Radical art collectives reemerge

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times Arts and Leisure, Jan. 19, 2003
Doing Their Own Thing, Making Art Together
By HOLLAND COTTER

To many Americans, the world feels more threatened and threatening today 
than at any time since the 1960's. Terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the 
prospect of war on Iraq and ever tightening security measures at home have 
sent a hum of tension through daily life.

In the 1960's, comparable tension, excruciatingly amplified, produced a big 
response: the spread of a counterculture, one that began with political 
protest movements and became an alternative way of life. Among other 
things, it delivered a sustained, collective "no" to certain values 
(imperialism, moralism, technological destruction), and a collective "yes" 
to others: peace, liberation, a return-to-childhood innocence.

The collective itself, as a social unit, was an important element in the 
60's utopian equation. Whatever form the concept took ? the commune, the 
band, the cult ? its implications of shared resources, dynamic interchange 
and egos put on hold made it a model for change.

Even the art world, built on a foundation of hierarchies and exclusions, 
produced its own versions. Activist groups like the Artworkers Coalition 
and the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition made concerted attempts to pry 
open institutional doors and let in a multicultural world. Simultaneously, 
nonmilitant movements like the Dada-inspired Fluxus produced an ephemeral, 
give-away, anyone-can-do-it art that amounted to a kind of passive 
resistance to the existing market economy. Both approaches ? one forceful, 
one gentle ? changed the way art was thought about, and the way it looked.

The collective impulse has never died out in American art; and now it is 
surfacing again, for the most part outside New York. In cities like 
Milwaukee, Providence, R. I., St. Louis and Philadelphia, as well as 
several in Canada, an old countercultural model, often much changed, is 
being revived, in some cases by artists barely out of their teens.

Many of the new art collectives are virtual: they reside on the Internet, 
that intrinsically collective medium. They are fluid in size, and members 
may not even know the identity of other members. The kinds of art they 
produce vary widely, but when it is political it tends to be actively so. 
To much of the art world, these collectives barely exist. Their work is 
difficult to market; it's available to everyone free; traditional criteria 
of judgment, the kind that make critics so comfortable with, say, painting, 
don't apply.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/19/arts/design/19COTT.html


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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