Collectivism after Modernism
 


Collectivism after Modernism

The Art of Social Imagination after 1945

Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, editors

Table of Contents

Collectivism after Modernism

$27.95 Paper
ISBN: 0-8166-4462-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4462-9

$84.00 Cloth
ISBN: 0-8166-4461-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4461-2

 

Analyzes collective artistic practice from the Cold War to the global present.

The desire to speak in a collective voice has long fueled social imagination and artistic production. Prior to the Second World War, artists understood collectivization as an expression of the promise or failure of industrial and political modernity envisioned as a mass phenomenon. After the war, artists moved beyond the old ideal of progress by tying the radicalism of their political dreams to the free play of differences.

Organized around a series of case studies spanning the globe from Europe, Japan, and the United States to Africa, Cuba, and Mexico, Collectivism after Modernism covers such renowned collectives as the Guerrilla Girls and the Yes Men, as well as lesser-known groups. Contributors explore the ways in which collectives function within cultural norms, social conventions, and corporate or state-sanctioned art. They examine the impact of new technologies on artistic practice, the emergence of networked group identity, and the common characteristic of collective production to blur the typical separations between artists, activists, service workers, and communities in need.

Together, these essays demonstrate that collectivism survives as an influential and increasingly visible artistic practice despite the art world’s star system of individuality. Collectivism after Modernism provides the historical understanding necessary for thinking through postmodern collective practice, now and into the future.

"Blake Stimson and Gregory Shollete skillfully utilize collectivism’s inherent ambiguities and contradictions to open a book that examines collectively produced art across many cultural divides and political contexts." —Artforum

"Stimson’s project is one to be engaged with, as it wreaks necessary havoc with that dominant reductive perspective that too easily casts consumerism versus idealism, Postmodernism versus Modernism." —Art Monthly

"Collectivism After Modernism, The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 provides us with a new “map” of Modernism since World War II/ A very challenging and exciting map, since it is one that is not compatible with any dominant paradigm or conceptualization of what Modernism used to be and could become once again in the near future." —Leonardo

Contributors: Irina Aristarkhova, National U of Singapore; Jesse Drew, San Francisco Art Institute; Okwui Enwezor, U of Pittsburgh; Rubén Gallo, Princeton U; Chris Gilbert, Baltimore Museum of Art; Brian Holmes; Alan Moore; Jelena Stojanovi´c; Reiko Tomii; Rachel Weiss, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Blake Stimson is associate professor of art history at the University of California Davis, the author of The Pivot of the World: Photography and Its Nation, and coeditor of Visual Worlds and Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology.

Gregory Sholette is an artist, writer, and cofounder of collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution and REPOhistory. He is coeditor of The Interventionists: Users’ Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life.

304 pages | 80 halftones | 7 x 10 | 2007

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Periodizing Collectivism by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette

1. Internationaleries: Collectivism, the Grotesque and Cold War Functionalism
Jelena Stojanovic´

2. After the “Descent to the Everyday:” Japanese Collectivism from Hi Red Center to The Play, 1964-1973
Reiko Tomii

3. Art & Language and the Institutional Form in Anglo-American Collectivism
Chris Gilbert

4. The Collective Camcorder in Art and Activism
Jesse Drew

5. Performing Revolution:  Arte Calle, Grupo Provisional, and the Response to Cuban National Crisis, 1986-1989
Rachel Weiss

6. The Mexican Pentagon: Adventures in Collectivism during the 1970s
Rubén Gallo

7. Artists’ Collectives Mostly in New York, 1975-2000
Alan Moore

8. The Production of Social Space as Artwork: Protocols of Community in the Work of Le Groupe Amos and Huit Facettes
Okwui Enwezor

9. Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics: Cartographies of Art in the World
Brian Holmes

10. Beyond Representation and Affiliation: Collective Action in Post-Soviet Russia
Irina Aristarkhova

Contributors
Index