Production Lines, Irit Rogoff

The History of Modernism is, it would seem, inscribed with collaboration and collectivity. The succession of international, interlinked avant-garde movements which make up the historical and mythical trajectory of modernist art is founded in a perception of artists coming together with a mutual and coherent project in mind. The very notion of artistic movements bearing a collective label intimates the noble abandonment of individual identity in the name of forging an heroic artistic ‘breakthrough’ which is greater than the sum of its individual artistic parts. Have we not been told repeatedly that Fauvism liberated color from the prison house of naturalism? That Futurism mobilized the newly available resources of massmedia communication to publicize itself as a polemical entity? And that the frantic activity of several dealers and critics transformed the disparate efforts of a few Parisian painters into a movement called Cubism?

But no sooner are such supposedly collective entities established by the historians than the process of privileging a dominant talent, an artistic leader, or a guiding light from within the group, begins in earnest. The chosen artist then represents those artistic and formal features thought to be the most significant and innovative contributions of the group to the linear progression of Modernism as a cultural movement, and the other members of the group are relegated to the margins as lesser examples of the same shared artistic aspirations. Collaboration, then, as perceived from within the orthodox narrative of Modernism, is a contradictory entity, at once useful and redundant for the methodological practices of the history of art. As it stands, this concept of collaboration is exceedingly limited. It assumes a coming together of talents and skills which cross-fertilize one another through simple processes, neither challenged by issues of difference nor by issues of resistance. The discourse of Modernism claims that these processes, which are always the result of lucky historical accidents that take place in atmospheric cafés, ultimately culminate in a triumphant form of artistic activity so vigorous and so coherent that it must necessarily make its mark on the realm of culture. In fact, this concept of collaboration (extracted from social and historical specificity, from dominant ideological discourses, and from the hegemony of centrist cultural practices played out primarily by male, centrist, cultural practitioners) represents little more than an animated form of affinity-a banding together of a group of artists around a series of formal moves which in turn, presumably, serves to ‘bond’ them in a cultural and ideological consensus. Thus, what we have in fact witnessed is a multiplication of heroic artistic entities within the symbolic formation of their artistic project, rather than the relinquishing of individual cultural heroics. Above all, what this traditional modernist perception of collaboration ignores are the inherent radical possibilities for a revision of the relation between imagination, cultural activity, and artistic institutions. For, as Charles Harrison so astutely observed, “The critical theory of Modernism is a theory of consumption masquerading as a theory of production.”.¹ The following discussion is intended, at least in part, to distinguish between two different perceptions of collaboration. The first is the above-mentioned positivist cooperation which serves to expand the field of possibilities and resources while furthering the progress of art. David Sylvester has characterized its combination of optimism and enthusiasm as resembling the Hollywood musical genre of ‘the kids getting together in the barn to put on a show’.² This mode is not the exclusive prerogative of the historic avant garde, but it has continued to play a substantial, if not substantive, role in contemporary art practices. In a recent article, Craig Bromberg elaborated what he calls ‘that collaborating itch’, the modernist approach to collaboration without the desire for an integration of elements. He describes a projected collaboration between novelist Stephen King and artist Barbara Kruger who differentiated between the following initiatives.

Sometimes collaborations are about a sense of procedure, about concrete social relationships-the conversational quality of day to day exchange. Others take place in the realm of the symbolic, in a repository of power where the proper names of individuals come together, and this is an essential part of the product. This collaboration [with Stephen King] was more like that. It was put together like a movie deal, and that was fine by me.³