Team spirit
There are two sides to every coin. In tandem with the cult of the individual artist discussed in the previous issue, art collectives have also flourished. Much of today’s cooperatively produced art evolved from the socially inspired art of the 1990s, made famous by the concept of relational aesthetics. What does today’s art have in common with the art of then, and how does it differ?It felt like a birthday party. The entire Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York had been reserved and all the major protagonists were there: Angela Bulloch, Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Huyghe, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Christian Höller. The exhibition, theanyspacewhatever (24 October 2008–4 January 2009), was an unofficial jubilee celebration for the on-again-off-again collaborative working relationship that had blossomed at the cradle of what Nicolas Bourriaud subsequently defined as relational aesthetics.The event offered a unique opportunity to spend the night in a hotel room installed by Christian Höller in the crest of the building. There was an enchanting performance by Pierre Huyghe, who transformed the museum into a mine shaft by turning out the lights and providing visitors with miners’ lamps. Apart from that, the exhibition unfortunately failed to elicit the excitement and commotion that these artists had together generated fifteen years earlier.Relational aesthetics are also being re-examined in the Netherlands. Last November, the biennial Hermes Lecture, at the provincial government building in Den Bosch, was given by Liam Gillick. His story was a provocative attempt to reformulate the objectives of his generation, to return to their ideological core.[1] Gillick feels that this has been lost in the debate on relational aesthetics. For him, what is most important in his art is not so much its interaction with the public, the ‘relational art’ to which time has increasingly reduced it, but a ‘discursive model of praxis…. It plays with social models and presents speculative constructs both within and beyond traditional gallery spaces.’Gillick’s reflections on the work he did in the early 1990s, in terms of ‘information and discourse’, shifts the emphasis from interactivity with the public to the content of the intervention and the quality of the idea, and this was precisely what Nicolas Bourriaud tried to do back in 2002, with his introduction of the concept of ‘postproduction’. Bourriaud used the term to refer to an information-related art practice, based on other, existing art ‘contributing to the eradication of the traditional distinction between production and consumption, creation and copy, ready-made and original work.’[2] For him, relational aesthetics and postproduction are twin concepts, both relying strongly on the new mentality brought by the information age and the resulting change in attitude towards making and distributing art.Collectively produced art certainly existed long before Gillick and Bourriaud, but their theoretical models nonetheless offer a good basis for a better understanding of the development of the art discussed in this issue, art that represents a new step in the changing thought about art production and distribution. Under the term ‘shareware’, this issue presents the art of a generation of artists who studied, often in a blossoming graduate school circuit, at the start of the century, during the height of the days of ‘postproduction’ . Their best-known representative was the Bernadette Corporation, the mysterious French ensemble that has in recent years been active in a wide range of areas in the world of art and fashion, as at home creating a magazine as they are organizing a fashion show. Characteristic of the youngest generation of co-operative artists is their investigative approach, somewhat related to ‘artistic research’, in the sense that the work is done in teams, making efficient use of the expertise of others. This work takes many forms, has no restrictions in terms of media or discipline and ranges from painting to fashion design. All of the art portrayed in this issue is information-based, which in part explains why so many designers and new-media artists are involved. They operate both inside and outside the art world, in small groups, often apart from their own individual careers, which are not infrequently also successful. In the Netherlands, consider Iris van Dongen, who is not only a successful painter, but is also a member of the Kimberly Clark trio. Classic authorship is certainly not taboo; it is simply no longer the only form of authorship.The collective art discussed in this issue is indisputably a product of a society in which the idea of networking is present at all kinds of levels. Ever newer zones of communication are continually being created, requiring their own forms of production. YouTube and Facebook are the best-known examples. Unlike the days of relational aesthetics, when the accent was on art production that was as democratic as possible, the new generation of artists work with more refined ideas of distribution, which can be intended for the masses and/or more specific or exclusive goals. The latest techniques are skilfully employed, from the Internet and Second Life to alternative models of on-demand printing, where only a few examples of a publication are distributed.‘Post-critical’, is what Hal Foster called the cult of ‘discursivity and sociability’ that brought about relational aesthetics, in his 2004 text, ‘Chat Rooms, Archival Spaces & Other Conundra in Contemporary Art’.[3] He found the attempt to achieve a ‘happy interactivity’ naive and not very worthwhile, when talking became an objective in itself. The artists discussed in this issue seem to have taken that criticism to heart. They are not just interested in the method, but also in the product. In that sense, the description recently given by curator Dexter Sinister and the Castillo/Corrales gallery and bookshop is perhaps the most appropriate: ‘With one foot outside of the information superhighway, art has a chance to stay dangerous, provocative, unruly, independent and curious. Working at a slowed-down and smaller (but human) scale potentially allows artists the focus to perfect a skill, to sharpen a single idea, to deeply pursue an obsession and to find an invested audience. Call it post-post-Fordism …information after dispersion.’ [4] Domeniek Ruyters
Domeniek Ruyters
