iylshowcase: Collectives are the new normal.The general warmth and buzz in your head from working in
iylshowcase: Collectives are the new normal.The general warmth and buzz in your head from working in a like-minded group is something that you can become accustomed to quickly. ‘Fucking collaborate’ is the advice that I give myself most often because a problem shared is a problem halved. ‘Movements’ have been around forever either as self-descriptions or retrospective labels, but the ability of the artist to work individually is reducing. The general trend being towards collaboration, photography collectives are becoming more and more the norm. Aside from Magnum (the highly influential photography cooperative) and the height of manifestos in the 20s the cult of personality has ruled the art world generally and this is changing. I am sitting at my desk and wondering about the cleanliness of an abstract title over names on names on names. The monolithic nature of them being like an artistic zeitgeist but losing its individuality? The value of the person against a like-minded group.Image by Alec SothAt the border / Ba Lan by Rafal MilachMoney money money! Also anxiety and love are things that bring people together. One of the pros of Magnum is that they can charge what they want, it is also an institution that provides a marble reputation. That is what groups and only a few iconic individuals can provide: a platform to begin change or to voice a position. Dynamics of collectives depend: anonymity in numbers or individuals among individuals, depending on the artist these can be freeing or restrictive. The question is: what are the benefits? To the artist, to the community, to the general body. The representation of a time and a demographic: Sputnik, the eastern European collective founded in 2006, is a place for documentary photographers from the common background of living the transition from communism to capitalism. The cultural and emotional changes it made are reported in their photographs. The collective by its nature is more productive than the individual, Sputnik can cover their eastern European zeitgeist far better than a single artist. Productive both artistically and financially, the volume of their self-published work is prolific. The amount of photobooks produced annually being far more than one person can manage, save for a The Factory style of operation (a collective of sorts anyway).sRafal Milach, ‘Chasing a White Horse’, from the collective project ‘Speaking in a loud voice’, ongoing from 2010.Change is central to movements, with Sputnik it is clear: the move from one thing to another, with Magnum, as the foremost photographic agency it is for the progression of the medium, an institution that has the best. Making things better! Prescriptivism in manifestos is like this, don’t eat pasta, only use film and only use natural light. Negative definitions.The internet is making such cut-and-dry statements obsolete though. Nothing is for certain but you still want something. Collectives like Sputnik and the America-based Live Wild collective do not prescribe but progress. Not wrestling with what they see the world as being but contributing to it. Methodology is not the focus, it is what the artist are saying. Dada, arguably the first ‘movement’ to even include photography (Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, etc.), was not a formal collective but is was still very effective in opposing the nationalist and bourgeois ideologies in art and war at the time. It was outrage about what was and imagination for change, a form of protest. People took more notice of them because they were together, even if they didn’t set out to be. The international collective, Strangers, exist for this reason, to enrich each other’s’ work and provide a space for discourse. Collaboration as its sole purpose. Guerrilla Girls Talk Back, 1989.In other cases the objective is more remote. Sputnik serves as a joint front to enter the art world dominated by the west. Guerrilla Girls similarly work to grow between the cracks in the male-dominated establishment. Live Wild, also an all-female collective, joined because of similarities in aesthetics and medium, but cannot avoid their context. Magnum, the odd-one-out among these in being a dominant force in photography, avoids stagnation through new blood and progressing the medium. Adapt or die they say. They change the base unit from the individual to the collective and garner more power like that. They all create solidarity particular to groups and allow them to work better and get things done, both artistically and otherwise. -- source link