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Collaboration and Its (Dis)Contents Art, Architecture, and Photography Since 1950

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Collaboration and Its (Dis)Contents Art, Architecture, and Photography Since 1950 COLLABORATION AND ITS (DIS)CONTENTS ART, ARCHITECTURE, AND PHOTOGRAPHY SINCE 1950 EDITED BY MEREDITH A. BROWN MICHELLE MILLAR FISHER Collaboration and its (Dis)Contents: Art, Architecture, and Photography since 1950 Edited by Meredith A. Brown and Michelle Millar Fisher With contributions by: Fiona Anderson Claire Bishop Meredith A. Brown Andrianna Campbell Sara Catenacci Marci Muhlestein Clark David Kennedy Cutler Michelle Millar Fisher Oriana Fox Jacopo Galimberti Andrea Geyer Sofia Gotti Sharon Hayes Marko Ili´c Frances Jacobus-Parker Liz Magic Laser Simone Leigh Richard Meyer Alexander Nemerov Sara Greenberger Rafferty Ileana L. Selejan Amy Tobin Series Editor: Alixe Bovey Managing Editor: Maria Mileeva Courtauld Books Online is published by the Research Forum of The Courtauld Institute of Art Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN © 2017, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. ISBN: 978-1-907485-07-7. Courtauld Books Online is a series of scholarly books published by The Courtauld Institute of Art. The series includes research publications that emerge from Courtauld Research Forum events and Courtauld projects involving an array of outstanding scholars from art history and conservation across the world. It is an open-access series, freely available to readers to read online and to download without charge. The series has been developed in the context of research priorities of The Courtauld Institute of Art which emphasise the extension of knowledge in the fields of art history and conservation, and the development of new patterns of explanation. For more information contact [email protected] All chapters of this book are available for download at courtauld.ac.uk/research/courtauld-books-online Every effort has been made to contact the copyright holders of images reproduced in this publication. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. All rights reserved. Designed by Matthew Cheale Cover Image: Detail of Untitled, 2013 (from Work) Courtesy of Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery. CONTENTS List of Illustrations 5 Notes on Contributors 7 Acknowledgements 10 Foreword: The Social Turn Ten Years On 11 Claire Bishop Introduction: Collaboration and its (Dis)Contents 12 Meredith A. Brown and Michelle Millar Fisher Exploring Collaboration in Architecture, Planning, and 20 Renewal in California, 1935–1965 Marci Muhlestein Clark and Michelle Millar Fisher Margin of Life: Post-war Concerned Photography in Mexico 39 and Guatemala, 1947–1960 Andrianna Campbell and Ileana L. Selejan Artists’ Project: Work 60 A Conversation about Work David Kennedy Cutler and Sara Greenberger Rafferty Points of Origin: From a History of Alternative Art to a 71 History of Alternative Institutions Sofia Gotti and Marko Ilić Artists’ Project: In Times Like These, Only Criminals 93 Remain Silent Andrea Geyer and Sharon Hayes Deschooling, Manual Labour, and Emancipation: The 99 Architecture and Design of Global Tools, 1973-1975 Sara Catenacci and Jacopo Galimberti Artists’ Project: BREAKDOWN 122 Collaboration ‘Breakdown’: A Conversation with Liz Magic Laser and Simone Leigh Andrianna Campbell Making Art with Your Kids: Generation, Cooperation, and 134 Desire in Parent–Child Artwork of the 1970s Meredith A. Brown, Oriana Fox, and Frances Jacobus-Parker Collaboration is Not An Alternative: Artists Working 158 Together in London and New York, 1974–1981 Fiona Anderson and Amy Tobin Afterword: Beginning ‘The Ends’ 179 Alexander Nemerov and Richard Meyer Photograph Credits 183 CHAPTER 6 COLLABORATION IS NOT AN ALTERNATIVE: ARTISTS WORKING TOGETHER IN LONDON AND NEW YORK, 1974 –1981 FIONA ANDERSON and AMY TOBIN 6.1 Group Material, The People’s Choice (Arroz con Mango), 1981, installation view, 244 East 13th Street, New York. ANDERSON and TOBIN | COLLABORATION IS NOT AN ALTERNATIVE 159 In the 1970s, collaboration gained traction as a strategy for making and displaying art outside institutional spaces as well as a political tactic to oppose the isolation of the artist and commodification of the artwork. Collective artists’ organisations such as Col- laborative Projects Inc. (Colab) and Group Material in New York, and the Women’s Free Arts Alliance, the Women’s Workshop of the Artists’ Union, and the Woman Artists’ collective in London utilised collaboration as a catalyst for action and as a basis for both professional and intimate support. These activities increasingly took place within neglect- ed or abandoned urban sites, in which relationships between group members acted like bonds securing them in a meaningful space, while their collective energy provided a vital creative environment. Consequently, collaborative spaces such as these have been viewed as alternatives to the more concrete support of commercial galleries and museums. This line of thinking follows a simplistic definition of ‘alternatives’ as existing outside estab- lished institutions and therefore as inherently critical of them. Yet in what sense did being outside the museum or gallery space engender critique beyond an oppositional position? In this essay we destabilise the association of collaboration with ‘alternative’ or counter- cultural forms and challenge the perceived synonymity between the ‘alternative’ and the politically oppositional, in order to investigate the distinct reasons artists worked together in London and New York. The distinct, but disconnected geography we cover aims to connect practices and sites that have not been placed in dialogue before and which do not always sit easily together. Just as they are not proximate in space, neither are they contemporaneous—as our New York examples fall a generation after our London ones. The case studies fall broadly into two contexts: artist-run spaces in 1970s London and art collectives and storefront ex- hibitions in late 1970s and early 1980s New York. In London, these case studies include Hang Up, Put Down, Stand Up (1974), an exhibition jointly organised by members of the Women’s Workshop of the Artists’ Union and Woman Artist’s Collective, and the ac- tivities of the Women’s Free Arts Alliance; and in New York, Colab’s Times Square Show (1980) and Group Material’s Arroz con Mango (The People’s Choice) (1981; fig. 6.1). Each case study offers an example of artists working together or with an audience in the production of artworks as well as in the formation of spaces to make and display art that attempts to resist institutional socioeconomic forces. We investigate how collaborations at the level of production created new spaces or modes for display and how these collaborations affected artistic practices. By bringing together these examples from different spatial and temporal coordinates, we hope to resituate these practices within their specific socioeconomic and cultural contexts and provoke a dialogue that moves beyond the rhetoric of synonymity. By taking these case studies out of their immediate context and placing them in rela- tion to projects from another city, we can begin to consider them on different terms, which will open up new interpretations. While these works have been previously judged accord- ing to the categories of longevity, funding success, and audience engagement, we will look at them according to more fluid themes of space, community, and site. This fluidity is ANDERSON and TOBIN | COLLABORATION IS NOT AN ALTERNATIVE 160 informed by Miwon Kwon’s analysis of the shift in public art in the 1970s. Kwon argues that during that time the public sphere or site was conceived less ‘in physical and spatial terms’ as ‘a cultural framework defined by the institutions of art’, and the collaborative was no longer ‘a noun/object but a verb/process’.1 There are as many, if not more, discon- tinuities than there are affinities between the case studies we have chosen. This is both a product of our approach to writing collaboratively as well as a conscious methodology used to break apart the homogeneity at the heart of the often invoked, but rarely chal- lenged, descriptor ‘alternative’. ‘ALTERNATIVE’ TO WHAT AND TO WHOM? The word ‘alternative’ has been frequently invoked in analyses of art created and exhib- ited outside the traditional institutions, but the word is especially pervasive in discussions of the art scene in 1970s and 1980s New York. Lauren Rosati and Mary Anne Stanisze- wski’s Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces, 1960 to 2010 (2012) offers an encyclopaedic history of self-managed and anti-institutional art spaces in the late twentieth century, aiming to ‘[bridge] neighborhoods, decades and themes’ under the familiar, unifying ban- ner of the ‘alternative’.2 Alternative Art, New York, 1965–1985 (2003) edited by the art- ist Julie Ault, a founding member of Group Material, offers a similarly unifying history, perhaps because of its comparable geographical and temporal focus.3 On the other hand, Gregory Sholette and Blake Stimson’s Collectivism After Modernism (2006) presents a range of case studies that look beyond New York, approaching collectivity as a methodological thematic that joins the projects together as ‘alternatives’ but failing to interrogate how collectivity functions at different sites.4 Kathy Battista’s Renegotiating the Body: Feminist Art in 1970s London (2012) groups together a number of site-related practices by women artists in a chapter entitled ‘Alternative Spaces for Feminist Art’, clustering widely diverse practices, spaces, and media (including publications) together under the general category ‘alternative’.5 Recently
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