07/01/22, 12:53 ten by ten: Production Lines

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ten by ten
a collaboration of ten GMIT fine art graduates

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a paper based collaboratice
Production Lines
project of ten recent GMIT
graduates in painting. Production Lines (from
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Irit Rogoff
The History of Modernism is, it would Seguir
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2012
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seem, inscribed with collaboration and
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collectivity. The succession of
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March
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international, interlinked avant-garde
movements which make up the historical
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and mythical trajectory of modernist

Production
art is founded in a perception of
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artists coming together with a mutual
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January
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and coherent project in mind. The very
notion of artistic movements bearing a
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2011
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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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.

bq. 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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

h2. notes

fn1. Charles Harrison, “On the Surface

of Painting,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 5,
no. 2, 1986, P. 306.

fn2. 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).

fn3. Craig Bromberg, “That

Collaborating Itch,” ARTnews, vol. 87,
no. 9 (November 1988), p. 161.

fn4. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the

Author,” in Image-Music-Text (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 143.

fn5. David Caute, The Year of the

Barricades (New York: Harper and Row,
1988).

fn6. Jurgen Habermas, Structural

Transformations in the Public Sphere
(Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1989).

fn7. Walter Benjamin, “The Author as

Producer,” reprinted in Brian Wallis,
ed., Art After Modernism (Boston: David
R. Godine, Publisher, Inc., 1986), p.
303.

fn8. Roland Barthes, “From Work to

Text,” in Image-Music-Text, p. 157.

fn9. Victor Burgin, The End of Art

Theory (London: Macmillan Publishing
Co., 1986), p. 158.

fn10. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text,

p. 145.

fn11. Victor Burgin, The End of Art

Theory, p. 11.

fn12. Mary Anne Staniszewski,

“Conceptual Art,” Flash Art, no. 143
(December 1988), p. 95.

fn13. William Olander, “Material

World,” Art in America (January 1989),
p. 24.

fn14. 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.

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