"Against Artists"
By Charles Green
Between the late 1960s and early 1970s, small, close-knit groups of artists
chose short-term collaborative projects for works that stretched
conceptualist redefinitions of art to the limit, self-consciously upturning
traditional artistic identities (that of the solo artistic genius being the
most obvious) through cooperative teamwork. The collaborations should be
viewed within the context of political and activist art as well. Their
solution, which we will examine, was to turn to framing discourses —of the
titular function, and of artistic collaboration as branding — as a way of
defeating the apparently inexhaustible tendency of art towards bohemian
subjectivity. Artistic collaboration was to be one of the most extreme and
temporary of their strategies, the final stage of a general agoraphobic
disillusion with the horizons of mainstream conceptual art. Let’s take one
Australian example: Inhibodress was a small alternative Sydney gallery run
for a mere two years, from November 1970 by a cooperative of artists.
Inhibodress serves as a reminder of the international nature of post-object
art at this time—of an internationalism that has to be re-emphasised again
and again. The artists worked collaboratively on many major works; they also
created cooperative links with mail art networks in Europe and the United
States. Inhibodress artists, who included Peter Kennedy and Mike Parr,
systematically enacted their explicit loss of mastery in collaborations that
rehearsed a series of complex and hybrid models of artistic work. They
meandered backwards and forwards across the borders of art, music, poetry
and politics, transmuting the Art & Language idea of “dialogue” into a
politicised and aggressively psychological body art, into a mobile idea of
experimental community. The extraordinary degrees of aesthetic ephemerality
involved were compatible with a commitment to this model of an experimental
community, but less compatible with a symbolic enactment of experimental
community enacted within art spaces. There are benefits involved in
overthrowing art, but also costs in moving beyond the idea of an artist. In
other words, when unconventional art produced by shifting alliances of
“artists” locates itself inside stable discursive frameworks such as art
museums, the tension created by the covert preservation of aesthetic
validation, combined with the aspiration to escape precisely this, is not
tenable beyond a short period of time. Pluralism does not rule, OK, though
we are again in a pluralist moment of art that increasingly resembles the
1970s. This should be unambiguously understood, and parallelism—linking
1970s collaborations to the art of experimental communities in 2004—is the
subtext of my essay.
The essential narrative problem became: how were artists to sustain a
critical praxis within the institutions and exhibiting spaces of art, but
also could the figure of the artist herself could be stretched, expanded and
re-defined? Artists moved outside museum and gallery-based definitions of
artistic work, some for a short time, others forever. The first response—to
the realisation that the utopian 1960s “end of art” would fail to make way
for a world-as-art—was many artists’ cessation of activity amidst a
surprisingly ubiquitous rhetoric of crisis. These responses were accompanied
by cycles of collaboratively-made projects production and unconventional
models of authorship. In other words, then as now, collaboration was the
solution to a problem with art rather than a personal decision per se. That
this critique was occurring at the periphery, above all, was no accident.
Inhibodress artists were continually involved in forging extensive contacts
through Inhibodress with a world-wide cooperative network of artists. In the
process, they corresponded with artists at the Nova Scotia School of Art,
File magazine, and eccentric artist groups at the fringes of international
conceptual art such as the Canadian group Image Bank and Marcel Idea. A
roughly typed 1971 essay accompanying a show of this art read, “Common to
most work in the exhibition, however, is a concern with ‘process’ and the
placing of emphasis on an art-making activity in lieu of the product of such
an activity.” The collaborative motifs of family and community recur in many
accounts and assessments of these international networks. Artistic
collaboration was the most promising direction in which the artists felt
their work could develop. Inhibodress artist Mike Parr alluded to the role
of synthesis in collaboration—that the process of working together with
another artist produced more than the sum of two artists’ work. He predicted
that such hybrid forms of authorship would inevitably proliferate, aware,
from Inhibodress’s importation of artists’ books, of the quantity of
international artistic collaborations. Sounds familiar?

But dissent expressed within the closed shop of art institutions was
appropriated easily by galleries and their curators, and only this art was
to remain visible within art discourse. The activist attack was always
dependent upon its mutual dependency with high art, with galleries and
museums, despite the oppositional rhetoric of exclusion, resistance and
social change. The demand, along with the touching belief that
military-industrial complexes actually invest, culturally, financially,
emotionally, in culture enough to be tested by strategic cultural dissent
persists to this day in the presumption that “art” can be appropriated as a
cultural tool and that museum spaces can be strategic sites of protest and
change. The logic was obvious back then to many artists. There was, already
in 1971, a sense amongst particular artists that collectives, especially Art
& Language, were already dated because of their obsessive, academic concern
with aesthetic philosophising. By the early 1970s, A & L artists were also
abandoning the art world for a more politically committed, collective art
that was completely independent of New York or English conceptual art,
moving instead into collective street-level social activism, participating
in urban redevelopment battles. I’d distinguish these collectives from the
artistic collaborations that I wrote about in The Third Hand, for the work
created by these artists fitted into recognisable existing historical
categories of community art. The artists themselves were aware of this
distinction, even though community artists often came from a background of
post-object art and its associated critique of art institutions and the art
market. Community art projects provisionally removed the distinction between
artist and unskilled amateur, redefining the audience and the figure of the
artist but not, usually, the conventional nature of the art itself.
Community art and the art produced by radical collectives did not
necessarily seek to engage with the problems of hybrid authorship, beyond
the adoption of cooperative, joint authorship in the production of
aesthetically fairly conventional objects.
“Freedom” constituted a different end-game to the state of grace arrived at
by formalist artists a few years earlier, but a collective cul de sac all
the same. Conceptual artists gradually recognised that eliminating the
material object was not a heroic step forward towards enlightenment but, as
Benjamin Buchloh later elegantly pointed out, yet another erosion to which
art was subjected in the gradual separation of production from its
philosophical base, emphasising that the artistic freedom represented by the
crisis in artistic language of the early 1970s was a short-lived moment
before aesthetic and economic recuperation. Artists sought, of course, to
avoid this recuperation, and did so frequently through the manipulation of
artistic identity and, therefore, often through collaborations. The most
radical strategies in this crisis of identity—and in artists’ attempts to
avoid or evade recuperation—ranged from the cessation of artistic activity
altogether to the adoption of collaborative or collective methods, as I
pointed out earlier. The latter, however, constituted in practice an
alternate type of authorship rather than the dissolution of art envisaged by
the revolutionary theorists and counter-cultural vanguard of 1968, or
experimental community theorists today.
My intention in this essay has been to make a definite point about the use
of artistic collaboration: collaborations were sometimes a deconstruction of
the metropolitan master-narrative—that of the “death of art”—and sometimes a
reconstitution of the avant-garde narrative in experimental, deliberately
“marginal” adaptations to the ecology of art. Unless they moved outside this
ecosystem completely (and many collaborations successfully did; they are the
necessarily invisible, exemplary figures of my essay), activist artists
memorialised a strategic self-definition that reified a conservative
cultural category, that of art.
Charles Green is a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne, and
Senior Adjunct Curator at the National Gallery of Victoria. He has published
Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-94 (Craftsman House,
1995), and The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to
Postmodernism (University of Minnesota Press, 2001). He is also an artist,
working in collaboration with Lyndell Brown. Recently, he has co-curated the
inaugural exhibitions at both NGV redevelopments: world rush_4 artists: Doug
Aitken, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Lee Bul and Sarah Sze (Melbourne: National
Gallery of Victoria International, 2003), and Fieldwork: Australian Art
1968-2002 (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria Australia, 2002).