From radical solidarity to “whatever” collectivism: political art and the rise of crisis capitalism
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, often sardonically, the radicalism of their political dreams to a free-play of differences and tactical positioning. But in the last couple of decades a variation of this informal mode of cultural collectivism has arisen whose impish adoption of group persona is neither strictly ironic nor entirely sincere. As if responding to the ruined public landscape of neoliberal enterprise culture, an assortment of ersatz institutes, centers, schools, bureaus, offices, laboratories, leagues, departments, societies, clubs, and bogus corporations have inserted themselves into the deterritoralized space of the spectacular global marketplace. Each of these mock-institutional entities sports its own logo, mission, and website, engaging in a process of self-branding not so much aimed at niche markets or product loyalty, but rather to gain surreptitious entry into visibility itself.
The most engaging of these phantom establishments do more than just replicate the appearance of lost liberal, institutional structures; they also use their virtual offices to confront and intervene in the real world of actual corporations, businesses, municipalities, and states. Brash, youthful, and disarmingly flippant, this “whatever collectivism” mixes visual art, politics, fashion, music, and mimetic forms of casual organizing to produce an ambient mode of group work that is more at home with the communal swarms generated by social networking platforms than with older notions of class or political solidarity arising from either labor or the Left.
Gregory Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, and founding member of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D: 1980-1988), and REPOhistory (1989-2000). His recent publications include Dark Matter: Art and Politics in an Age of Enterprise Culture (Pluto Press, 2011); Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (with Blake Stimson); and The Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (with Nato Thompson).
He teaches in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies at Harvard University, is a faculty member of CCC post-graduate research program at Geneva University of Art and Design, and is currently Chair of the MFA Program in Studio Art, as well as an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Queens College: City University of New York (CUNY).
