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5 Dec 2016

ARTICLE /
ARTICLE

A Brief History of Collective Action

General Idea, AIDS, 1988, installation view, Württemburgischer Kunstverein. Photo Reinhhard Truckenmüller.
Courtesy Esther Schipper Gallery

Working collectively is often now interpreted as a form of resistance to the perhaps

hackneyed ideal of the individual genius, but the impetus for artists to create and
author work together has a long history, as Ellen Mara De Wachter explains.

This feature originally appeared in Issue 29.

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Collective practice is an increasingly popular approach for artists making work today,
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whether that collaboration takes the form of an intimate duo or a larger group
operating under an assumed name. It is also getting unprecedented attention from
curators and audiences: the latest editions of the Venice Biennale (2015) and the
Whitney Biennial (2014) showed the largest percentage of collaborative art practices
in the exhibitions’ histories, at 13 per cent and 15 per cent respectively.

It is in China during the flourishing of Buddhism in the early Middle Ages that we find
the first evidence of reverence for the individual artist’s skill above that of the artisan.
Artists were put on a par with poets, previously considered the pinnacle of all
creatives. In the West, medieval guilds and workshops involved artists and craftsmen
producing works together, usually without specific pieces being attributed to
individual artisans. It was only during the Renaissance that the uniqueness of the
solo artist’s hand began to be prized both culturally and financially, with works of art
coming to be valued as true expressions of the matchless qualities of the singular
genius.

Fast-forward to the dawn of the twentieth century when a chain of modernist avant-
gardes began to explore collective practice. Each movement in the string of –isms
that included Cubism, Futurism, Suprematism, De Stijl and Dada was committed to
engendering some kind of social or cultural change under a coherent aesthetic.
However, every single one of these artistic groups had a figurehead: Picasso,
Marinetti, Malevich, Mondrian, Duchamp.

Moreover, they authored works individually, which puts them at some remove from
recent collective art practices, which happily co-author works. After World War II,
the Cold War produced a split in East–West aesthetics and a parallel rift in attitudes
towards collective art practice. In the US, collective approaches were viewed with
suspicion, redolent of the Communist spirit of the rival Eastern bloc. Popular culture
in the US instead celebrated figures that incarnated the mythology of the lone
genius: for instance, Jackson Pollock, an avant-garde artist with a challenging
aesthetic, who nevertheless became a household name. In the Eastern bloc, art was
equally influenced by state policy, except in this case artists were expected to work
together in state-sponsored workshops. In spite of the collective labour conditions,
the imposition of the official Communist style—Socialist Realism—stifled
experimental collaborations and heavily determined artists’ work with rigid
requirements over subject matter, style and technique.

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In the 1960s, art collectives were active in cities beyond Europe and North America,
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notably in Japan, Chile and Argentina, making work that responded to the post-
atomic era and internal politics. In 1963, the Japanese artists Genpei Akasegawa,
Natsuyuki Nakanishi and Jirō Takamatsu founded the collective Hi-Red Center, which
organized happenings such as Shieruta puran (Shelter Plan, 1964) for which they
created a personalized nuclear fallout shelter for each of the group’s members. For
their Street Cleaning Event (1964), they scoured the pavement in central Tokyo
dressed in white lab coats to mock the official campaign to clean up the city in
advance of that year’s Olympic Games. Their impish critiques of social conditions in
Japan prefigure the work of more recent Japanese collectives, such as Chim Pom
and Kyun-Chome.

In Argentina, the Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia de Rosario made works that were
vehemently critical of the government, for example, Tucumán Arde (Tucumán Is
Burning, 1968), a documentary exhibition that exposed the social and economic
crisis in the city of Tucumán in the north-west of the country as a consequence of
the government’s decision to close local sugar refineries.

In Britain, the collective Art & Language, formed in 1968, turned its attention to the
discourses and conventions surrounding art practice, criticism and theory. Over the
years, some 50 people from different disciplines have been involved with the group.
Art & Language’s interest in the apparatus of the art world gave way to a tendency
for art collectives to engage in institutional critique. For several collectives—
including the Guerrilla Girls, founded in 1985—this approach crossed over with
activism addressing social inequality, sexism and the devastating consequences of
aids. The early works of Canadian collective General Idea, founded in 1969 by Felix
Partz, Jorge Zontal and AA Bronson, involved the persona of “Miss General Idea”,
under whose guise they organized a number of extravagant events that parodied
beauty pageants and trade fairs. In the face of the aids crisis—a disease that
eventually claimed the lives of both Partz and Zontal—the group began making
striking artworks, including the AIDS wallpaper in 1988, which appropriated Robert
Indiana’s famous “love” design from the mid-1960s. The late 1980s was significant in
the establishment of a number of crossover activist/art collectives such as Act Up
and Gran Fury in New York, which were set up to raise awareness and challenge the
US government’s negligence with regard to the spread of aids.

In the 1990s, postmodernism was evident in the work of collectives that ironized
institutional and corporate strategies by treading the line between consumer
enterprise and critical art practice. In New York, Art Club 2000 was initiated in 1992

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by the art dealer and impresario Colin de Land along with seven of his students from
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the Cooper Union School of Art. The group cast a sharp look at the relationship
between advertising and desire, in particular with regard to clothing and interior
design. Their photographs were pastiches of lifestyle features from glossy
magazines, with Art Clubbers wearing outfits from the Gap or hanging out at the
Conran Shop. Bernadette Corporation, started in 1994 by Bernadette van Huy, John
Kelsey and Antek Walczak, also played with fashion and branding to create its own
line, and to put on exhibitions that rewarded visitors with a serious dose of
ambiguity. More recently, the trend forecasting group-cum-art collective K-Hole was
set up in 2010 in New York by Greg Fong, Sean Monahan, Chris Sherron, Emily Segal
and Dena Yago, young arts graduates who had experience in the trend and
marketing industries and whose work involves publishing bona-fide trend forecast
reports.

In 1990s London, the collective bank—with members including Simon Bedwell,

John Russell, Dino Demosthenous, Milly Thompson, David Burrows and Andrew
Williamson—organized exhibitions that mocked the YBA bubble and its associated
media frenzy. For their Fax-Back project, one of the most delightfully acerbic works
ever made about the art world, they corrected and faxed back bombastic and
ungrammatical press releases to the commercial galleries that had issued them.

Other groups founded in the 1990s focused on social, political and economic issues,
for instance the Danish collective Superflex. Friends Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, Jakob
Fenger and Rasmus Nielsen came together to make artworks they refer to as “tools”,
which combine experimental engineering, science and technology to produce social
or environmental change. Their innovative Supergas (1996) system runs on organic
materials (human and animal stools, to be precise) to produce biogas that can be
used for cooking and lighting in rural areas. The Indian group Raqs Media Collective
was formed by Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Their
work involves filmmaking, curating, research, writing and editing, and in 2000 they
founded the Sarai programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies,
which combines film history, new media theory, media practice and urban culture.

Working across disciplines is an increasingly common strategy for artists. The New
York-based collective DIS was originally formed in 2010 as an online magazine, and
has since branched out into a stock-image agency called DISimages and an online
retail platform, DISown. The London-based group åyr, set up in 2014 by members

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from France, Italy and Mexico, has a practice that reads like a Venn diagram
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combining architecture, art and design. Both these collectives address online and IRL
lifestyle desire and the endlessly mutating nature of aspirational living.

The collective GCC, formed in 2013 with members scattered across the globe, chose
its name—an acronym that doesn’t actually stand for anything—in reference to the
Gulf Cooperation Council, an intergovernmental political and economic union of
Arab states in the Persian Gulf. Their work uses pastiche to critique stately rituals
and administrative rhetoric, in particular in the Gulf states, with installations that
often act out codified gestures or replicate environments related to diplomacy or
nation-branding.

Art collectives working today often draw on a multiplicity of influences and sources,
which is not surprising given the centrality of the internet in people’s lives. The
accelerated circulation of images and ideas around this largely free mass
collaborative platform has diluted the concept of authorship, and perhaps even taken
the shine off its appeal for artists. But with free access to the internet increasingly
threatened by pay walls, and the sharing economy and creative commons closely
monitored by corporations seeking to maximize profit, it feels more important than
ever to recognize and encourage collective practice as a means for productive
critique.

Ellen Mara De Wachter’s book “Co-Art: Artists on Creative Collaboration” will be

published by Phaidon on 24 April 2017.

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This feature originally appeared in Issue 29

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General Idea, Sandy Stagg Models the Hand of the Spirit Make-up, 1973, gelatin silver print, 43.2 x 27.9cm.
Courtesy Esther Schipper Gallery

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Raqs Media Collective, Meanwhile Elsewhere, hoardings, dimensions variable, installation view, Dhaka Art
Summit, 2014. Photo: Shumon Amed. Image Courtesy of Samdani Art Foundation

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General Idea, P Is for Poodle, 1983, Ektachrome, 76.2 x 63.5cm. Courtesy Esther Schipper Gallery

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