General Introduction to Collectivity in Modern Art
Alan Moore
Paper for “Critical Mass” exhibition, Smart Museum, University of Chicago, April 2002

Art starts from groups. Collectivity is the basis for artistic production. Special forms of social relations are the soil in which artists are rooted. From this soil the flowers of art bloom, are cut, and carried to the vases in arrangements like those in large vases in the lobby of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. There they may be understood as emblems, as a language of flowers, speaking universally, as if to everyone, above and beyond their origins.

The collective in western art is rooted in the workshop structure of art and artisan production, rooted too the teaching routines of the art academy. It is also bred into the artist’s economy of poverty. Time, space, materials, ideas and opportunities make up the conditions within which art can be produced. Not all of this is bought and paid for. Artists receive and give gifts in continuous transactions and exchanges. This network of non-monetized exchange is the social field of the collective.

High art is not usually seen as the outcome of collective processes, but rather as the product of an individual, a “hand.” The work of art organizes the capital investments of great collections, and these investments organize institutions and histories. Collectives like those featured in the exhibition Critical Mass do not usually make such products. They make changes.

Collectivity is certainly present in all intellectual industries. In the mental work of advertising and entertainment, production begins with the "creative team." That’s why the boss wants you to show up. Collective production dominates when what matters is dependability, repeatability, and impressive craftsmanship. In ancient Rome the individual artist was an anonymous worker in a shop. Collective production supported the military egos who maintained the empire. Today collective cultural production reproduces the habits of a society under corporate rule.

The working groups that serve up cultural products for popular taste -- segmented of course by gender, age and income – are the collectivity of workaday cultural production.

The collectivity this exhibition displays is the culture industry's evil twin. It is a mirror image -- a dialectical collectivity that values creativity and critique, and process over product. These collectives don’t serve comfort food. They inspire us as to what is possible, and propagandize for another world. Through this group work, artists are reasserting and reinventing a public social role for art. Industry doesn’t care about that, and it is unfulfilled in the production of objects for decoration and contemplation.

In the history of art, collectives have emerged when they are needed. Artists associate continuously as part of their work, and groups form in response to particular conditions, when something needs to be done. Artists have long used their groups to get some clout in artworlds dominated by managers running institutions and markets for trustees and collectors. Artists organize to better difficult situations, especially around exhibition – to get their art to the public.

In looking for models and modes of artists' collectivity, one must look up and down the history of art – at workshops (the structure of production itself), education, markets, museums and associations.

This spine of historical investigation runs from the French Revolution forward, with the reorganization of the great machinery of the French royal academy under Jacques-Louis David to serve republican rather than monarchical ends. Among these were great civic festivals, grander by far than the simple civic processions staged through city streets in the new American confederation which consisted of floats decorated by the trade groups. David’s students, the “Barbu,” or bearded ones, lived a neo-classical moral ideal, and are credited with publicly beginning that special self-segregated community of creatives which came to be called Bohemia. Although it was named for an actual country which sent its refugees west, this Bohemia was imaginary.

If you feel romantic, it was an Isle of Cythera for the muses and their servants, ever-present and invisible, a state of mind reached by checking out. If you are a realist, Bohemia was the exurbia of an immense apparatus of cultural production. To a cynic it's a shantytown for wastrels. Bohemia saw many spiritual immigrants throughout the 19th century and after. It was the first global nation of artists, and a continual unruly counterpoint to the official academy. Almost from the start bohemian style was bought and sold as an ideal of fun and artistic life. In our time this bourgeois myth has played a key role in motivating young people to gentrify working class urban neighborhoods.

In their heyday, bohemians resisted the changing nature of work under industrial capitalism. Of course life was hard without wages, as Henri Murger's stories of hard-scrabble and heartbreak in Paris recall. But the allure of bohemia was that of a place which recognizes Paul Lafargue’s “right to be lazy.”

Alternative society in the 19th century was not only on Grub Street. In the United States with its cheap land, communes arose, what today are called “intentional communities,” many founded by socialists inspired by the natural philosophy of Rousseau and the psychosocial systems of Fourier. Others were millennial Christians and transcendental religionists. Many of these communities, most famously the Shakers, made furniture and decorative objects, and painted “gifts” from the Holy Spirit. Fourierists at the New Jersey phalanx ate in a cafeteria decorated with murals, maybe something like the anarchist Paul Signac’s “In the Time of Harmony” (Au temps d’harmonie) of 1894.

Factory growth and the labor discipline it demanded broke up the farm and the artisan’s workshop alike, and as they vanished both became idealized. Perhaps the most enduring collectivist response to 19th century capitalism among artists was that of William Morris and the Arts & Crafts movement he inspired. Morris took the words of John Ruskin, anEnglish cleric’s son, to heart. The products of industrial labor reflected a lamentably degraded taste -- an outward sign of the moral infirmity of a people.

Ruskin's preaching moved William Morris to resist industrial capitalism by word and deed. He revised the artisan shop for art and design in a rural workshop complex through which a stream ran. Although Ruskin was a monarchist and Morris a socialist, both idealized the medieval era as the moment of collective social cohesion. For Ruskin, creative individuality shone through in the building of cathedrals where each irregular detail showed the reverent worker's hand. The American historian Henry Adams imagined the divide that plagued Ruskin as a contest for adherents between religion and technology symbolized by the Virgin and the dynamo, the huge new machine he’d seen at the 1876 American centennial exposition.

“Together with bohemia, the Arts & Crafts movement was part of a revolt against the redefinition of work. Most work in the industrial age was not creative; rather it was directed at making ever-cheaper commodities in automated shops where, in Marx’s formulation, the machine runs the worker.

At its height the Arts & Crafts movement was comprised of hundreds of workshops, associations and exhibiting places in the English-speaking world. The movement also had significant influence on U.S. art education. Yet despite Morris’ public political profile as a socialist, its spokesmen and women were very often metaphysical and moralizing, not material and organizing.

The Arts & Crafts movement was quickly turned to luxury production. What many well-off people desired, and continue to desire, were signs that spoke against the material basis of their society. Elegant signs of resistance to the industrial order became very popular, and remain so today. They merge, as may be seen in contemporary ads for Stickley furniture, into the identification with other moments of collective resistance, like the American rising of 1776 against colonial rule. Industrial and political realities are softened within the bourgeois parlor through the displays of products of archaic labor.

Even before Morris’ became famous in England, the revolutionary and the collective were fused in historical and intellectual memory with the rise and fall of the Paris Commune of 1870-71. Emulating David before him, realist painter Gustave Courbet led a short-lived but comprehensive attempt to change the structure of French art institutions through a democratically run, self-administering artists’ association. While Courbet was later put on trial for the destruction of the Vendome Column – the Fédération des artistes did most of their work defending the treasures of Paris from the besieging Prussians and the fleeing Imperial officials.

Subsequently anarchist artists and critics – Pissarro, Signac and Feneon, among others -- broke through the stranglehold of official exhibition in Paris by regularly convening large artist-organized exhibitions to popularize advanced art. These were the kind of shows which had made the names of the Impressionists. The Paris Salon d’Automne in turn became a model for the New Yorkers who started the Society of Independent Artists to mount annual exhibitions, most famously the Armory Show of 1913. The group was headed by the socialist John Sloan, and included among its directors Marcel Duchamp.

Duchamp’s own group of New York Dadas stage managed the infamous affair of the “Fountain” at the SIA’s “big show” of 1917. A urinal fixture submitted by a Philadelphia Dada and signed “R. Mutt” was rejected from this supposedly open show. The Dada journal Blindman energetically defended the work, and other artists’ openness to the avant-garde became an issue. Along the way the incident generated the kind of “ballyhoo” publicity the Dadas so avidly sought.

Dadas were great ones for association. From salons in New York to their nightclub and gallery in Zurich, and thence to the multi-purpose Club Dada in Berlin, the movement played scales on the forms of artistic collectivity. Johannes Baader, Oberdada of Berlin, urged members of the Club to use the “dada graphological institute; Dada medicinal department; Dada detective agency, the advertising department, the central bureau for male and female welfare, and the Dada school for renewing the psycho-therapeutic day to day relationships between adults and children…” (Richard Huelsenbeck, ed., The Dada Almanac with essay and added German matter by Malcolm Green ,Atlas Arkhive of the Avant-Garde, London, 1998)

Dada was not only anti-art but anti-art institutions. Its comprehensive critique of society is normally explained in art history classes as a repertoire of techniques – collage, chance procedure, sound and image unhitched from language. Dadaist "nihilism" then gives way to programmatic Surrealism, which under the strong leadership of Andre Breton, sought to leaven communism with libido and dreams.

In their first project the group founded a kind of institute, the Bureau of Surrealist Research or the Centrale Surréaliste. This office functioned in a collective mode derived from the procedures of scientific institutes, investigating speech under trance. Dutch de Stijl, a movement of artists, designers and architects, worked collectively in a style that appeared anonymous with its author’s works interchangeable.

The most profound instances of modernist collectivism took place in Russia. After the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the avant-garde artists of the futurist movement routed the old tsarist academies, and undertook to reformat the nation’s art institutions as completely as David had in France over a century before. This revolution was noticeable not only for rigorous formal exploration, like that in Malevich’s “year zero” exhibition, but for the strong participation of women, who were scarce in other European vanguards. The Soviet artists, both masters and students, researched and worked in all media, masters and students, then moved into the factories to begin the constructivist phase of work, redesigning all consumer goods.

Although Lenin turned his back on this vanguard in 1928, and Stalin reestablished figural socialist realism and conservative architectural form by repressive commands, purges and imprisonments, the socialist collective model was far from bankrupted by the betrayal of its avant-garde.

It inspired artists in China and the newly decolonized African nations, and remained vital in Europe during the cold war, even marking the network of artists making unsanctioned work under communist regimes.

The Bauhaus, the great interwar model of modernist art education, had roots in Arts & Crafts ideologies through the continental Art Nouveau movement. The school began its instruction with a course designed by the spiritualist mystic Johannes Itten. Mystic though he was, Itten’s Vorkors[was marked by a scientific formalist method and comprehensive material training. Rather than revering the hand, the Bauhaus sought to partner with enlightened factory owners.

While the structure of work at the school was hierarchical, it explicitly reasserted the old order of artistic production in the figure of the master and apprentice. The expectation of the student that apprentice will become master reflects an ordered system of cultural production in its real conditions, that is, in the conditions that insure its reproduction. This unspoken certainty stands in waiting behind all artists’ dreams of fame, the “sweepstakes” nature of publicity and celebrity which leads the public to regard artists as brand names. It is the bedrock social contract among artists, and the basis for the fluid formation of collectives – talent, honed by training and skill, will bring recognition over a lifetime of work.

American art institutions grew up largely from artists’ initiatives since the state was an irregular patron at best. Art academies and schools, like those in New York such as the National Academy of Design in the 19th century and the Art Students League in the early 20th, were founded and guided principally by artists.

The Beaux Art revival of the American Renaissance, and Gilded Age construction encouraged by the City Beautiful movement meant regular work for artists in the execution of decorative schemes along traditional lines. Artists formed professional associations according to these competencies.

During the 1920s teams of artists executing designs by the masters of the Mexican mural movement covered new post-revolutionary public buildings with visions of pre-colonial grandeur and a socialist future for illiterate workers and peasants. Educational programs like the Open Air Studios and new museums throughout Mexico stimulated the creativity of the people in the interests of national construction.

U.S. artists banded together along trade union lines to press the government for advantage in the economic crisis of the 1930s as the Artists Union represented those in the Federal Arts Project. Other groups, like the nationwide network of John Reed Clubs taught and exhibited in preparation for the revolution many thought was inevitable. When the Soviet Russian strategy changed from building Proletkult or Proletarian Culture to building the Popular Front against fascism, the American Artists’ Congress was formed, comprised of artists of “standing.”

Complex and continuous contests over what art should be and do were played out through these groups, in the extreme social situations of economic depression and fascist warmongering, as well as questions around the government’s support for the arts and its foreign policy.

The late 1930s climaxed in trauma for the American cultural left – which as a child I witnessed in the frequent retrospective rages of my mother, a one-time youthful socialist, at the spoiling of progressive democratic opportunities by Stalinists bent on controlling every group as a party front.

The years of fear and hatred which poisoned the left are best evoked for me in the figure of Leon Trotsky. Condemned in absentia at the Moscow show trials and exiled in Mexico, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo entertain him, while the artist David Siqueiros helps the Party by arranging an assassination attemp (it’s not clear whether he arranged the successful attempt, although he’s been accused]

This was a small trauma beside the thousands of people & soldiers killed in the Paris Commune, and merely annoying beside the millions that fascists murdered. (In an obscene inversion of the collectivity we consider, a good number died in Terezin, the Nazi labor camp for artists.) Still, the bitter divisions of the 1930s made the U.S. old left old, paralytic and incapable, in the bipolar world after World War II.

When the popular risings of 1968 arrived it was simultaneously disconcerting for governments east and west locked in the Cold War. The great and nearly bloodless uprising in Paris described by Daniel Cohn-Bendit in his book Obsolete Communism and the Left-Wing Alternative had a counterpart in the Prague Spring of that same year. The Paris rising was put down by De Gaulle, and the Prague revolt by Krushchev. In a sense, then, both prewar avant-gardes – one crushed by communists the other by fascists – were recalled in popular uprisings

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