Hi Greg As I'm thinking about your questions forward collective practice.

Hi Greg

As I'm thinking about your questions forward collective practice, I'm disturbed still not surprised to sense that it would be far easier for me to speak about the difficulties of collaborative work than to outline the things which draw me to it. Here are a small in number of the positive aspects...that are important to me: Working as a collective or collaborative means that we can do throws on a scale that common person could only do with great difficulty. Resources, skills, interests, knowledge and ideas are lakeed This contributes to the overall political and aesthetic complexity, diversity and effectiveness of the plans Working on these projects involves developing collaborative practices which, however problematic, visibly eject a culture of hyper-individualism in favor of other designs of "work" and of social (and calm personal) responsibility.

David Thorne, Resistant Strains, just discovered York, NY, 1999 [1]

From the swipe of a plastic debit card at the grocer's shop store to the surveillance of public spaces to the labels in your undergarments, an administered collectivity hides everywhere in plain view. each "I" conceals an involuntary "belongingness," each gesture a statistic about purchasing power, education or the market potential of your desire. A recently made known IBM computer program called "Clever" equal detects what its designers call "communities in their nascent stages." ingenious locates these Web-based fraternities "even before members are aware of their community's existence" through tracing the electronic links "spontaneously" generated between users. [2] Therefore if collective incorporation is with equal reason relentless that it can be revealed by dint of a machine, one might question with what intent non-individual cultural activity is treated as the exception. reciprocally how can the artist be defined as an autonomous farmer detached from politics, history and the market?

While postmodernism may have deflated the status of the auteur, the art industry and its discourse nevertheless remain conditioned upon a litany of individual name-brand farmers that circulates like global aesthetic general reception As the collective Critical Art total effect succinctly puts it:

The individual's signature is still the prime collectible, and access to the carcass associated with the signature is a commodity that is desired more than ever--so often so, that the obsession with the artist's visible form [i]or[/i] frame has made it into "progressive" and alternative art networks. plane community art has its stars, its signatures and its bodies. [3]

according to contrast, when a group of artists "self-institutionalize" themselves to generate collaborative or collective work, the critical replication if any, can fall into undivided of only a few distinct categories: 1 Art world duo like Gilbert & George, Komar and Melamid or Sophie and Hans Arp in which a methodology estateed on individual art practice is indiscriminately applied to two; 2 Collective authorship as a backdrop for discussing the evolution of an individual's career: eg Kiki Smith as former member of Collaborative concocts or Joseph Kosuth as cofounder of Art & Language; 3 The art collective as representative of an entire historical mise en view as when the 1980s became the decade of the activist art group

When efforts are made to define collectivism in succession its own terms these descriptions nurse to psychologize the process, setting it apart from any specific social and economic adjoining matter In her essay "Connective Aesthetics: Art after Individualism," critic Suzi Gablik argued for a of the present day kind of artist who understands that "the boundary between self and Other is fluid rather than fixed: the Other is included within the boundary of selfhood" [4] However, boundaries as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but real and imaginary are historically determined and frequently harshly material. By contrast I understand conflict and difference, rather than "merging," to be necessary for the formation of the collective. Furthermore of that kind incipient abrasiveness must carry throughout to the routine functioning of the assemblage possibly sparking violent repercussions the pair inside the collective and between the collective and existing institutional forms. As anyone who has worked in this way will attest, the effort required to sustain collective work rises in direct proportion to the pro fessional and emotional toll extracted from its constituency. still it is exactly this state of overdetermination-the heterogeneity of membership, the meetings where too often is attempted or rejected, too a great deal brought to the table and left against the table, the fleeting ecstasy of collaborative expenditure and a space unexpectedly opened to the unpredictable purports of class, race, gender, sexual estimation age, divergences in ability, knowledge and career status--all of this can not at any time be encompassed within the cluster identity per se; yet this exces is what makes the collective viable.

The central affect of this text is to rethink the way collective practice is apprehended. Instead of the individual oppos to the collective or the artist deciding to work with the "community," my contention is that "collectivity" in single in kind form or another is virtually an ontological condition of fresh life. This supposition guarantees that there is no location disclosed of which an individual can operate alone in opposition to society. While this does not invalidate the irrepressible desire to escape or radically rewrite what Thomas Hobbes called the social contract, it does allow us to reconfigure the frequently stated opposition between collective and individual as that of a displacement between couple kinds of collectives: one passive and reflexive, the other active and self-valorizing. In his verse "Postscript on the Societies of Control" Gilles Deleuze outlined this of recent origin world order insisting, "We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become 'dividuals,' and masses, samples, data, markets, or 'banks.'... Man is no longer man enclos however man in debt." [5] Part of my argument will focus in succession the narrative of a modern science-fiction film. The Matrix (1999 through Larry and Andy Wachowski) conduce tos as an example of by what mode this condition of collective indenture is already figured within mass tillage At the same time it might furnish insight into why some artists elect to work collectively and others do not. [6]