Production Lines
The History of Modernism is, it would seem, inscribed with collaboration and collectivity. The succession of international, interlinked avant-garde movements which make up the historical and mythical trajectory of modernist art is founded in a perception of artists coming together with a mutual and coherent project in mind. The very notion of artistic movements bearing a collective label intimates the noble abandonment of individual identity in the name of forging an heroic artistic ‘breakthrough’ which is greater than the sum of its individual artistic parts. Have we not been told repeatedly that Fauvism liberated color from the prison house of naturalism? That Futurism mobilized the newly available resources of massmedia communication to publicize itself as a polemical entity? And that the frantic activity of several dealers and critics transformed the disparate efforts of a few Parisian painters into a movement called Cubism?
But no sooner are such supposedly collective entities established by the historians than the process of privileging a dominant talent, an artistic leader, or a guiding light from within the group, begins in earnest. The chosen artist then represents those artistic and formal features thought to be the most significant and innovative contributions of the group to the linear progression of Modernism as a cultural movement, and the other members of the group are relegated to the margins as lesser examples of the same shared artistic aspirations. Collaboration, then, as perceived from within the orthodox narrative of Modernism, is a contradictory entity, at once useful and redundant for the methodological practices of the history of art. As it stands, this concept of collaboration is exceedingly 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. The discourse of Modernism claims that these processes, which are always the result of lucky historical accidents that take place in atmospheric cafés, ultimately culminate in a triumphant form of artistic activity so vigorous and so coherent that it must necessarily make its mark on the realm of culture. In fact, this concept of collaboration (extracted from social and historical specificity, from dominant ideological discourses, and from the hegemony of centrist cultural practices played out primarily by male, centrist, cultural practitioners) represents little more than an animated form of affinity-a banding together of a group of artists around a series of formal moves which in turn, presumably, serves to ‘bond’ them in a cultural and ideological consensus. Thus, what we have in fact witnessed is a multiplication of heroic artistic entities within the symbolic formation of their artistic project, rather than the relinquishing of individual cultural heroics. Above all, what this traditional modernist perception of collaboration ignores are the inherent radical possibilities for a revision of the relation between imagination, cultural activity, and artistic institutions. For, as Charles Harrison so astutely observed, “The critical theory of Modernism is a theory of consumption masquerading as a theory of production.”.1 The following discussion is intended, at least in part, to distinguish between two different perceptions of collaboration. The first is the above-mentioned positivist cooperation which serves to expand the field of possibilities and resources while furthering the progress of art. David Sylvester has characterized its combination of optimism and enthusiasm as resembling the Hollywood musical genre of ‘the kids getting together in the barn to put on a show’.2 This mode is not the exclusive prerogative of the historic avant garde, but it has continued to play a substantial, if not substantive, role in contemporary art practices. In a recent article, Craig Bromberg elaborated what he calls ‘that collaborating itch’, the modernist approach to collaboration without the desire for an integration of elements. He describes a projected collaboration between novelist Stephen King and artist Barbara Kruger who differentiated between the following initiatives.
Sometimes collaborations are about a sense of procedure, about concrete social relationships-the conversational quality of day to day exchange. Others take place in the realm of the symbolic, in a repository of power where the proper names of individuals come together, and this is an essential part of the product. This collaboration [with Stephen King] was more like that. It was put together like a movie deal, and that was fine by me.3
As an artist who works within the language of representation constructed through mass-media culture, and who has entirely abdicated the claim to a traditional, male, authorial voice of individual uniqueness, Kruger is particularly well situated to characterize such differentiations. Rather than reveling in the romantic sentiments of historic meetings, artistic affinities, and kindred spirits, what she reveals are the the market forces that operate beneath the facades of the joint collaborations of named entities.
The second perception of collaboration, which emphasizes a critical interrogation of the processes of production through artistic practice, the loss of the so-called autonomy of the work of art, and the subjugation of the heroic, individual artist to the cultural embeddedness of the art work, is the one with which we are preoccupied here. The importance of Harrison’s insistence on a theory of consumption which masquerades as a theory of production is that it assumes the point of reception, rather than the point of production, as an analytical vantage point. Thus it can begin to dismantle the seeming contradiction between the cultural construction of tendencies for stylistic group identities and the actual supremacy of the individual heroic artist within the same modernist trajectory. In this argument and in numerous analyses Harrison, who is a founding (non-painting) member of the Art & Language collective, makes clear two fundamental points. The first is that, within the history and theory of visual culture, we have traditionally developed only the most limited theories of artistic production while allowing market values to construct an extensive series of legitimating narratives that masquerade as a set of canonical masterworks and the superior aesthetic values they represent. The second issue concerns the centrality of the ‘author’ to the discourse of art as a form of consumption. While historical periodization and the random and erratic division of visual culture into named stylistic groupings continue to operate as what Michel Foucault has termed ‘dividing practices through which the institutional organization of knowledge gains both its power and its internal coherence’, both market values and interpretative values have continued to depend on the undisputed centrality of the author. We are all aware that the actual value of art works does not depend on their stylistic affiliation but on their attribution, beyond all doubt, to the hand of a named author, to their point of origin within the creative consciousness of Romanticism’s ‘unique’ individual. This postEnlightenment prestige of the individual has, in Roland Barthes’ analysis, rendered it logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author. The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines, as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centered on the author, his person, his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the most part in saying that Baudelaire’s work is the failure of Baudelaire the man, Van Gogh’s his madness, Tchaikovsky’s his vice. The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author ‘confiding’ in us.4
Barthes wrote his famous radical essay, “The Death of the Author,” in 1968 when Modernism was facing its most acute crisis and traditional Western culture was being subjected to one of the most extensive critiques experienced in the Modern era. The events of 1968, the so-called ‘year of the barricades’,5 went far beyond the protests of the various student movements in Europe and the United States. The invasion of Czechoslovakia, the intensification of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the rise of international terror organizations aligned with nationalist movements engaged in anti-colonial battles of liberation, the emergence of European Maoism, and the rising of traditional unions and labor movements all came together into an activist critique of Western democracy. Parallel to these movements, ethnic minority groups within Western societies began organizing with the purpose of articulating separate political and cultural identities and questioning the social and political systems which had excluded them on their home ground, as in the case of the Black Panther movement in the United States. Throughout the world the women’s movement and feminism began to interrogate critically the cultural and economic terms that worked toward the oppression of women across the boundaries of class and race, and to articulate an alternative set of analytical methods based on the recognition of gender difference. The importance of 1968 as an historical moment is that issues of class, race, gender, and knowledge converged across a much wider set of allegiances than had occurred previously within strictly national or cultural debates. The predominance of mass-media culture and the emergence of its formulation as ‘Counter Culture’ indicated the degree to which everyone, across divergent nationalities and traditions, was to some extent subject to the influence of a Western modernist ideology of progress, technology, and universalism.
In France this critical revision interrogated not only inherited meanings but also the way they had been constructed and communicated. The works of Levi-Strauss, Althusser, Barthes, Lacan, and Foucault examined language, sign systems, cultural hierarchies, class, ideology, and sexuality as socially constructed systems. New Wave cinema dispensed with traditional narrative devices and codes of social acceptability. In Britain and the United States the many artists affiliated with Pop Art took on the world of representation, conflating high art and mass-media culture and acknowledging the centrality of the communications media in the construction of visual worlds. Women artists began experimenting with autonomous art forms such as performance, video, and actions which could work against the burdensome grain of cultural tradition and serve to redefine some of its terms. In Europe, Australia, and the United States collectives and socially and politically engaged art initiatives made an effort at populism, accessibility, and an attempt at self government and wider representation. This was an attempt, however optimistic and naive, to revive a cultural politics of the historic public sphere as articulated by the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas.
By the ‘public sphere’ we mean first of all the realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. A portion of the public sphere comes into being in every conversation in which private individuals assemble to form a public body … This process marks an important transition from mere opinions (i.e., cultural assumptions, normative attitudes, collective prejudices and values) to a public opinion which presupposes a reasoning public, a series of public discussions concerning the exercise of power which are both critical in intent and institutionally guarantied.6
Within the much older Marxist critique of culture that had been part of the historical avant garde, great emphasis had been placed on the modes and processes of cultural production. In mobilizing cultural practices for political struggle Walter Benjamin decreed that “the place of the intellectual in the class struggle can be identified, or better chosen, only on the basis of his position in the processes of production.”7 This critical interrogation of the processes of production was pursued in the wake of the late 1960s through the introduction of collectivity, of a non-individualist collaborating practice which affected a transition from art to artistic practice and attempted to erode some of the market value invested in the unmediated relation between the work and the ‘named author’. In the shift from what Barthes called “Work to Text” not only could the former work of art be opened up to a plurality of meanings which would recognize a plurality of viewing positions but “in the same way the text does not stop at (good) literature; it cannot be contained in a hierarchy, even in a simple division of genres. What constitutes the text is on the contrary (or precisely) its subversive force in respect of the old classifications.”8 Here a model begins to emerge for a mode of critical and interrogative artistic activity which could question the very terms that could work against the grain of ‘artistic creation’. Furthermore, the emergent theories of ideology which were sparked by Louis Althusser’s famous essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” produced models for the analysis of ideology as the lived experience of everyday life rather than the expression of clearly articulated explicit political doctrines. Such a form of lived experience was the production, display, criticism, and trading of art which could no longer be wrenched out of the institutions which were covertly determining its course. As Victor Burgin wrote, contrary to the dogmas of our ‘new’, dissent-free Romanticism, the artist simply does not ‘create’innocently, spontaneously, naturally-like a flowering shrub which blossoms because it can do no other. The artist first of all inherits a role handed down by a particular history, through particular institutions, and whether he or she chooses to work within or without the given history and institutions, for or against them, the relationship to them is inescapable.9
All of the strategies which make up this strand of collective and collaborating work have been influenced by the legacy of Saussurian linguistics and by the critique of cultural hierarchies and dominant cultural modes articulated by the discourses on gender and race. As Barthes put it, linguistics has recently provided the destruction of the author with a valuable analytical tool by showing that the whole of the enunciation is an empty process, functioning perfectly without there being any need for it to be filled with the person of the interlocutor. Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance of writing, just as I is nothing more than the instant of saying I: language known to a ’subject’, not a ‘person’, and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation
which defines it, suffices to make language ‘hold together’, suffices that is to say, to exhaust it.10
Barthes wrote this observation from within the linguistic legacy of the second half of the twentieth century which has strived to revise traditional concepts of signification, working against a realist tradition which viewed the sign as a transparent entity which allowed an unproblematic access to the field of reference.11 If language is perceived as is imagery, as a signifying system which operates within the framework of the concept of ‘discourse’ (i.e., the rules of formation), then the author/artist can no longer be its subject. Instead we have evolved an understanding that the author also functions within a certain set of rules of formation, the discourse of artistic production. Thus, the demise of the culturally heroic author who exists outside of the discursive formations of culture has brought about a recognition of a reflexive artistic entity who occupies a set of subject positions vis it vis both culture and ideology. The strategies of collaboration used by different artistic groups over the past twenty years vary greatly. Their commitment, however, remains largely to reevaluate the ways in which meanings are constituted in culture through the dual, interrelated framework of authorial subject positions and the workings of the institutions of culture. A recent discussion of the work of Art & Language states,
Art & Language [have] kept their project strictly within the proposition of how art comes to have meaning and specifically, how their work functions in terms of meanings. A moment of consolidation for the group, Art & Language exhibited their first index-a series of file cabinets containing all the materials published or considered for publication in ArtLanguage .. . . This labyrinthine installation can be understood as an index map where the theoretical domain within Art & Language was constituted. This room of file cabinets materialized a critique of modern art’s idealist project and served as
a visual model for the production of meaning that was collaborating, relational and disseminative. The sovereignty of individual creation and unmediated expression had no place within this communal and publicly posted system generated by quorums of readings. A paradigm of the systematic and collaborating character of conceptual art in general and of Art & Language in particular, the project provided a radical critique of Modernism’s investment in liberal humanism and the orthodoxy of the unfettered will of the indivdual which has traditionally been understood as finding its release in art. [12]
Since then the linguistically inspired model has been further extended by feminist cultural analysis and by the discourse on race. The work of the New York-based collective Guerrilla Girls provides a particularly poignant example. While seemingly simple and theatrically effective as a set of strategies aimed at exposing the inherent and pervasive discrimination against women within the more official ‘mainstream’ institutions of visual culture, theirs is in fact a subtle reworking of some of the critical elements discussed so far using the tools of an analysis of gender roles within cultural production. Thus, for example, they are one of the few groups who mask their identity and carefully guard the confidentiality of their membership. While this could be attributed to pragmatic motives concerning their vulnerability to various forms of pressure, it is far more interesting as a radical strategic gesture against the invisible reconstitution of the artist as ’subject’ and the extreme ways in which women artists, in particular, have been subject to demeaning narratives which equate biography with the work produced. The unadorned and simply presented bodies of information which the Guerrilla Girls research, display, and disseminate-with shocking evidence of the way in which institutions of culture see themselves as entirely divorced from the shifts and changes taking place within the very societies they inhabit-gain great strength from their refusal to expose their personal identities and narratives for the purpose of publicity. While decrying the staunch commitment to a policy of ‘no change, no representation’ which the museums seem to manifest, the Guerrilla Girls also resist the traditional way in which they could be incorporated, becoming traditional authorial entities. Another strand of contemporary revision has come from the discourse on race and class manifest in the work of Tim Rollins + K. 0. S. While a member of Group Material, another collaborative effort whose work takes the form of a cultural bricolage which wrenches objects out of the linguistic structures that constitute their meanings, thus achieving what Walter Benjamin called the “unfunctioning of form,” Rollins claimed, what is rarely discussed (in the world of art) is the crucial question of method in the production of radical art. The most interesting new work is that which embraces social means of production and distribution. A political art can’t really be made at working people or for the oppressed. A radical art is one that helps organize people who can speak for themselves, but lack the vehicles to do So.13
In working in a South Bronx school with the so-called Kids of Survival, whose position of social disenfranchisement derives from both their class and race, Rollins has moved on to an engagement with the facilitation of those traditionally privileged vehicles of expression as a strategy in the formulation of counter-hegemonic, alternative identities. Although many of the processes of interrogation which I have briefly sketched in this context have their genesis in the severe crisis of Modernism following the social upheaval of the late 1960s, they must nevertheless be firmly located within the sphere of the Postmodern. For it is there that the politics of identity-in the extensive process of unnaming, in the insistence on unfixed and shifting meanings, in the critical interrogation of the implications inherent in differentiating between ’self’ and ‘other’-have finally come into their own. “What is transformed in the postmodern perspective is not simply the ‘image’ of the person but an interrogation of the discursive and disciplinary place from which questions of identity are strategically and institutionally posed.”14 The enthusiastic celebration of collectivity has thus been transformed, rupturing the authority previously held by the aura of the unique individual known as ‘the artist’ without any attempt to reinscribe it in an alternative, expanded group identity. While in some arenas the ‘death of the author’ facilitated the birth of the reader, in others it has begun to bring about the emergence of an author grounded in the collective and social politics of identity formation rather than in the traditional and rarefied realm of identity affirmation.
notes
1 Charles Harrison, “On the Surface of Painting,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 5, no. 2, 1986, P. 306.
2 This is my somewhat clumsy paraphrase of David Sylvester’s introduction to the catalogue Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, Arts Council of Great Britain (London: Hayward Gallery, 1984).
3 Craig Bromberg, “That Collaborating Itch,” ARTnews, vol. 87, no. 9 (November 1988), p. 161.
4 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 143.
5 David Caute, The Year of the Barricades (New York: Harper and Row, 1988).
6 Jurgen Habermas, Structural Transformations in the Public Sphere (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1989).
7 Walter Benjamin, “The Author as Producer,” reprinted in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism (Boston: David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc., 1986), p. 303.
8 Roland Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image-Music-Text, p. 157.
9 Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory (London: Macmillan Publishing Co., 1986), p. 158.
10 Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, p. 145.
11 Victor Burgin, The End of Art Theory, p. 11.
12 Mary Anne Staniszewski, “Conceptual Art,” Flash Art, no. 143 (December 1988), p. 95.
13 William Olander, “Material World,” Art in America (January 1989), p. 24.
14 Homi K. Bhaba, “Interrogating Identity,” in The Real Me-Post-Modernism and the Question of Identity, ICA Documents, no. 6 (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1989), p. 5.