The world of popular culture and the world of contemporary art both idolize the artist as superstar, a rapidly rising (or falling) hero; as a brilliant and foremost individual genius. This star-maker machinery keeps the Western cult of individuality permanently alive, which renders it continuously superior to the non-objectivity of ideas, politics and social imagination. Despite our self-declared and cultivated postmodern personas (which declared the death of the author a long time ago), we simply like to cling to the ego fetish of old-fashioned Romantic genius.

In their recent book Collectivism After Modernism, Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette adventurously attack the cult of the mastermind while delving into the specific histories of collective art practice. Spanning the globe from Europe to Japan, to the United States, Africa, Cuba and Mexico, the editors have asked significant writers, curators and theorists to explore ways in which collectives function within cultural norms and social conventions. Although each of the contributors brings a highly personal and geopolitical approach to the exploration of these themes, Stimson and Sholette set forth some compelling ideas in their provocative introductory text.

The authors relate collectivism directly to modernism and the avant-garde. Indeed, when considering the historical avant-garde before the Second World War, it is clear that modernism was an attempt to develop an alternative to the then present social life by means of art. From Mondrian’s aim to struggle “against everything individual in man” to Magritte’s “L’invention collective”, modernism was directly involved with the realization of communist ideals, to affirm community and social being. The modernist dream came abruptly to an end immediately after the Second World War, when collectivism was strangled by Cold War paranoia.

In the US and Western European countries, collectivism became associated with a loss of individual will. Instead, a new kind of gathering was established in random social, urban and work related groupings. Stimson and Sholette underline the constant banishment of collectivist tendencies from these groupings, and point out their return in mass-consumed popular culture as the unnamable and dangerous “others” (in the form of aliens, animals or secret societies). A new dynamic collectivism, one of mass culture, replaced old notions related to communism. This so-called ‘collectivism after modernism’ represented the desire of artists to speak collectively and to initiate artworks outside institutional structures, delivering them straight into the world of mass culture.

Stimson and Sholette make a very clear point: despite the art world’s inability to disconnect artistic value from individual achievements, many art practices are accomplished through their collective nature. The other texts in the book illustrate this notion clearly and urgently, sometimes maybe too extensively. But that’s just a minor critique: Collectivism After Modernism is a superb provocation of the market driven art world, a statement in favor of something more social, more collective and more real than art.

More info: here.

‘Collectivism After Modernism’, Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, editors, University of Minnesota Press, 2007

(This text first appeared in hART magazine.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 at 10:27 pm and is filed under Arts, Book Review, Movements, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.