Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (review)

The radical critique of art/Art in Western culture since Duchamp and, more generally, the birth of Modernism around 1850 has had, of course, its own blind spots—for instance, those linked with class, sex, gender, race and so on. The “expanded” radical critique of art has tackled these and comparable issues, but its eagerness to unearth all hidden determinations of what we call art continues also to suffer from an even more special kind of blindness, because even the most critical art theory often still relies on an extremely individualist way of thinking. Neither the death of the subject, nowadays a commonly accepted notion, nor the widespread awareness of the institutional determination of any artist’s work have prevented critical art theory from adopting the traditional market-driven idea of art as basically made by individual artists and judged by individual standards and achievements.

The major merit of this fascinating collection edited by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette is not to claim room for a completely different approach (this would be nothing more than radical, countercultural or antiglobalist propaganda or wishful thinking, to name just some labels that have an obvious family resemblance with the collectivist stance). It is to offer a comprehensive analysis of the relationships between modernity and collectivism and to complete it with a certain number of case studies and surveys of collective art practices in Western and non-Western contexts.

Let us first see how, on a historical and theoretical level, the place and the stakes of collectivism are analyzed by the editors as well as by the various contributors of the book (there is indeed no sharp division here between editors and contributors: the former sign a comparatively modest, although far-reaching introduction; the latter are allowed to participate very actively in the elaboration of the theoretical underpinnings of the volume). Three key ideas constitute the backbone of the collection.

There is a fundamental association between Modernism and collectivism, at least in the pre–World War II period, when all modernist movements were, to a variable extent, committed to social change and the implementation of new—and often socialist—relationships within the production and reception of art.

This “natural” alliance was broken by the Cold War, which reinforced the anti-Modernism of art in communist countries and “decollectivized” Modernism in capitalist countries. Modern art in the West not only became more and more form oriented (and thus less and less content-oriented), but also erased any collaborative or collectivist tendency as ideologically and artistically suspect.

The hegemonic position of the individualist model, first in the West only, later worldwide, has never been complete, however. Forms of resistance have always existed, and their presence and importance are now spreading dramatically. In this regard, the editors—more than the authors themselves, one may have the impression—make a clear distinction between on the one hand modernist collectivisms—i.e. collectivist reuses and reinventions of the avant-gardes and other radical idioms—and on the other hand non-modernist collectivisms. The latter are either anti-Western and anti-modernist gemeinschaft-like nostalgias (the name of Al Qaeda as a shortcut for this type of nowadays very violent movement is, of course, unparalleled) or hypercapitalist, rhizomatic, decentralized and virtual communities glued together by e-commerce (and the editors stress that these communities share with the anti-capitalist group a deep longing for the same traditional relationships between the individual and the group, or between the individual and the State).

Further specification of what modernist collectivisms typically (and positively) are can only be found in the various essays, whose theoretical ambitions are quite diverse. Some contributors limit themselves to a historical overview of the most interesting phenomena in the geographic area they cover (for this is the basic criterion of the book’s structure). Others, instead, use their case study or studies to present a more in-depth discussion of the theoretical questions...