Collectives Without Consensus?

“By joining the Dadaist and Surrealist movements, Bauhaus, Fluxus, and conceptual art, artists have been decompartmentalizing art and life for a long time through material and architectural forms, events, performances, and happenings developed and carried out collectively. Motivated by a series of utopias, from the investigations into the revolutionary potential of aesthetics by avant-garde artists to the poststructuralist aspirations of post-May 68 counterculture movements, collectives have established political and often radical communities around art creation. More than a century of cooperative practices has assembled a reservoir of models, issues, and ideas that are now being re-examined by increasingly diverse collectives not only of artists, designers, and architects, but also of curators, activists, theorists, and scholars. Given the urgent need to act, in a world where a state of emergency has become permanent, laboratories of social action, interdisciplinary research groups, and international discussion forums are forming on the margins of the art field. They value improvisation, spontaneity, autonomy, flexibility, innovation, and utility, which may bring them closer to post-Fordist work for which the artist had been established as the absolute model.”

The resurgence of collaborative work in recent artistic and curatorial projects is notable. Seeking alternative forms of “being together,” these new collectives are reviving the concerns of several decades of shared creation. Esse’s editorial board — also a collective and for this issue composed of Anne-Marie Dubois, Benoit Jodoin, Didier Morelli, Amelia Wong-Mersereau, and myself — proposed in the call for papers quoted above a historical contextualization, broadly defining the idea of the collective. We were particularly interested in how working collectively problematizes power relations within art institutions and groups and how this effects the implementation of less hierarchical structures.