Team Spirit
Most forms of art-theater, film, dance, architecture, music-are inherently collaborative. With rare exceptions, all involve the participation of more than one individual. Only those forms of art-such as literature, painting, sculpture, and musical composition-that we think of when we speak of the author, artist, or composer are generally taken to be the work of one extraordinary human being. But in fact, this was not always so. The concept of the isolated genius emerged in the Renaissance along with capitalism and, while most writing or musical composition seems indeed to be a solitary endeavor, every mode or style of visual art can be made collaboratively.
A collaboration can reflect the personality of a single artist as it did in the studio of Rembrandt where, according to recent scholarship, the marks of the Master’s most intimate subjectivity-brushstrokes, psychological insight, impasto, ‘touch’-turn out to have been applied at times by hands other than his own. Thus, the one artist who has always been thought of as unique, as a particularly subjective kind of genius, seems to have engaged in a form of corporate art making. In this case, the collaboration retained the name and the characteristic of its dominant member, Rembrandt1. But a collaboration can also generate a completely new artistic personality. A remarkable group of fourteenth-century Sienese paintings, once thought to be the work of Sassetta, are now attributed to an unknown artist identified as the Master of the Osservanza. These paintings were probably produced in the workshop of Vico di Luca, perhaps in collaboration with Sassetta and the young Sano di Pietro. The group of works assigned to the Master of the Osservanza is so internally consistent, the collective personality so distinctive and so unlike that of its conjectured participants, that in the absence of definitive documentation it still seems as though the artist might eventually be proved to have been one person2. Whatever his antecedents, the Master of the Osservanza is, to all intents and purposes, an individual-a meta-artist–an entity greater than and different from the sum of its parts. It is this sort of collaboration that is the subject of our exhibition.
Since the mid- to the late-1960s, collaboration as a mode of production and self-definition has become increasingly visible in the international art world. Even excluding groups of individual artists who assume a temporary collective identity for specific projects, such as Colab, the feminist Guerrilla Girls, or the AIDS activists Gran Fury, and those who work primarily in inherently collaborative media such as performance or video, the number of partnerships and artist-teams is now far too great to include all of them in a single comprehensive exhibition. In Team Spirit, we have chosen to focus on collaborations which are sustained by the existence of a collective persona that has been operative over a prolonged period of time, in which the individuals as pairs or groups have had no substantial career outside the collective context.
Working in an art world accustomed to value art as the expression of a single, powerful, and original ego, the collective entities represented in this exhibition operate as metaartists. They practice a kind of cooperative individualism; their works possess the qualities of originality and particularity of style that characterize the twentieth-century artist.
Cubism, an earlier instance of a collaborative phenomenon, was the creation of Picasso and Braque. Those artists, like so many early modernist collaborators, chose not to merge their identities but to conceive of their joint activity, as did critics and scholars, as the pioneering of a new movement. Thus, the movement had a name-Cubism-and the style was adopted and elaborated on by its followers, but each painting was the work of a single artist. The movement was collaborative; the works were not.
Both the Dadaists and Surrealists explicitly encouraged joint artistic activity through their self-conscious engagement in the collaborative dynamic that generated artistic innovation. For the Dadaists, performance, collage, and photomontage were particularly adaptable to joint activity. Performance, for the Dadaists, was often a political gesture, while for the Surrealists the game of the “exquisite corpse” involved the creation of a single image from a sequence of drawings by several artists, none of whom could see the work of those who preceded them. The creative ferment of these avant-garde groups tended to ignore distinctions between media, including distinctions between visual art, literature, and theater.
The associations among artists who elaborated new stylistic and aesthetic theories and pioneered new visual vocabularies in the first part of the twentieth century provide important and direct antecedents for much of the collaborative activity of the past twenty-five years. Indeed, the creation of any new style or theory of art which embodies a shift in the social and intellectual climate of its own time may be seen as the result of the collective activity of many minds. In a broad sense, all stylistic innovation is a collaboration with the past: without the old, the new cannot be born.
Although the interactive creativity that sparked various earlier art movements involved collaborative dialogue, the artists who joined together to formulate new ways of making art were highly individualistic. Despite many instances of joint activity, there were relatively few long-term collaborations of the kind we see today. There are some notable exceptions in the mid-nineteenth century, the photographers Hill and Adamson and Southworth and Hawes, and two in the early part of this century- Kukryniksy, and Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Beginning in the 1920s in the Soviet Union, Kukryniksy-a three-person collective-acted as an artist-entity, political cartoonist, and illustrator of classic Russian literature. As a Socialist Realist collective and political cartoonist, the group achieved considerable fame. Its members, now in their nineties, have only recently ceased to create art together. Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, each recognized individually as a substantial artist, were precursors of the kind of husband-wife collaborations which were eventually articulated many years later by the impetus of the feminist movement of the 1970s. It was only then that the equality of the working relationships between artistmarriage partners gained a new validity. While the jointly signed works of Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin or Claes Oldenberg and Coosje van Bruggen acknowledge the wives’ contributions, the character of earlier works by the husbands in these pairs dominates. But the work of Bernd & Hilla Becher, begun in the late 1950s, of Anne and Patrick Poirier, or Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison reveals a full merging of artistic identities. The model for each of the couples’ work is that of a research team: the Bechers as archivists of vanishing industrial architecture, the Poiriers as archaeologists, the Harrisons as ecologists, documenting in exquisitely poetic images man’s impact on the environment3.
The works of art in this exhibition are always presented as joint productions; most of the artist-pairs sign their works with both their names: Wallace & Donohue, Komar & Melamid, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Gilbert & George, Jones and Ginzel. The groups generally adopt a collective nom-deplume-Art & Language, IFP, IRWIN, FASTWURMS. Thus, each pair or group firmly asserts its collective nature. The collective personas of these artists originated in many different kinds of associations. The artist-pairs may be couples-heterosexual and conventionally married like the Bechers, the Poiriers, Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, or Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. They may be homosexuals like Gilbert & George or McDermott & McGough, lesbian feminists like Martha Fleming and Lyne Lapointe, identical twins like Doug and Mike Starn, or close friends and partners like Komar & Melamid or Fischli and Weiss. The teams may be nuclear families like Boyle Family, collectives like Seymour Likely, FASTWURMS, and General Idea, or groups like Art & Language or Tim Rollins + K.O.S., in which the number of members may fluctuate while the group retains a coherent collective identity. These associations may have originated in art school, in friendships, in close personal or family relationships, or may have resulted from shared housing, shared political convictions, teacherstudent relationships, or a combination of these factors. The shared lives of the artist-pairs or teams develop concurrently with the body of work that stems from the interaction of the association and belongs equally to all its members. There is no visual signal of the joint nature of their production. The work of these groups is diverse, representing virtually all the tendencies of the current art world with the exception of formalist abstraction and conventional representation. Any work of art in the exhibition could have been made under the name of a single artist, yet there seems to be a new attitude towards art and art making in this collective work, with its specifically contemporary flavor, even though the attitude itself has numerous precedents in nineteenth and earlier
twentieth-century art. Throughout those periods, associations of artists based on the guild system, the workshop, and even a quasi-monastic model reflected a nostalgia for earlier, less alienated times and a desire to integrate art into modern life. But the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Arts and Crafts movement, the Bauhaus, and the Weiner Werkstätte were cooperative enterprises of an entirely different kind from those engaged in by the current group of practitioners. While based in a shared idealism and in social concerns, the earlier collaborations did not demand that personal identity merge with the identity of the group. ,/ The current surge of collaborative activity began approximately twenty-five years ago at a moment of intense social idealism and nostalgic desire for thesocial integration of the artist. Artists in the early part of this century, and again in the late 1960s and early 1970s, longed for a radical restructuring of art itself and sought ways to communicate more directly with audiences outside the art world. They hoped to liberate art from the constraints of commerce and aestheticism, and to make art into a vital force in the world.
In their earliest work, Gilbert & George transcended the ideal of the meta-artist, as if they could become, through ritualized, almost monastic discipline, not merely a single artist but also a work of art. Their performances as ‘living’ sculptures (1969-1977) articulated an entirely new relationship between art and life, asserting that the substance of art is and, in a fundamental sense, must be life itself. But if Gilbert & George believed that art could be achieved only through intense dedication, they also believed passionately that art must be accessible, comprehensible to all, and that “the true function of art is to bring about new understanding, progress, and advancement.”4. Though much of their work until 1977 focused on themselves and their life, on an apparently subjective exploration of drunkenness, despair, and their relationship to one another, they treated these personal subjects as emblems of the human condition. Since 1977 they have moved towards increasingly political subject matter, introducing images of urban derelicts and decay, and of adolescent proletarian youths who appear as innocent, ragged angels in an essentially religious view of the underside of contemporary life. Their most recent work has used similar subject matter, in increasingly decorative repeat patterns.
In the context of Team Spirit, Gilbert & George point a way-both forward and back in time. Their belief that art functions as a socially redeeming force relates to previous art movements. Forebears for them, as for other collaborative artists today, lie not only in the distant past but in the more recent years of this century in two distinct traditions which have repeatedly fertilized one another. On the one hand, the socialist world view which fueled the Russian Revolution caused Soviet artists such as the brothers George and Vladimir Stenberg to work together in the early 1920s. Authorship was less important, perhaps, than mission; the artistic collective was as ’sensible’ in methodology and result as a collective organized to address farm and factory work. On the other hand, the development of early twentieth-century movements such as Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism which reflected societal changes as profound and disruptive as those in Russia, were also collaborative efforts. Although western European artists acting together to create a work of art did so more in the spirit of experimentation than to realize a socio-political goal, they too felt the influence of socialist concepts. The same lines of influence inform the collaborative entities in this exhibition and explain, in part, a deeply rooted commitment among many of them to create works of art which address a wide range of sociopolitical subjects, whether ecological and environmental, meta- or intra-personal, or utopian and visionary.
Boyle Family, for example, acts within an ‘ideal’ socialist-democratic framework (each member of the family is equal, each plays an equal part in decision making). In addition, in one series of works, Boyle Family removed the personal and subjective elements from some of the sites they examined and replicated by having friends or acquaintances throw darts at a world map to determine site selection. The family becomes a model of the ideal state, and their art both comments on and critiques our less-than-ideal world society and its negative impact on our collective environment. As Boyle Family examines and documents a section of beach, a field, a portion of a city pavement, its collaborative/collective activity creates art which conveys a philosophical position as well as specific reportage.
IRWIN, the Yugoslavian group which is part of a larger collective, LAIBACH, that has a music, theater, and design component, relies on and believes in the enabling dialogue and open critique which the group provides its members. Each member of IRWIN has a separate studio and, after group discussion, may create an individual object or a part of an object. But all works by group members are signed collectively as IRWIN The members of IRWIN, until recently living within a repressive society, used the group and one another as sources of aesthetic and social dialogue, finding intellectual justification and recognition among themselves for an art which, although based on Yugoslav antecedents, was not officially acceptable. IRWIN, as artist-entity, acts from ideal socialist principles within a state that, until recently, was nominally socialist but actually repressive.
In a different social environment, Tim Rollins + K. 0. S. also act as an artist-team. Rollins, a teacher, works with young people from the South Bronx who come from backgrounds of extreme deprivation. While Rollins usually proposes the literary text on which they base their paintings, the group develops the actual images through a process of shared decision making and a method which requires research, group discussion, experimentation, and education through direct experience. Despite the difference in age and background between teacher and students, the group members attain an equality that relates to a socialist ideal.
Seymour Likely’s work at times positions itself through the use of references to pop culture in titles (The Brady Bunch), but in its relatively short existence has made works of art which reflect or comment on other art as well as on culture (The Unexpected Return of Blinky Palermo from the Tropics). This collective of three Dutch artists adds another dimension to their nom-de-plume, however, in that they have created a fictitious character-an American artist-whose motive, aesthetic, and cultural heritage must be intuited and deciphered as well as constantly re-created. Thus, the creation of the personage of Seymour Likely is an invisible theatre piece or performance event (although never seen as such by an audience), for when Seymour Likely creates a work of art it does so rooted in a European idea of and reaction to the American culture which surrounds an American artist. Throughout the process of formulating an idea for the work of art, the collective of three must try to hold true to the Americanness of its meta-personality, attempting always to know how and why “he” makes his art. Rather than directly using elements of American pop culture as does Pruitt. Early, for example, Seymour Likely attempts to base its mental point of view in American culture. Thus, it seems to come to its subjects from a distance or through a filter. We think of the Master of the Osservanza as a new artistic personality, albeit one which may or may not be a workshop or collaborative effort; in Seymour Likely we have a collaborative which has deliberately set out to form itself into a new being, one which has likes, dislikes, and opinions, as well as being a fusion of its actual members. Active since the late 1960s, General Idea has made use of many media-sculpture, video, performance, painting, photography, printmaking-but in all of them its members use a mix of politics, humour, and a deep sense of morality to provoke.
Their ideas, as they suggested, were situated on the borderline. The borderline is, to begin with, a “no man’s land,” the zone of collaboration among the three artists, an area of collective consciousness. It is also the edge, the sharpest point of awareness, and a psychological precipice. General Idea’s borderline represents a neutral space between conceptual models …. a line of convergence between public and private, the point at which an internal psychology meets the external events, objects, and imagery of the world … an area of ideal freedom as much as fatalistic alienation5.
Their AIDS paintings hung over AIDS wallpaper are simultaneously slick and bright, boldly beautiful, a play upon and reminder of Robert Indiana’s LOVE (which entered into pop culture as T-shirt, key chain, poster, greeting card), and an iconic and provocatively ambiguous reminder. General Idea’s tactic in this case is to reduce a complex subject, as does massmedia communication, to reductive unforgettable simplicity.
Like Gilbert & George, most of the artists in our exhibition engage in more than one strategy, in more than one idea. For example, collection and classification of typologies is an important element in Fischli and Weiss’s rubber castings of banal contemporary objects, in McDermott & McGough’s use of the Victorian and Edwardian lifestyle and decorative arts, and even in Pruitt Early’s series, Art for Teenage Boys, whose compendium of head-shop decals will some day, no doubt, seem as nostalgic as the increasingly obsolete structures photographed by the Bechers. Martha Fleming and Lyne Lapointe, in their ephemeral site-specific installations, use a mix of architectural archaeology, social theory, popular history, and research to create layers of information and meaning. Wallace & Donohue often fuse the static and the dynamic, formalist painting with electronic media, or household objects with quotations or references to the often modernist icons of past art.
There are three major, often overlapping, preoccupations among the artists in Team Spirit: art about art, art about ecology and the environment, and art about social and political issues. Art about art plays a role in works as diverse as those by Equipo CrOnica, Art & Language, IRWIN, Seymour Likely, Pruitt Early, Tim Rollins + K.O.S., and Doug and Mike Starn. Working in Franco’s Spain, Equipo Crónica produced paintings which attacked the government and satirized the icons of cultural heritage. Their works are both humorous and political. Investigations of ecology and environment are central to the work of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, and to that of Boyle Family. FASTWURMS’s work, although aesthetically dissimilar, involves similar issues. Kate Ericson & Mel Ziegler, like many other collaborative artists in this exhibition, base their work in a research and study model, at times interacting with nonartists in the course of creating a new work, moving away from an art-world context into one with a broader social outlook. Clegg & Guttmann’s portraits and still lifes (like the Bechers’s photographs of industrial architecture, or Kate Ericson & Mel Ziegler’s elegant studies of the materials employed in public buildings or of the agricultural machines used for specific tasks) present types and classes of objects. Clegg & Guttmann’s primary interest, beyond formalism, is a social history in which they reveal power and stylize relationships between sitters, while TODT’s work speaks of another sort of power-that of the seemingly hermetic knowledge of the scientific world, or the military-industrial complex.
A quasi-scientific inventive attitude merges with that of the sturdy model of the American handyman-bricoleur in the work of Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel to create a visionary art which yearns for a perfect world, especially in their site-specific installations. Recent works explore time and motion, pursue fusions of seeming opposites, and make use of simple materials to create meticulous new worlds. A sense of wonder and meditative calm infuses their mysteriously cosmic work. In the broadest sense, theirs is an art about our environment-immediate and galactic.
Since the early 1970s, Anne and Patrick Poirier have used mythology, archaeology, and architecture, often delving into Greek and Roman sources as references, to create imaginary, ruined civilizations. These works, too, are visionary. Although creating a new past rather than a future perfect, these private civilizations also provoke meditation and silence. They, too, speak about our environment as they reflect on past art.
A particularly ironic and skeptical Russian humour permeates the work and public personas of Komar & Melamid. According to Melaniid, “Two weeks after we came to the United States, we realized we had comedic careers. We’re accepted by the art world because we’re exotic-from Russia, working as a team-and we quickly understood were supposed to be amusing.”6 Now, after more than a dozen years in the United States, Komar & Melamid continue to view their Soviet past with nostalgia, irony, and humour, and to those attitudes they have added their outsider’s view of the United States. In 1988, Komar & Melamid ‘discovered’ Bayonne, New Jersey and its schools, churches, parks, Main Street, and wood-frame houses, its factories, and inhabitants, all of which they eulogized in a series of Bayonne paintings and objects. In particular, Komar & Melamid concentrated on Bayonne’s Bergen Point Brass Foundry and its workers, rendering them in a style close to the Socialist Realist academic tradition they learned as art students in the Soviet Union. Irony, fellowship, irreverent social comment, praise, and humour are intermixed in this series; not the least of its elements, however, is that aspect of industrial Bayonne which reminds them of their Soviet homeland. Here, in their art, the United States and the Soviet Union overlap.
Trained in the USSR in the officially approved Socialist Realist style, Komar & Melamid broke away from their schooling in the early 1970s to experiment with Pop and conceptual modes. Some of the early works which followed included the creation of two fictional artists, to each of whom they gave complete bodies of work, biographies, and histories; the invention of an alphabet; plans for magical objects; and performance events. Meanwhile, Komar & Melamid functioned as underground artists, having been ejected from the Soviet artists’ union, earning their living as book designers and teachers of art. In typical comedic twist, Komar & Melamid, who once served as role models for other Soviet underground artists, have become highly successful in the capitalistic and commercial art world, all the while basing their art in a nostalgia for a past and a country which caused them to emigrate.
Like the artists of the 1920s in the Soviet Union, and like Kukryniksy or Komar & Melamid whose work as collaborative artists preceded their own, Rimma Gerlovina and Valeriy Gerlovin are rooted as artists in a time of social and political change. Beginning with their first collaborative works in 1971 and moving on from the tradition of samizdat (underground or private publishing), the Gerlovins used photography, private or still performances, game-like structures, and language or text-environment to expand their artists’ book activities. Their work, too, is meditative but is most often based on the use of archetypal or mythological relationships or images. The Gerlovins believe that we know and understand such imagery subconsciously, thus eliminating the need for verbal explanations. Their work finds its antecedents in that of experimental Soviet artists of the 1920s, but their own experiment stems from their desire to create an art which exists beyond their Russian roots, based instead on a universal language, which symbolically unites human nature and the human mind.
Rimma and Valeriy Gerlovin believe that we now live at the end of the age of religion and at the threshold of a new age of knowledge. Indeed, the existence at this time of so many collaborative artists may signal such a change. In writing about Tim Rollins + K.O.S., Arthur Danto says that “ours is a time in which all conceptual and institutional aspects of the practice of art, the meaning of “art,” and the nature of the artist are being rethought-this means we are coming to the end of one history and have entered, tentatively, upon another. The existence of active collaborations, rather than the collaboration being something merely dreamed of, is evidence of a new attitude and perhaps a new age.”7.
While Danto sees Tim Rollins + K. 0.S. as having modeled itself on “an enlightened school, with a canon and a curriculum and a code of conduct, designed to produce artworks [and] … certain human types”8, we must state that all of the collaborative artists in this exhibition provide a model, a canon, a curriculum, and a code of conduct.
Noting how often we, as curator-authors, or the artists themselves, cite socialist forebears, a socialist model, a visionary ideal, or social concerns, it seems that all of the artists included here point to a new direction for society as a whole. Theirs is a new model based on a new order of cooperation that demands the redefinition of the concept ‘artist’.
notes
1 Svetlana Alpers, Rembrandt’s Enterprise: The Studio and the Maker, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, and London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1988).
2 Keith Christiansen, Lawrence B. Kanter, and Carl Brandon Strehlke, Painting in
Renaissance Siena (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988).
3 David Shapiro, “Art as Collaboration Toward a Theory of Pluralistic Aesthetics, 1950-1980,” in the exhibition catalogue, Artistic Collaboration in the Twentieth Century, by Cynthia Jaffee McCabe (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1984), P.45.
4 Carter Ratcliff, Gilbert & George: The Complete Pictures 1971-1975 (New York: Rizzoli International, 1986), p. vii.
5 Tim Guest, “From Ziggurats to Curlicues: Principle Features in the Art of of General Idea,” in General Idea 1968-1984, edited by General Idea and Jan Debbaut (Eindhoven: Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, 1984).
6 Kristine McKenna, “Two Soviet Artists Conquer the West,” Los Angeles Times, 28 January 1990.
7 Arthur Danto, “K.O.S. and the Art History of Collaboration,” in Amerika: Tim Rollins + K.O.S., ed. Gary Garrels (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 1989), p. 64.
8 Ibid.