both artistic identity and the origin of postmodern art.

During the 1960s and 1970s, artists were testing the limits of art. It has been argued that they were involved in testing the limits of other domains as well, among them the studio and artistic work. The movement away from the lone artist was a journey similar to that from the studio. It was less shockingly literal, certainly, than Tony Smith’s famous New Jersey Turnpike drive–during which he asked himself why one would continue to make art in the studio–but it was equally radical. Looking closely at works by artistic collaborations, I discovered that artists found collaborations and other, modified types of authorship necessary to answer pressing questions facing contemporary art. What were they asking, and how did they go about framing these questions? This book hinges on a period that might be broadly called the 1970s, extending from the late 1960s into the first years of the 1980s. During that time, there was a significant sea change in both critical discourse and art, coinciding with the generally accepted but quite dramatic ascendancy of postmodern art and theory. Looking back, we see that the reinventions of artistic identity in the late 1960s and 1970s have largely been described through the narrative terms of the next decade’s victors–in this case, through the terms of postmodern critiques of representation. But are these terms sufficient to draw out the common threads underlying artists’ modifications of artistic authorship? Certainly, theories of postmodern art based on allegorical identifications, simulation, and appropriation are increasingly inadequate tools for evaluating art beyond the horizon of art canonized during the 1980s. It may be that the sheer institutional success of postmodern style, tempered by its reaction against a highly conservative form of neo-expressive postmodernity, bunkered artcritical discourse to certain types of difference. Many alternative trajectories emerge from a rereading of the 1970s, problematizing the conceptions of artistic identity that underlay the postmodern canon with its hall of mirrors. Artists in the 1990s inevitably began to widen these boundaries. Even allowing for the (illusory) arbitrariness of decade divisions, we are left with the impression of a greater discontinuity between the 1970s and the 1980s than we might expect and surprising signs of continuity between the artists I write about in this book and art in the later 1990s. There is another reason why it is important to revisit these collaborations: the suddenly compelling relevance of alternative 1970s art practices to 1990s conceptualist agendas.

In part I, I look at collaborations in early conceptual art, particularly the collaborations of Joseph Kosuth, Ian Burn, and Mel Ramsden. Joseph Kosuth called his reaction against self-expressive identity a reaction against “painting,” even though, to a surprising degree, he managed to construct a certifiable, well-policed signature style from the bare bones of typography. In his case, though, the clearly enunciated delegation of manufacture was crucial to the integrity of his work from the Second Investigation onward. Burn and Ramsden “framed” their reaction against self-expressive, individual artistic identity through the hierarchical metaphors and teamwork methods of bureaucracy, in jointly written, quasi-philosophical discourses surrounding (and contained within) the works. They thought that a zone between art and art theory could be created by a collective art of text-based critical propositions.

In part II, I look at collaborations based on a long-term, lifetime commitment and thus at couples and family units. In the years around 1970, Boyle Family, Anne and Patrick Poirier, and Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison reformulated artistic work as “fieldwork” to be undertaken through the agency of a collaborative structure identified with the family or the couple and articulated through determinedly anonymous styles in projects that would last for decades. Their anthropological archivism stands at the cusp of modernism and postmodernism, for they sought modes of production that might be genuinely decentered. However, because these artists were not part of an assault on Clement Greenberg’s modernism, they have to a large extent become historically invisible, since a debate in which they had little stake-the ideological critique of late modernism-has remained so paradigmatic. Their emphasis on the stakes involved in memory representation, however, was quite systematic, even if it did not affect their misleading legibility within more canonical debates as a mere footnote. The result was that their understanding that the crisis of visuality was also a prolongation of the memory crisis remained invisible to most critics. The proof of this is that alternative critical agendas, such as that of thenimportant critic Jack Burnham, have more or less disappeared from recent revisionist texts. However, these artists extend the conceptualist dogma that a work of art is about ideas that must be encoded in language. Their works contest the antivisual disposition attributed to 1970s conceptualisms.

In part III, I look at artistic collaborations where artists identified their collaboration as their art. I propose that the intersection of collaboration with a discourse of silence and inaccessibility shows us that representation is neither a transparent window onto authorial subjectivity nor sufficient to index the self. My method is to map Michael Fried’s terms of absorption and theatricality onto Gilbert & George’s and Marina Abramovh and Ulay’s collaborations. This clarifies why these artists’ actions ignored the viewer: Silence and unknowability, in combination with the complexities of double authorship, denied the expected economies of representation (specifically, the binary terms through which we habitually describe gender, pain, and experience). The works are complicated by this series of doublings, so much so that an understanding of the limits of identity as an index of the self becomes apparent. First, the artistic collaboration between Christo and Jeanne-Claude represents an incomplete transition from individual to corporate identity. Second, Gilbert & George represent a far more complex, troubling example of collaborative self-effacement. In their work the artists appear as three-dimensional sculptural objects of a particular type: as cult apparitions of a higher reality nominally governed by aesthetic appearance. Third, I’ll isolate Marina Abramovh and Ulay’s conception of artistic language’s primal ground, which they saw as voidness experienced, already in translation, as a body memory of rapture. The final chapter of part III defines the third identity that resulted from these collaborations, arguing that the artists’ doppelgangers were strategic but almost terminal means of shedding traditional signs of unwanted artistic personality-the conventional artistic identities increasingly under question during the 1970s.

The lonely individual artist is a historically specific figure. There are many studies of medieval authorship — of its frequent communality and anonymity — and of Renaissance workshops, with their complex, hierarchical divisions of labor and graded scales that individually defined an assistant according to his position in an atelier. Research into the nature of authorship — and not simply of attribution — in Renaissance and Baroque painting also renders our picture of great figures, specifically Rembrandt and Peter Paul Rubens, much more complex as we begin to understand the collective nature of the Dutch and Flemish studio enterprise¹. Thomas Crow’s studies of French neoclassical painting make Jacques-Louis David’s grand reputation seem to be the product of many hands and even of many signature styles². This research obviously inflects my study of artistic collaboration, for I take special account of collaborations that are not simply mergers of two “hands” into one and look instead at collaborations that manipulate the concept of signature style itself. Equally, not all artistic collaborations are interested in authorship; many collaborations construct works as if there is just one artist and no collective work. I have found, however, that few collaborative works failed to encode their dispersed authorship in specialist divisions of labor or in increases in the possible expenditure of labor. Almost all invented strategies in which knowledge of collaborative authorship was implicitly assumed in order to convince the audience. But of what?

Since the great changes in art during the 1960s, artistic identity has not been a straightforward given. It has been selected in good and bad faith, out of duplicity, or from acts of speaking for someone else. The categories of artistic collaboration and constructed, manipulated — as opposed to “natural” or individual — authorial identities overlap but are not the same. There are other forms of modified artistic identity that I could have logically written about — hoaxes and pseudonyms, for example — and though these fictional identities appear in certain of the collaborations I describe, they are not central to this book, though concealment and disappearance are.

Many short-term collaborations preserve each individual’s authorial signature style, even though the participating artists might all contribute to each area of a work; a good example is Andy Warhol’s collaboration with Jean-Michel Basquiat. But such short-term collaborations that preserve authorial style rarely occupy much more than an incidental position within an artist’s oeuvre. In another type of collaboration, also ignored in this book, dedicated and highly skilled craftsmen or technicians, who must be considered more than assistants, collaborate over a long period of time with an artist who nevertheless is given sole credit. Ian Hamilton Finlay and Frank Stella are cases in point, for each artist worked with master craftsmen in order to realize works that would have been otherwise impossible. Different types of collaboration emerged in Europe and North America during the early to middle 1990s: first, the collaborative category of twins and siblings (the Starn Twins, the Wilson Sisters, and Jake and Dinos Chapman, among many other twins who work together); second, the longterm collective with a relatively large and fluid membership (for example, Group Irwin, Dumb Type, and Tim Rollins and K.O.S.; this type of collaboration is similar in structure to Art & Language of the 1970s); third, complicated authorial fictions in which individual artists pose as collaborative groups (including Scottish artist Peter Hill’s Museum of Contemporary Ideas, Dutch collective Seymour Likely, and Los Angeles artist David Wilson, who is director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology). Several artist teams came to prominence before the period I describe, including major figures whose production continued well into the 1990s (Ed and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje Van Bruggen), but I do no more than allude to these artists; nor do I discuss the ongoing and complex production of post-1975 Art & Language, about which much has been written. I ignore the many collaborations that surfaced in the 1980s, including Jones and Ginzel, TODT, Clegg & Guttman, McDermott & McGough, or Gran Fury, and the reader is directed to the important waves of collaborations by Russian artists during the 1980s and 1990s (for example, Medical Hermeneutics)³.

Two important objections might be made to the way I treat my limited number of case studies. First, this project might be misinterpreted as arguing that something inherent in all texts — textuality — is also literally embodied in collaborations and that collaborations are therefore in some way a privileged form. After all, the few critics who have written about artistic collaboration have asserted that behind an unexpectedly large number of authors are unseen collaborators, usually female partners. This is more or less the position taken by the book edited by Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron, but their overpersonalization simplifies the more complex issue of intention and identity⁴. Unlike such writing, my book does not rely at all upon the excavation of previously unexposed joint works, though it is clear in two of the teams I discuss — Boyle Family and Christo and Jeanne-Claude — that the patriarchal name was for a long time credited with the work of a partnership. The teams in this book were chosen for another reason, and definitely not to assert the centrality of collaboration within the corpus of early postmodern art. Nor are the artists interesting simply because they worked collaboratively. Collaboration has not in itself been a radical act since early modernism, when Russian constructivists or the French surrealists, for vastly different reasons and in different media, used artistic collaboration to escape the constricting consequences of existing individual production methods.

A second criticism is more difficult for me to answer: that these artistic teams are isolated figures, that my choice of artists is idiosyncratic and unrepresentative, and that within the wider held of post-1968 art their relevance is limited. Certainly, the artists in this book are unusual, and their works, in part because of their collaborative production, have been difficult to categorize. The central focus of my discussion, though, is not the enumeration of strange artists’ working processes or a critique of their marginality. It is, rather, the need to unravel the enigma of alternatively constituted “authors” and their link to the crisis of artistic representation, which is also a crisis in artistic intention. Conceptual art is an appropriate starting point because conceptualist collaborations were not simply the result of a fusion of voices but were implicit and highly intentional products of a textual version of the “expanded field.”

The literature on artistic collaboration in post-1960s art is at first sight surprisingly scant, but it indicates that the second objection, at least, is unfounded, as does the exploding corpus of literature on Marina Abramovic. There are a couple of exhibition catalogs and a few feature articles on collaboration in journals, including most notably an Art Journal issue on collaborations between artists and writers, and a separate body of literature on each of the artists about whom I write⁵. In 1984, Cynthia McCabe curated Artistic Collaboration in the Twentieth Century for the Hirshorn Museum (Washington, D.C.). Although the exhibition catalog is an interesting sourcebook, it seeks to prove its premise — that “artistic collaboration has been a vital component of avant-garde development” — by demonstrating the ubiquity rather than the significance of collaboration.6 The catalog for curators Susan Sollins’s and Nina Castelli Sundell’s exhibition Team Spirit focuses on post-1970s collaborations, and it includes Irit Rogoffs comprehensive and eloquent essay “Production Lines,” which identifies structuralist theories of authorship as central to the work of understanding artistic collaboration⁷. First, Rogoff identifies a positivist strain in art criticism through which collaboration can be viewed as an “expansion” of the field of art, thus demonstrating the ineffable inventiveness of the human spirit. Modernist artists worked in revolutionary collaborations and subversive collectives, but these projects were invariably recuperated in the literature by the cult of individual genius. As she observes, “[T]his concept of collaboration is extremely 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”⁸. Second, she suggests that collaborations be seen as highly significant practices within both modernism and postmodernism, because the practice of subjugating the individual signature is a paradigmatic interrogation of artistic production.

Accounts of literary collaborations in relation to theories of authorship are both more intriguing and more rewarding. In Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius, Jack Stillinger presents an account of editorial interventions in English literature from William Wordsworth onward, focusing on Wordsworth, John Keats, Samuel Coleridge, and T. S. Eliot (in the latter case, analyzing Ezra Pound’s modifications to The Waste Land)⁹. Stillinger rehearses Roland Barthes’s essay “Death of the Author.” But he literally assumes that this essay legitimizes his thesis that collaborative practices will be found behind many famous authors, an approach that has severe shortcomings, to say the least: It remains oblivious to the unorthodox surplus “author” constituted by collaborative authorship; instead of one solitary genius, he substitutes two. A more useful distinction — between constructed artistic identity as strategy and as a universal textual property — is usefully expounded in Michael Wood’s study The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction¹⁰. Wood describes a writer’s “signature” as the characteristic signs and tropes by which readers recognize the identity of writers. This signature, he argues, is the writer’s visible subjectivity; but “style,” on the other hand, is the more complex deployment of tropes, metaphors, structures, and devices within which signature is contained. Even if we acknowledge Barthes’s, Michel Foucault’s, and Jacques Derridá’s revelations about reading, this does not, of course, mean that authors are dead or destined to disappear. Instead, authors may often be conspiratorial when they are absent, for their signatures may be as carefully constructed as their styles. Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit develop a related insight of great subtlety in their study of Michelangelo da Caravaggio’s “enigmatic signifiers”, that is, his portrayal of enigmatic desire and of “the ‘concealment’ of an unmappable extensibility of being”¹¹.

In many of the collaborative works discussed in this book, the signs of personality and subjectivity were deliberately and thoroughly suppressed. It can certainly be argued that the relativizations of stable authorial identity by postmodern, structural, and poststructural theorists, especially Barthes and Foucault, inevitably lead to the conclusion that all authors are culturally or socially constructed from other texts. One might naively then conclude that these constructions are “fictional”; to do so, however, would be to conflate a theory of cultural reception with a strategy of artistic production and to confuse an ethic for artists with an analysis of art. But collaborations did construct themselves as texts, elaborating self-consciously chosen, modified authorial identities.

Collaborations and modifications of authorship existed in modernist art and were often linked with the marginal — with the alternative modernist stream that includes surrealism’s collectively produced “exquisite corpses” and dada actions. A circle of authors connected with the journal October — particularly Rosalind Krauss, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Yve-Alain Bois, and Hal Foster — has gradually revised our understanding of that modernism and post-1960s art alike, drawing a new picture of twentieth-century art, a picture in which the enigmatic Marcel Duchamp quietly sits at the epicenter¹². In relation to the decades that preoccupy me here, a younger generation of scholars, including Jessica Prinz and Caroline Jones, has since begun to patiently analyze and periodize the 1960s and 197Os¹³. Charles Harrison has argued, to some effect, that Foster’s and Krauss’s books represent a new homogenizing voice of centralizing logic, even though they include a far wider methodology and canon than the formalist narrative. Harrison himself, through his own writing and his work as part of the artistic team Art & Language, has a considerable investment in the periodization of art history after 1960. He has also eloquently described the complications of authorship and artistic identity in modernist art, and there is also considerable force in Harrison’s regionalist arguments¹⁴. Postcolonial theorists have also discussed the mechanisms of power and translation, particularly the ability of subjects to reconstruct identity when they move across cultural and national borders¹⁵. For the theoretical underpinnings of concepts of mimicry developed in my later chapters, the writings of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, and Geeta Kapur suggest that the deconstructive analysis of postmodernism and, implicitly, modernism reinscribed the conceptual boundaries of the West onto the colonized periphery¹⁶. Further, Edward Said observes in Culture and Imperialism that postcolonial authorship often moved away from a stable idea of the original author¹⁷.

Art and Identity

In the course of this book, I will invert the terms of previous accounts in order to see the 1970s from a different perspective. For example, during the later 1960s, claims were made that contemporary art — and especially the emerging conceptualisms — would “alter” its audience. These claims centered on the perceptual changes induced by viewer participation in phenomenological inquiries as they were supposedly incarnated in conceptualist artworks. Harald Szeemann’s early exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (Kunsthalle [Bern] and then at the Institute of Contemporary Art [London] in 1969) captured this aspiration¹⁸. Charles Harrison republished his catalog essay in Studio International, writing:

Art changes human consciousness. The less an art work can be seen to be dependant, in its reference, on specific and identifiable facts and appearances in the world at one time, the more potent it becomes as a force for effecting such a change¹⁹.

I contend in this book the reverse: that the demands of contemporary art changed the artist. Artists examined the shape and limits of the self, redefining artistic labor through collaborations. To paraphrase Linda Nochlin’s eloquent words at the start of this introduction, we must begin to look closely at how artists responded to the intersection of the self and history.

Notes

¹ See, for instance, Yael Even, Artistic Collaboration in Florentine Workshops (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms International, 1984); Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Market (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

² See Thomas Crow, Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995).

³ In the late 198os and early 1990s, perhaps in response to magazine editors’ searches for new artistic novelties, there was a small spate of survey articles on alternative modes of artistic work. These include Eleanor Heartney, “Combined Operations,” Art in America 77, no. 6 (June 1989): 140-47: Glenn Zorpette, “Dynamic Duos: Artists Are Teaming Up in Growing Numbers,” Art News 93, no. 6 (summer 1994): 564-69. Heartney surveys collaborations by couples in U.S. and European contemporary art, including Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, TODT, the Starn Twins, McDermott & McGough, and Clegg & Guttman, concluding that there are two types of artistic duos: those who work with research and high technology, combining forces in order to deal with large tasks and an excess of information, and those who work politically, producing implicit or explicit critiques of the art system. Zorpette’s article is surprisingly thorough, citing “Artistic Collaboration in the Twentieth Century” essayist Robert Hobbs on the death of originality and interviewing the Harrisons, Poiriers, Bechers, Starns, Kienholzes and Komar and Melamid. As might have been expected from the list, Zorpette’s focus is on couples who work as teams. He hypothesizes about gender roles in collaborations, asserting that female partners tend to be managers. Although considerable critical attention was lavished on new British collaborations in the mid-199os, they were rarely considered in terms of artistic collaboration. One exception was the Southampton City Art Gallery’s exhibition Co-Operators; see Godfrey Worsdale, curator, Co-Operators, exhibition catalog (Southampton, England: Southampton City Art Gallery, 1996); for a review of this exhibition, see David Barrett, “Co-Operators,” Frieze, no. 2,8 (May 1996): 64.
fn4. Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., Significant Others. Creativity and Intimate Partnership (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993). 201, 202 Notes to Introduction

⁵ See Debra Bricker Balken, “Editor’s Statement,” Interactions between Artists and Writers, special issue, Art Journal 52, no. 4 (winter 1993): 16-17; Bricker Balken mentions a model of collaborative authorship developed in this book: the third hand, or the “third mind,” writing that “William Burroughs and Bryon Gysin have argued that through the process of collaboration an anonymous and disembodied voice is created” (Bricker Balken, “Editor’s Statement,” i6).

⁶ Cynthia Jaffee McCabe, “Artistic Collaboration in the Twentieth Century: The Period between Two Wars,” in Cynthia Jaffee McCabe, curator and ed., Artistic Collaboration in the Twentieth Century, exhibition catalog (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1984), 15-44,15.

⁷ Tnt Rogoff, “Production Lines,” in Susan Sollins and Nina Castelli Sundell, curators and eds., Team Spirit, exhibition catalog (New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1990), 33-39.

⁸ Ibid., 33.

⁹ Jack Stillinger, Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1991).

¹⁰ Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); for a discussion of this book, see John Banville, “Nabokov’s Dark Treasures,” New York Review of Books 42, no. 15 ( October 1995): 4-6.

¹¹ Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio’s Secrets (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998), 39.

¹² For this study, particularly see Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985); Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993); Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic.. Essays on Postmodern Culture (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983); Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).

¹³ Jessica Prinz, Art Discourse/Discourse in Art (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the PostwarAmerican Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Jones addresses two stereotypical constructions: Documentary films and interviews reflect the status of the studio as a crucial locus of artistic identity; and art was the product of lone, male individuals, solely responsible for their work, who were divorced from the constraints of the world outside their studios.

¹⁴ See Charles Harrison, “The Conditions of Problems,” in his Essays on Art & Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), 8z-i2,8. For a historicization of the avant-garde, see Raymond Williams, “Metropolitan Perceptions and the Emergence of Modernism” (1985), reprinted in his The Politics ofModernism.. Against the New Conformists, ed. Tony Pinkney (London: Verso, 1989), 37-48.

¹⁵ See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Chatto and Windus, 1993), 400.

¹⁶ See Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990); Homi K. Bhabha, “The Other Question: Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Marcia Tucker, ed., Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 71-87; Geeta Kapur, “When Was Modernism in Indian Art?” Journal ofArts and Ideas, nos. 27-28 (March 1995): 105-26.

¹⁷ Said, Culture and Imperialism, 400.

¹⁸ Harald Szeemann, curator and ed., When Attitudes Become Form: Works-Concepts — Processes-Situations — Information: Live in Your Head, exhibition catalog (Bern: Kunsthalle, 1969), unpaginated.

¹⁹ Charles Harrison, “Against Precedents,” Studio International 178, no. 914 (September 1969): 9o; the essay does not appear in the earlier Bern catalog.