New Communities

I was given a copy of a new book last week called “New Communities” a collection of essays edited by Nina Möntmann, an investigation of the art, artist groups, collectives and practices that resulted from symposia in Toronto and Stockholm. The text intrigued me as it addresses in some ways, issues that are central to our practice at Tensta Konsthall.

It is somewhat typical of this type of ‘post eventum’ publication that you feel you are missing something, perhaps even the most important part. Amongst the texts the most disarming is an extraordinary text by Simon Critchley, a wonderful wide-ranging explication of ‘mystical anarchism’. I have to say I’m not quite sure what it really has to do with the topic at hand but it is a rich an invigorating line of philosophical inquiry. Maria Lind has written a compendium of references to collective artist groups from Group Material and Irwin to Clegg & Guttman where even Tensta Konsthall gets a mention. It is a thoroughly pedagogical text and I can well imagine Lind’s students at Bard using this is as a road map for further investigation. Her text bears a significant debt to a reading of relational aesthetics as a template for interactivist practice situated as ‘alternative’. And from this Lind also attempts a taxonomy of community distinguishing between collaboration, cooperation collective action and participation. Simultaneously she invokes Christian Kravagna’s own designation of contemporary art into “working with others”, interactive activities, collective actions and participatory practice. Again Lind’s intention seems consummately pedagogical. Nikos Papastergiadis’ text is also framed liked Lind’s by Bourriaud and a fear of a ‘neo-liberalist appropriation of collaborative and communicative working methods’ (to cite Möntmaan’s introduction to the essay). There are also artist statements and a curatorial framework provided by Möntmann herself.

What seems a thread through almost all the texts is an appreciation of community as benign. Community is lauded, found favourable and set up in opposition to the rigidity of institutionalism, the dogma of the sovereign artist and the move of late capitalism to a reduced homology of cultural control. It is perhaps understandable that in the heady desire to insist on ‘an important cultural shift’ that one looses sight of the shore. The point is quite simple – communities are not irrespectively positive, they run the gambit of all human interaction and participation. Artist groups are certainly also not only saintly, they are full with all the prejudice, violence, bigotry, hatred and intolerance found in any other quarter of human existence. A few notable groups that are not mentioned in the book might include the 1930’s British Scarsdale Set, a group of painters who met to discuss watercolour technique and fascist politics, the numerous groups in the former east who gathered under the dubious title of ‘Friends of Russian Art’ and even the artists currently associated through and by the Winkleman Gallery in New York. Community is just a coming together of like minds, there is no inherent goodness in those minds just similarity. As it is easier to motivate groups through dislike rather than like and through opposed views rather than supportive ones, communities are perhaps more likely to collect the bigoted and the jaundiced. Whilst many of the authors acknowledge the problem there is also a very optimistic view presented of the construction of community, particularly on-line, as being part of a form of activism or a politics of subversion. It would be impossible to deny that this is indeed the case but one should be very cautious here. The web maybe full of subversion but it is equally rich in traditional authority.

All the texts (with the obvious exception of Critchley's) carry a sort of activist call to arms. This gives the book a sense or urgency. There is an immediacy about what is being stated, a demand to seek new paths, strategies, ways to maneuver. Maria Lind uses the term instrumentalism to describe the condition for much publicly financed art. I read this both as a critique of how politics uses art and culture as instruments in party politics but also in the French meaning for the term instrumentaliser , in the sense of ‘to use to ones own advantage. What she implies therefore, if my reading is correct, is the fact that public institutions are caught in a double bind of popularism and self-image. One could remark that this is the same for the individual but there is still no escape route from this. Between branding public art spaces and the demand for bums on seats that comes with public funding there is little space for experimentation. Community must therefore operate outside of these rigid and over-determining structures. I must say I am not in total agreement since I think this overlooks perhaps one of the most basic tenets of community; that the model that it is condemned to follow is society itself. As such I like to read the socius in its older more phlegmatic sense as being an ally or better a comrade.

http://www.thepowerplant.org/publications/new_communities.htm