Post by henryprocter on Dec 2, 2006 9:05:46 GMT -5
Beyond Autonomy (2): Collaboration and Relation
NB These notes are in lieu of our collaborative session on ‘collaboration’ (and ‘Relation’). I am really sorry to have missed that as it had the potential to be a very fitting finish to our 4 week block. Far better than these notes would be the text that you collectively composed our of your 100-200 word pieces. I wonder if we can find a way of stitching those together – perhaps using the new CFAP wiki? Ask Sina for details…
Introduction
When we looked at the concept of ‘autonomy’ in art, we did so in 2 sessions
1) First, we reviewed some theories of art’s autonomy, in order to establish that, from different theoretical perspectives, ‘autonomy’ takes different forms e.g. for Marcuse ‘the aesthetic form removes art from the actuality of class struggle [and…] constitutes the autonomy of art vis a vis “the given.”’; for Greenberg, art is ‘autonomous’ as it differentiates itself from other cultural forms.
2) Then, in the second session, we looked at the way in which the idea of art’s autonomy impacts the discourses of curating.
The two sessions on ‘Beyond Autonomy’ follow the same rubric.
1) First, we looked at different theories of ‘beyond autonomy’ - namely, Lingner’s ‘post-autonomy’ and Danto’s idea of ‘The End of Art’.
2) Thus, with this, the last session, we are going onto look at one of the implications that a refusal of art’s autonomy has for the production of art: specifically, as that affects art’s authorship – its production by artists – and others…
1. Relation and Collaboration
The insistence – that many artists now place – on ‘relation’ (more anon) and collaboration (in its most basic understanding – ‘working together’) is not a necessary outcome of refusing autonomy. Because, as you’re now aware, ‘autonomy’ in art can be refused in different ways, depending on how one conceives of it – autonomy.
However, that said, there is a strong identification of practices that seek to re-connect art to forms of ‘social life’ with the practice of collaboration and ‘relation’.
2. A note on ‘relation’
What do I mean by ‘relation’? Well, I’m using the word as a short version of ‘Relational Aesthetics’ to forge a relation (sorry!) with ‘collaboration’. So let’s talk a bit about Relational Aesthetics as a way of establishing its link to collaboration in the context of ‘beyond autonomy’.
2.1 ‘Relational Aesthetics’
… is, as you’ll know from your pre-course, Summer Reading, a term coined by Nicolas Bourriaud. Of contemporary practices, Bourriaud writes:
‘Artistic activity […] strives to […] connect levels of reality kept apart from one another’. (p. 8)
Why does it do this? B suggests that it’s a protest against the increasing levels of human alienation – human’s alienation from one another via ‘communication superhighways’ – i.e. artists are protesting this alienation by working with very human, social forms of practice.
‘Herein lies the most burning issue to do with art today: is it still possible to generate relationships with the world, in a practical field art-history traditionally earmarked for their “representation”?’ (p. 9). This is a key question, which also makes a very important point – almost unnoticed. In the last bit of the sentence, there’s a point about art taking ‘real life’ – ‘the world’ as its subject (the conventional mode of engagement) which is counter posed to today’s practices, which as Bourriaud suggests, don’t so much represent the world but take place in it – one could, at a stretch say, they ‘presence’ it. Or, as I prefer to argue, contemporary practices ‘presence’; whereas much twentieth century art was concerned with represenation.
And what do these contemporary practices ‘presence’ rather than re-present? Yes, as Bourriaud writes on p. 14:
‘the realm of human interactions and its social context’; Relational Aesthetics is ‘an art form where the substrate is formed by intersubjectivity’ (p. 15)
Put like this, we can see how artists are reversing the autonomy of art as described by Marcuse.
Relational aesthetics is about changing the medium of art in a way that rejects art’s autonomy from social life – but c.f. Claire Bishop’s trenchant critique (of Bourriaud) – she says that often the ‘social relations’ that RA type work involves merely comprise artists’ relations with each other! That is to say, it’s all too convivial and ignores ‘antagonistic’ relations.
Going back to the issue of ‘authorship’ of this new type of art-practice: we can argue that the subjects involved in the work become the authors of the work – though the mechanisms for crediting them as such don’t yet exist / or the originating artists are reluctant to cede their authority in this regard…
Relational Aesthetics is very important – as a concept, as a book, and as a set of practices - to art-beyond-autonomy, but it does not so clearly belong to the discourse of post-autonomous ‘authorship’ as much as the concept and practice of ‘collaboration’ do. This is a simple point about the fact that Relational Aesthetics (the book) focuses on the medium of art, rather than the discourse of its production.
However, the excerpt I proposed for this week (by way of reminding you of RA), is not perhaps the most obvious for the purposes of this discussion. The next section ‘Art of the 1990s’ is perhaps better, dealing as it does at more length with participation, collaboration etc. head on, but alas, so ‘untheoretically’ – see for example, yes, the section ‘collaboration and contracts’ as to be little use, other than by way of exemplification. The chapter I gave you at least sets the broad, intellectual and historical scene for RA.
(A note on Bourriaud’s text as a piece of writing. I think that he’s very unrigorous theoretically. Certainly he never clearly lays out his terms of analysis. Yes, he makes references e.g. to Marx, Althusser (an odd favourite), de Certeau, and much odder writers / thinkers, but never with a view to elaborating a sustained theoretical position. Moreover, I personally find his prose very, well ‘scatter-brained’; he darts about all over the place, not really sustaining or developing an argument. In some places I suspect that the disorientation one feels is compounded by a truly appalling translation – p. 20 – bottom half is a case in point – many typos – Durkheim’s name misspelled, grammatical errors etc…)
3. From Relational Aesthetics as a way of thinking about art’s post-autonomous authorship to ‘collaboration’
For our purposes, today of thinking about the production (as authorship – or subjects who produce / originate the work of art), John Roberts’ essay on Collaboration is far more to the point.
It’s essential reading not the least because it takes a very much used term – dare I say a ‘trendy term’ i.e. ‘collaboration’ - and subjects it to critical scrutiny which produces / reveals different types of collaboration. For such is the value put upon the concept (loosely defined) by virtue of its perceived ‘social worthiness’, that there’s a rush to define many things as ‘collaborative’ – which at the most minimal, only slightly tweak the model of the artist-in-his-garret slaving away in solitary confinement.
So: what is this more sophisticated understanding of ‘collaboration’ that John Roberts elaborates? (In the paraphrase and commentary below, bits in square brackets represent my thoughts on the text where it’s not otherwise clear.)
Let’s not forget that ‘collaboration’ means – according to its etymology – ‘working together’.
1.1 All art is ‘collaborative’, or a ‘social practice’. What does this remind you of? (Answer at bottom of script.) Even the Romantic artist in the garret needs ‘the labour of others’. [However, we do not often choose to see this as ‘collaboration’ – indeed, society suppresses this aspect of ‘relational’ working.]
1.2 Then there is what Roberts calls ‘self-conscious’ collaboration. However, this is not simply ‘collaboration’ which refuses to be suppressed e.g. an artist acknowledging the work of their canvas maker. Rather it seems to be a process of authorship that is ‘made explicit in the form of the work’. But what does this mean? I’m not convinced that Roberts is sufficiently clear with what could be a very important point. When he says that ‘self-conscious’ collaboration is ‘made explicit in the form of the work’ it’s not clear whether ‘work’ is process or outcome. I would argue that he has to mean process as art doesn’t necessarily readily ‘manifest’ varied authorship in its outcomes… I think that R wants to call this ‘self-conscious’ because it’s different from the mundane (if suppressed) forms of collaboration i.e. the artist depending on the canvas maker.
1.3 R underlines the point above by calling everyday collaboration (that which often happens but isn’t acknowledged as such) ‘the ‘artisanal model of teamwork and setting this against a form of collaboration in which ‘uthorship is defined as multiple and diffuse’. What he really wants to emphasise with the latter model is the fact that:
a) through working with others ‘the artist’s individual will and identity’ is subordinated to that of the group; and
b) that the working with others (who are different from, or ‘other to’ - in a radical sense - the usual run of artisans and assistants) passes a comment on the artist’s (usual) position in the ‘socialized division of labour’ – it makes it transparent. It shows us how ‘alienated’ artists usually are in their largely solitary activities. At least, I think this is what R means. It’s not the easiest of his sentences. But like many an article, this gets clearer as it proceeds – well for a little while!
1.4 R then coins the term ‘collective collaboration’ (it appears as such on p. 559; to begin with it only appears in the phrase ‘collective mode of collaboration) to mark this form of authorship (self-conscious collaboration). While it doesn’t have a ready common-sense meaning (but does ‘Relational Aesthetics’?), it is nevertheless needed to distinguish the two types of working-together. Note that ‘collective collaboration’ i.e. authorship which is ‘multiple and diffuse’ is opposed to Warhol-type collaboration.
> Can anyone think of a better term? You might want to refer to the many examples Roberts gives (a strength of this article is the way in which he cites different types of practice to support more abstract points – c.f Bourriaud – who tends to omit the latter bit).
1.5 Elaborating ‘collective collaboration’, R cites Werkbund, Bauhaus, Rodchenko’s Metfak faculty and early Soviet Productivism (you may want to research these as Constructivism and Productivism have been out of fashion for quite some time) in which ‘technical procedures of various disciplines are brought into critical exchange and alignment’.
This is a key point which R doesn’t perhaps emphasise enough; for at the heart of this acknowledgement is the recognition that what is emerging is an inter-disciplinary practice. Art is ‘collaborating’ with a range of other disciplines. Not necessarily more than one discipline for any given practice – but this takes art beyond the ‘artisinal model’ (which only involves art-related activities; activities already in the ‘service’ of art’).
1.6 Then, having already distinguished between the ‘artisinal model’ of collaboration and ‘collective collaboration’, Roberts further identifies ‘two main models’ within the latter (it subdivides, in other words):
- a) a ‘post-autonomous defence of art as social praxis’ (note Roberts’ use of Lingner’s term). He cites Rodchenko’s propaganda (‘public information’) kiosks as examples – but let’s note that ‘a post-autonomous defence of art as social praxis’ is a critical position, not a type of art, strictly speaking.
-
- b) ‘the dissolution of art into industrial production itself’ – Boris Arvatov’s Productivism in which ‘art goes hand in hand with technology and science’ Roberts is quoting from Arvatov.
What are the differences in these practices? Well, without having too much detail of Roberts’ examples (I found some information online… ), it appears that the 1st sub-type concerns art – or more to the point, quasi-architecture, that has an overt social function. It’s ‘defended’ as art via a post-autonomous theory of what art can be. In the second case, art, it seems, informs and disappears into another discipline, here industrial production. Perhaps the difference resides in the degree to which the results of either ‘type’ are identified with ‘art’ in its autonomous sense, and / or the way in which art is ‘taken over’ by non-art processes.
Roberts then underscores the ‘social’ aspect of these types of practice. How? Why are they such ‘social’ forms? See end for the answer!
1.7 Slightly losing sight of the ‘two models’ of ‘collective collaboration’, Roberts then stresses the fact that, in its historical (avant-garde) form, ‘collective collaboration’ is ‘highly critical of those collaborative models in art that […] identified collaboration solely in terms of artistic interdisciplinarity, rather than in terms of political alliance with proletarian reconstruction’ (p. 558) such that ‘the collective model of collaboration was stillborn’. (p. 559).
1.8 We then move quickly onto the ‘present’, for Roberts sees the unfinished / unrealised business of the Russian avant-garde as a provocation for contemporary artists: ‘the critique of the separation of “artistic technique and general social technique” continues to provide the speculative basis of various collective models of collaboration.’ (p. 559). We will leave to one side the spectre of more ‘models of collaboration’!
Suffice to say that there’s then a key proclamation. Roberts writes: ‘this move [the convergence of ‘artistic technique and general social technique] [is] a necessary precondition for any radical transformation of the cultural form of art [‘today’]’ (p. 559)
This very important claim then leads into a rather technical discussion of Marxist ‘value form’
1.9 As this takes us well into another session’s worth of notes, and moreover, is not only very, very technical (economics-wise) and involved and further still not entirely clear, I’m going to leap over it. (I’m also somewhat disconcerted by the fact that Roberts offers a very different account of ‘value-form’ from Marx – see the excerpt I supplied at the end of the Roberts’ article…). Then again, there’s the question of what this discussion is doing in the article: how it advances things…
So we will pick up this text with Roberts’ attempts to understand the reason for the recent interest on the part of artists in collaboration: (p. 562). He is very careful here and does not want to claim that the rise of collective collaboration in art is simply a result of ‘changes in the relations of production’ (a ‘vulgar Marxist’ analysis – for remember, that art is always ‘relatively’ autonomous from the economic base, for ‘cultural’ Marxists.) More so, because as he notes with quite some irony, ‘collective collaboration’ is a minority practice in the art world: the art world is still typified by commodity production e.g. white cube type practices. However, while not wanting to cite the ‘increasing socialisation of labour’ – (what does he really mean by this?) as the cause, he does want to suggest that there’s a connection here. He then moves onto:
1.10 The implications of recent collective collaboration: ‘If collaboration in art is part of a common struggle with labour against the capitalist value-form, in what ways is this activity to be nominated as art rather than as some other kind of practice, such as politics itself?’ This is a key question for many writers – workers in the field; the problem of art’s ‘identity’ as distinctness as it becomes post-autonomous. Moreover, as Roberts says, as collective collaboration is precisely, the way in which art becomes post-autonomous, the question is particularly acute. He notes that ‘what post-autonomous defenders of collaboration fail to register is where exactly the boundaries are of art as praxis’. (Perhaps this is the most difficult bit of the whole argument – but see my forthcoming article in The Journal of Visual Arts Practice, which tackles this question head on… should be published early 2007). Roberts notes ‘post-autonomous collaboration […] always returns to the art world to name itself as art’. And then he invokes Marcuse-like arguments to do with art’s necessary autonomy. You might want to compare the terms of engagement here, as they’re quite close.
1.11 As an aspect of this argument about preserving the ‘autonomy’ of art in the social realm he then goes onto to make a rather complicated point about the value of art as non-alienated labour in the realm of other types of work – what he somewhat confusingly calls ‘socialised labour’. To try to put this simply: I’d say that what he is arguing is that art which tries to be too integrated with ‘social practices’ i.e. everyday forms of production (and hence makes a political critique of the conventional non-socialised condition of art-production) simultaneously risks negating the value of art’s non-alienated condition under capitalism. Putting the point about non-alienated artistic labour very crudely: artists work for themselves (or are thought to do so); other ‘workers’ have little relation to their efforts other than the need to earn a salary. This ‘non-alienation’ is not something any Marxist would wish to lose – so the project of collective collaboration must resist fully dissolving art into other social practices.
A quick summary of the structure and contents of Roberts’ article:
• Looks at different types of collaboration – amongst artists and artists with others (finds two sub-types in the latter)
• Then: looks at the 20th Century history of collaboration and its political value / context
• Then: looks at questions of ‘value-form’ in capitalism and labour-relations: exchange and production – technology and subjectivity.
• Then: looks at issues of the value of the ‘post-autonomous’ project of moving art into life. Or at least: he questions what happens when art moves into social practice (as art) and what the advantages and disadvantages of this are in terms of a Marxist critique of Capital.
Responses to questions put to you in the lecture notes:
1. All art is ‘collaborative’, or a ‘social practice’ – this can be seen as a version of Marcuse’s comment on the fact that ‘all art is somehow conditioned by the relations of production’.
You might also recall the Bourriaud writes: ‘art has always been relational in varying degrees’ Relational Aesthetics p. 15.
2. The two ‘types’ of collective collaboration and how they are so ‘social’: sense; they offer a model of collective labour and connectivity across disciplines that exist in primary conjunction with the transformation of collective experience in the social world. In this, they are models of convergence between art as collective practice and the collectivised labour (intellectual and manual) of the factory and workshop itself.’ (p. 558)
What’s important in this point that Roberts is making is that he’s trying to emphasise the fact that not only are the forms of production ‘social’ in the sense that they involve people working together (more than one producer), but that they’re also ‘social’ in the sense that they’re bringing hitherto separate practices together.
Refer back to introductory paragraph above for suggestions about the ‘assignment’ for this week’s session.
NB These notes are in lieu of our collaborative session on ‘collaboration’ (and ‘Relation’). I am really sorry to have missed that as it had the potential to be a very fitting finish to our 4 week block. Far better than these notes would be the text that you collectively composed our of your 100-200 word pieces. I wonder if we can find a way of stitching those together – perhaps using the new CFAP wiki? Ask Sina for details…
Introduction
When we looked at the concept of ‘autonomy’ in art, we did so in 2 sessions
1) First, we reviewed some theories of art’s autonomy, in order to establish that, from different theoretical perspectives, ‘autonomy’ takes different forms e.g. for Marcuse ‘the aesthetic form removes art from the actuality of class struggle [and…] constitutes the autonomy of art vis a vis “the given.”’; for Greenberg, art is ‘autonomous’ as it differentiates itself from other cultural forms.
2) Then, in the second session, we looked at the way in which the idea of art’s autonomy impacts the discourses of curating.
The two sessions on ‘Beyond Autonomy’ follow the same rubric.
1) First, we looked at different theories of ‘beyond autonomy’ - namely, Lingner’s ‘post-autonomy’ and Danto’s idea of ‘The End of Art’.
2) Thus, with this, the last session, we are going onto look at one of the implications that a refusal of art’s autonomy has for the production of art: specifically, as that affects art’s authorship – its production by artists – and others…
1. Relation and Collaboration
The insistence – that many artists now place – on ‘relation’ (more anon) and collaboration (in its most basic understanding – ‘working together’) is not a necessary outcome of refusing autonomy. Because, as you’re now aware, ‘autonomy’ in art can be refused in different ways, depending on how one conceives of it – autonomy.
However, that said, there is a strong identification of practices that seek to re-connect art to forms of ‘social life’ with the practice of collaboration and ‘relation’.
2. A note on ‘relation’
What do I mean by ‘relation’? Well, I’m using the word as a short version of ‘Relational Aesthetics’ to forge a relation (sorry!) with ‘collaboration’. So let’s talk a bit about Relational Aesthetics as a way of establishing its link to collaboration in the context of ‘beyond autonomy’.
2.1 ‘Relational Aesthetics’
… is, as you’ll know from your pre-course, Summer Reading, a term coined by Nicolas Bourriaud. Of contemporary practices, Bourriaud writes:
‘Artistic activity […] strives to […] connect levels of reality kept apart from one another’. (p. 8)
Why does it do this? B suggests that it’s a protest against the increasing levels of human alienation – human’s alienation from one another via ‘communication superhighways’ – i.e. artists are protesting this alienation by working with very human, social forms of practice.
‘Herein lies the most burning issue to do with art today: is it still possible to generate relationships with the world, in a practical field art-history traditionally earmarked for their “representation”?’ (p. 9). This is a key question, which also makes a very important point – almost unnoticed. In the last bit of the sentence, there’s a point about art taking ‘real life’ – ‘the world’ as its subject (the conventional mode of engagement) which is counter posed to today’s practices, which as Bourriaud suggests, don’t so much represent the world but take place in it – one could, at a stretch say, they ‘presence’ it. Or, as I prefer to argue, contemporary practices ‘presence’; whereas much twentieth century art was concerned with represenation.
And what do these contemporary practices ‘presence’ rather than re-present? Yes, as Bourriaud writes on p. 14:
‘the realm of human interactions and its social context’; Relational Aesthetics is ‘an art form where the substrate is formed by intersubjectivity’ (p. 15)
Put like this, we can see how artists are reversing the autonomy of art as described by Marcuse.
Relational aesthetics is about changing the medium of art in a way that rejects art’s autonomy from social life – but c.f. Claire Bishop’s trenchant critique (of Bourriaud) – she says that often the ‘social relations’ that RA type work involves merely comprise artists’ relations with each other! That is to say, it’s all too convivial and ignores ‘antagonistic’ relations.
Going back to the issue of ‘authorship’ of this new type of art-practice: we can argue that the subjects involved in the work become the authors of the work – though the mechanisms for crediting them as such don’t yet exist / or the originating artists are reluctant to cede their authority in this regard…
Relational Aesthetics is very important – as a concept, as a book, and as a set of practices - to art-beyond-autonomy, but it does not so clearly belong to the discourse of post-autonomous ‘authorship’ as much as the concept and practice of ‘collaboration’ do. This is a simple point about the fact that Relational Aesthetics (the book) focuses on the medium of art, rather than the discourse of its production.
However, the excerpt I proposed for this week (by way of reminding you of RA), is not perhaps the most obvious for the purposes of this discussion. The next section ‘Art of the 1990s’ is perhaps better, dealing as it does at more length with participation, collaboration etc. head on, but alas, so ‘untheoretically’ – see for example, yes, the section ‘collaboration and contracts’ as to be little use, other than by way of exemplification. The chapter I gave you at least sets the broad, intellectual and historical scene for RA.
(A note on Bourriaud’s text as a piece of writing. I think that he’s very unrigorous theoretically. Certainly he never clearly lays out his terms of analysis. Yes, he makes references e.g. to Marx, Althusser (an odd favourite), de Certeau, and much odder writers / thinkers, but never with a view to elaborating a sustained theoretical position. Moreover, I personally find his prose very, well ‘scatter-brained’; he darts about all over the place, not really sustaining or developing an argument. In some places I suspect that the disorientation one feels is compounded by a truly appalling translation – p. 20 – bottom half is a case in point – many typos – Durkheim’s name misspelled, grammatical errors etc…)
3. From Relational Aesthetics as a way of thinking about art’s post-autonomous authorship to ‘collaboration’
For our purposes, today of thinking about the production (as authorship – or subjects who produce / originate the work of art), John Roberts’ essay on Collaboration is far more to the point.
It’s essential reading not the least because it takes a very much used term – dare I say a ‘trendy term’ i.e. ‘collaboration’ - and subjects it to critical scrutiny which produces / reveals different types of collaboration. For such is the value put upon the concept (loosely defined) by virtue of its perceived ‘social worthiness’, that there’s a rush to define many things as ‘collaborative’ – which at the most minimal, only slightly tweak the model of the artist-in-his-garret slaving away in solitary confinement.
So: what is this more sophisticated understanding of ‘collaboration’ that John Roberts elaborates? (In the paraphrase and commentary below, bits in square brackets represent my thoughts on the text where it’s not otherwise clear.)
Let’s not forget that ‘collaboration’ means – according to its etymology – ‘working together’.
1.1 All art is ‘collaborative’, or a ‘social practice’. What does this remind you of? (Answer at bottom of script.) Even the Romantic artist in the garret needs ‘the labour of others’. [However, we do not often choose to see this as ‘collaboration’ – indeed, society suppresses this aspect of ‘relational’ working.]
1.2 Then there is what Roberts calls ‘self-conscious’ collaboration. However, this is not simply ‘collaboration’ which refuses to be suppressed e.g. an artist acknowledging the work of their canvas maker. Rather it seems to be a process of authorship that is ‘made explicit in the form of the work’. But what does this mean? I’m not convinced that Roberts is sufficiently clear with what could be a very important point. When he says that ‘self-conscious’ collaboration is ‘made explicit in the form of the work’ it’s not clear whether ‘work’ is process or outcome. I would argue that he has to mean process as art doesn’t necessarily readily ‘manifest’ varied authorship in its outcomes… I think that R wants to call this ‘self-conscious’ because it’s different from the mundane (if suppressed) forms of collaboration i.e. the artist depending on the canvas maker.
1.3 R underlines the point above by calling everyday collaboration (that which often happens but isn’t acknowledged as such) ‘the ‘artisanal model of teamwork and setting this against a form of collaboration in which ‘uthorship is defined as multiple and diffuse’. What he really wants to emphasise with the latter model is the fact that:
a) through working with others ‘the artist’s individual will and identity’ is subordinated to that of the group; and
b) that the working with others (who are different from, or ‘other to’ - in a radical sense - the usual run of artisans and assistants) passes a comment on the artist’s (usual) position in the ‘socialized division of labour’ – it makes it transparent. It shows us how ‘alienated’ artists usually are in their largely solitary activities. At least, I think this is what R means. It’s not the easiest of his sentences. But like many an article, this gets clearer as it proceeds – well for a little while!
1.4 R then coins the term ‘collective collaboration’ (it appears as such on p. 559; to begin with it only appears in the phrase ‘collective mode of collaboration) to mark this form of authorship (self-conscious collaboration). While it doesn’t have a ready common-sense meaning (but does ‘Relational Aesthetics’?), it is nevertheless needed to distinguish the two types of working-together. Note that ‘collective collaboration’ i.e. authorship which is ‘multiple and diffuse’ is opposed to Warhol-type collaboration.
> Can anyone think of a better term? You might want to refer to the many examples Roberts gives (a strength of this article is the way in which he cites different types of practice to support more abstract points – c.f Bourriaud – who tends to omit the latter bit).
1.5 Elaborating ‘collective collaboration’, R cites Werkbund, Bauhaus, Rodchenko’s Metfak faculty and early Soviet Productivism (you may want to research these as Constructivism and Productivism have been out of fashion for quite some time) in which ‘technical procedures of various disciplines are brought into critical exchange and alignment’.
This is a key point which R doesn’t perhaps emphasise enough; for at the heart of this acknowledgement is the recognition that what is emerging is an inter-disciplinary practice. Art is ‘collaborating’ with a range of other disciplines. Not necessarily more than one discipline for any given practice – but this takes art beyond the ‘artisinal model’ (which only involves art-related activities; activities already in the ‘service’ of art’).
1.6 Then, having already distinguished between the ‘artisinal model’ of collaboration and ‘collective collaboration’, Roberts further identifies ‘two main models’ within the latter (it subdivides, in other words):
- a) a ‘post-autonomous defence of art as social praxis’ (note Roberts’ use of Lingner’s term). He cites Rodchenko’s propaganda (‘public information’) kiosks as examples – but let’s note that ‘a post-autonomous defence of art as social praxis’ is a critical position, not a type of art, strictly speaking.
-
- b) ‘the dissolution of art into industrial production itself’ – Boris Arvatov’s Productivism in which ‘art goes hand in hand with technology and science’ Roberts is quoting from Arvatov.
What are the differences in these practices? Well, without having too much detail of Roberts’ examples (I found some information online… ), it appears that the 1st sub-type concerns art – or more to the point, quasi-architecture, that has an overt social function. It’s ‘defended’ as art via a post-autonomous theory of what art can be. In the second case, art, it seems, informs and disappears into another discipline, here industrial production. Perhaps the difference resides in the degree to which the results of either ‘type’ are identified with ‘art’ in its autonomous sense, and / or the way in which art is ‘taken over’ by non-art processes.
Roberts then underscores the ‘social’ aspect of these types of practice. How? Why are they such ‘social’ forms? See end for the answer!
1.7 Slightly losing sight of the ‘two models’ of ‘collective collaboration’, Roberts then stresses the fact that, in its historical (avant-garde) form, ‘collective collaboration’ is ‘highly critical of those collaborative models in art that […] identified collaboration solely in terms of artistic interdisciplinarity, rather than in terms of political alliance with proletarian reconstruction’ (p. 558) such that ‘the collective model of collaboration was stillborn’. (p. 559).
1.8 We then move quickly onto the ‘present’, for Roberts sees the unfinished / unrealised business of the Russian avant-garde as a provocation for contemporary artists: ‘the critique of the separation of “artistic technique and general social technique” continues to provide the speculative basis of various collective models of collaboration.’ (p. 559). We will leave to one side the spectre of more ‘models of collaboration’!
Suffice to say that there’s then a key proclamation. Roberts writes: ‘this move [the convergence of ‘artistic technique and general social technique] [is] a necessary precondition for any radical transformation of the cultural form of art [‘today’]’ (p. 559)
This very important claim then leads into a rather technical discussion of Marxist ‘value form’
1.9 As this takes us well into another session’s worth of notes, and moreover, is not only very, very technical (economics-wise) and involved and further still not entirely clear, I’m going to leap over it. (I’m also somewhat disconcerted by the fact that Roberts offers a very different account of ‘value-form’ from Marx – see the excerpt I supplied at the end of the Roberts’ article…). Then again, there’s the question of what this discussion is doing in the article: how it advances things…
So we will pick up this text with Roberts’ attempts to understand the reason for the recent interest on the part of artists in collaboration: (p. 562). He is very careful here and does not want to claim that the rise of collective collaboration in art is simply a result of ‘changes in the relations of production’ (a ‘vulgar Marxist’ analysis – for remember, that art is always ‘relatively’ autonomous from the economic base, for ‘cultural’ Marxists.) More so, because as he notes with quite some irony, ‘collective collaboration’ is a minority practice in the art world: the art world is still typified by commodity production e.g. white cube type practices. However, while not wanting to cite the ‘increasing socialisation of labour’ – (what does he really mean by this?) as the cause, he does want to suggest that there’s a connection here. He then moves onto:
1.10 The implications of recent collective collaboration: ‘If collaboration in art is part of a common struggle with labour against the capitalist value-form, in what ways is this activity to be nominated as art rather than as some other kind of practice, such as politics itself?’ This is a key question for many writers – workers in the field; the problem of art’s ‘identity’ as distinctness as it becomes post-autonomous. Moreover, as Roberts says, as collective collaboration is precisely, the way in which art becomes post-autonomous, the question is particularly acute. He notes that ‘what post-autonomous defenders of collaboration fail to register is where exactly the boundaries are of art as praxis’. (Perhaps this is the most difficult bit of the whole argument – but see my forthcoming article in The Journal of Visual Arts Practice, which tackles this question head on… should be published early 2007). Roberts notes ‘post-autonomous collaboration […] always returns to the art world to name itself as art’. And then he invokes Marcuse-like arguments to do with art’s necessary autonomy. You might want to compare the terms of engagement here, as they’re quite close.
1.11 As an aspect of this argument about preserving the ‘autonomy’ of art in the social realm he then goes onto to make a rather complicated point about the value of art as non-alienated labour in the realm of other types of work – what he somewhat confusingly calls ‘socialised labour’. To try to put this simply: I’d say that what he is arguing is that art which tries to be too integrated with ‘social practices’ i.e. everyday forms of production (and hence makes a political critique of the conventional non-socialised condition of art-production) simultaneously risks negating the value of art’s non-alienated condition under capitalism. Putting the point about non-alienated artistic labour very crudely: artists work for themselves (or are thought to do so); other ‘workers’ have little relation to their efforts other than the need to earn a salary. This ‘non-alienation’ is not something any Marxist would wish to lose – so the project of collective collaboration must resist fully dissolving art into other social practices.
A quick summary of the structure and contents of Roberts’ article:
• Looks at different types of collaboration – amongst artists and artists with others (finds two sub-types in the latter)
• Then: looks at the 20th Century history of collaboration and its political value / context
• Then: looks at questions of ‘value-form’ in capitalism and labour-relations: exchange and production – technology and subjectivity.
• Then: looks at issues of the value of the ‘post-autonomous’ project of moving art into life. Or at least: he questions what happens when art moves into social practice (as art) and what the advantages and disadvantages of this are in terms of a Marxist critique of Capital.
Responses to questions put to you in the lecture notes:
1. All art is ‘collaborative’, or a ‘social practice’ – this can be seen as a version of Marcuse’s comment on the fact that ‘all art is somehow conditioned by the relations of production’.
You might also recall the Bourriaud writes: ‘art has always been relational in varying degrees’ Relational Aesthetics p. 15.
2. The two ‘types’ of collective collaboration and how they are so ‘social’: sense; they offer a model of collective labour and connectivity across disciplines that exist in primary conjunction with the transformation of collective experience in the social world. In this, they are models of convergence between art as collective practice and the collectivised labour (intellectual and manual) of the factory and workshop itself.’ (p. 558)
What’s important in this point that Roberts is making is that he’s trying to emphasise the fact that not only are the forms of production ‘social’ in the sense that they involve people working together (more than one producer), but that they’re also ‘social’ in the sense that they’re bringing hitherto separate practices together.
Refer back to introductory paragraph above for suggestions about the ‘assignment’ for this week’s session.