Reviewing the Van Abbemuseum’s recent exhibition Forms of Resistance (Eindhoven, The Netherlands, September 22, 2007–January 6, 2008), art historian and critic Hal Foster poses the questions, “What is the ‘social’ that ‘desires’ to be ‘changed,’ and how might ‘forms of resistance’ bear on this change? Do radical art and politics converge only at moments of crisis?” (Artforum XLVI, no. 4 [January 2008]: 273). How can we describe the relationship between political activism and the production of contemporary art? While of course there are no simple answers to these questions, editors Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette propose that the concept of collectivism may provide a viable starting point and much-needed supplement to the current discourse of social-art history. Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 thus begins with a bold and provocative introduction that suggests the transformative potential of contemporary artistic collectivity or a so-called “new collectivism.”

Recognizing that the collectivization of artistic practice as inspired by a desire for social transformation is by no means a new historical phenomenon, Stimson and Sholette hold that after a period of uncertainty occurring roughly from 1945–1989, the sociopolitical viability of artistic collectivism began to emerge once again. Yet here the editors must concede that the parameters of such a potential renaissance—one given currency via the recent articulation of concepts like “relational aesthetics,” “collaboration,” “social practice,” and “interventionism”—will remain forever obscure unless a greater degree of scholarly attention is devoted to the forms of artistic collectivism that arose amid the cultural politics of the Cold War and its immediate aftermath.

Collectivism after Modernism presents the reader with a series of ten essays offering a wide range of contextually and temporally specific examples of collective formations from Europe, Japan, the United States, Cuba, Mexico, Africa, and post-Soviet Russia with the hope of providing “occasion to bring to fruition the lessons and opportunities of the past that have lain dormant or underrealized until now” (14). A common methodology linking the book’s various arguments is related to the fact that each instance of collectivism can inherently be associated with some idea of resistance. Yet here there is obviously a tremendous amount of variation in terms of how, when, and against which dominant forces such resistance was mounted. For example, throughout the 1950s, the Situationists resisted formulations of canonical modernism in continental Europe. During the 1980s, groups of “New Cuban” artists resisted censorship by a struggling socialist state in an attempt to rectify an aging notion of revolution. During the 1990s, African collectives resisted the chaotic effects of the many forces impeding the emergence of a sovereign African subject. Also during the 1990s, Russian artist collectives resisted the psychological effects of political apathy. Finally, during the beginning of the twenty-first century, new collectives are confronting forces of production by seeking ways to resist the totalizing elements of a globalizing and neoliberal brand of late capital. Given such a diverse and intimidating spectrum, it remains well beyond the scope of the book to fully clarify the tremendous amount of ambiguity associated with any discussion of artistic collectivism. Instead, the ideological project of Collectivism after Modernism can be read as an attempt to better understand contemporary artistic collectivity and its prospects for the future via the provision of a historical framework spanning three generalized periods.

The first period is that of “modernist collectivism” which includes the work of the Futurists, Productivists, Constructivists, and Surrealists, and is characterized as a time of noble intentions albeit limited means. Stimson and Sholette argue that a collectivist component, as well as one relating to communism, formed central parts of modernist aspirations in the early twentieth century insofar as both were attempts “to blur the boundaries between subjects and subjectivities, to diminish the sense of who did what and who was what in order to call forth, as the honored subject of history, some synergy greater than the sum of its constituent parts” (6). Despite such lofty aspirations, the failure of modernist collectivism in the early twentieth century is attributed to an inability on behalf of the various groups to effectively manifest and implement their visions of social transformation. Thus for the most part, modernist collectivism remained only a vision, only able to affirm its resistant nature “by picturing it, by imagining its structure and form” (6).

After explaining the unfulfilled goals of modernist collectivism in the early twentieth century, the editors continue to trace the “ideological aftermath” of the desire for collectivism following World War II. Here they explain the need to revisit the often overlooked relationship between the social history of art and the cultural politics of the Cold War. It is explained how throughout the United States and Western Europe, especially during the 1940s and 1950s, the vehicles of art and culture were effectively instrumentalized as a means of demonizing the idea of collectivism, as it was purported to represent a loss of individual will. Many were convinced that the ideas of collectivism were virtually synonymous with those of communist oppression and the U.S.S.R. It is also explained that Western policy makers, while suppressing the notion of socialist collectivism, were simultaneously able to channel the lingering desires of modernism into a new “brand” of collectivism—a brand embodied by the ideology of a corporatizing America.

Eventually, however, artistic forms of collective dissent began to emerge from beneath the radar of Cold War cultural policy. In her contributing essay, Jelena Stojanović explains how early postwar collectives like CoBrA and the Situationists developed techniques of resistance such as unitary urbanism, psychogeography, détournement, and derivé in critical opposition to the cultural tenants of a hyperrationalized and dehumanized modernity. In order to gain a better understanding of the effects of the environment upon human subjectivity amid a European landscape in turmoil from the catastrophic events of the Second World War, groups of early pioneers (including individual members Asger Jorn, Isadore Isue, and Guy Debord) sought situations that enhanced the free expression of creative imagination by attempting to reinvent a sense of space—both physical and psychological. It is precisely the emergence of such postwar resistance and experimentation via collective action that marks the beginning of the period the editors deem “collectivism after modernism.”

Coinciding with the rise of New Leftist cultural politics, the period of collectivism after modernism begins with two crucial realizations: first, realizing the failure of modernist aspirations toward collective utopia; second, that the channels of media distribution utilized to sustain and replicate mass culture could be creatively détourned for use as a form of artistic medium that would allow artists to remain critical of an ever-more pervasive “culture industry” crystallizing in the world around them. Stimson and Sholette explain that the period of collectivism after modernism “marked a shift within the practices of visual artists from a focus on art as a given institutional and linguistic structure to an active intervention in the world of mass culture” (9). Awakening to the process of creatively appropriating the means of cultural production set a vital precedent and soon gave rise to the development of mobile, culture-jamming, and counter-hegemonic networks of resistance that today include a myriad of collective formations (a long list can be found at http://groupsandspaces.net/). Given the evolution of such critical practices, in his concluding essay entitled “Do-It-Yourself Geopolitics,” contributor Brian Holmes asks whether or not “this type of subversion can go further, deeper, involving broader sections of the population and producing positive effects of resymbolization and political recomposition?” (287). Thus stands the most pressing, and as of yet unanswered question set forth by Collectivism after Modernism: how can contemporary artistic collectives push beyond the rapidly reifying field of cultural politics and begin to develop lasting, meaningful, and autonomous forms of resistance capable of engaging more directly with the dominant forces of production?

The editors seek an answer to this question by setting forth the idea of a “new collectivism” or “collectivism now.” To this end, the book’s core argument dissolves into Sholette’s concept of art-historical “dark matter.” Borrowed from the lexicon of astrophysics, Sholette’s “dark matter” is meant to represent a great unknown and invisible mass of informal cultural activity capable of tremendous albeit inadvertent influence upon the machinations of today’s mainstream institutions. Yet insofar as a further unpacking of this concept is concerned, it seems as though modernist art historians and critics can do little more than mine the “event horizon” of such dark matter—tracing the liminal points upon which triangulations of art, politics, and everyday life begin to dissolve beyond recognition.

The first and perhaps most obvious of such points is the high degree of ambiguity associated with the terms “collective” and “resistance,” especially when they are used in the context of artistic practice. In surveying the history of artistic collectivism, one must constantly question: What exactly constitutes a collective? How, why, and which forces are being resisted by the collective itself? Adding further to this ambiguity is the contextually and temporally specific nature of such practices. To this end, one of the book’s most redeeming qualities is the extent to which it provides a sense of the overall heterogeneity of postwar artistic collectivism. While the book’s array of examples is by no means exhaustive (particularly lacking is an adequate description of Fluxus practices during the 1960s and 1970s, as well as of Eastern European collectives such as IRWIN and NSK that arose in the 1980s), if nothing else, the examples provide an adequate starting point.

For example, Rachel Weiss’s essay concerning the development of “New Cuban” art produced during the 1980s describes the somewhat inverse nature of how the Cuban groups Arte Calle, Grupo Provisional, and Art-De worked as collectives within a socialist Cuban society. These groups hold a unique position in the field of postwar collectivism, because rather than inciting revolutionary ideas, their work was more focused on showing how art could be made autonomous from the propaganda of a reifying “revolutionary” state. Weiss explains how these groups were often founded more along lines of friendship and conviviality rather than a strict political agenda. She admits that ultimately the lasting effects of “New Cuban” collectivism, insofar as it may have inspired a new generation of Cuban collectives working today, have yet to be determined.

Another of the book’s examples is provided by contributor Rubén Gallo, who in his essay on Mexican collectives of the 1970s raises an important point regarding the role of the individual artist within a collective group. Here he explains the “great paradox” of Mexican muralism in the early twentieth century, wherein hundreds of artists collaborated to produce the giant murals, yet in the end the works were only designated by the signature of a single heroic author (Rivera, Siqueiros, Orozco, etc.).

Other examples of specifically “non-Western” collective formulations are provided by contributor Reiko Tomii, who explains that while from afar it may seem as though the evolution of Japanese postwar collectivism corresponds with developments in the West, upon closer analysis one learns that such evolution (which Tomii divides into four different epochs) is highly specific to Japanese culture and the historical formulation of modernism in Japan from 1868–1912. Additional examples are provided by contributor Okwui Enwezor, who, using the groups Le Groupe Amos (Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo) and Huit Facettes (Dakar, Senegal), explains that a critical understanding of collectivism after modernism in Africa must be seen though the intricacies of postcolonial politics and the desire to reconstruct African identity. Along similar lines, contributor Irina Aristarkhova, in her essay on collectivism in post-Soviet Russia, explains how Russian artists have begun to recharge the concept of “socially engaged artistic practice” and reclaim the notion of Russian identity amid an atmosphere complicated by the prevalence of Western stereotypes and saturated with feelings of political apathy and melancholia.

One immediate and obvious concern arising from the presentation of such a wide range of examples is the degree to which this variety corresponds chronologically with the editors’ tripartite historiographic framework of collective practice from the 1920s through the Cold War to the present. Although “collectivism after modernism” can be characterized as a form of realization or awakening, one must be acutely aware as to when, how, and why such awakening occurs. While the diversity of such examples suggests that there is a certain degree of futility in theorizing how future forms of collectivism may arise, the many examples can serve as a valuable index of techniques to aid potential collective experimentation.

Besides contextual and temporal specificity, another major obstacle set before the path to new collectivism is the ubiquitous nature of the market for contemporary art and its attendant networks of knowledge production and institutional support. Who will fund the new collectivism? How will it be maintained, cataloged, propagated, and preserved? Presently, the only viable response to such questions is a cry for other options born of artistic experimentations with alternative economic strategies based on principles of self-organization that seek to directly appropriate the forces of economic production as forms of new media. Yet in an age wherein the intangible realms of memory, history, and the imagination can be effectively massified via media conglomeration, monetized via systems of intellectual property, or policed under the apparatuses of neoliberalism, one must question the degree to which radical forms of art are allowed to become self-conscious. In other words, the pessimism of Debord’s Society of Spectacle points toward a situation wherein even thinking consciously of resistance is to be already co-opted by a totalizing spectacle. Thus the unthinkability of a potential new collectivism can be viewed paradoxically as both virtue and hindrance.

Holmes describes this paradox while simultaneously giving the clearest articulation of Collective after Modernism’s impossible thesis. He explains:

The indeterminacy of the results, the impossibility of knowing whether we are dealing with artists or activists, with aesthetic experimentation or political organizing, is part of what is being sought in these activities. . . . What matters, at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one, is the slow emergence of an experimental territory, where artistic practices that have gained autonomy from the gallery-magazine-museum system and from the advertising industry can be directly connected to attempts at social transformation. (290)

Although one might argue that the emancipatory aspirations of the editors closely resembles a deep commitment to modernism, or that the entire book is in itself little more than a fanciful way of reiterating the old avant-garde notion of dissolving the realm of art into everyday life, the question remains as to the potential catalytic effect that such a reiteration may have upon a new generation of young artists, critics, historians, and administrators. Today, in 2008, it is possible to find numerous manifestations of contemporary artistic collectivism aimed at developing practices that are autonomous, sustainable, and self-determined, and as such represent openings into Holmes’s “experimental territory” of new collectivism. These openings, however discontinuously and however unconsciously, are flexible platforms from which artists can begin to re-tool the social history of art and to realize the latent potentiality of new media practices, marking a necessary shift from the reactionary position of being always already “forms of resistance” toward being new modes of collectivism here and now.