Existing writing
Collaborative Art and the limits of Criticism
byGrant Kester May 2013

Commissioned by Create: The National Development Agency for the Collaborative Arts

 

In conventional art practice the act of production is distinct and clearly separate from the subsequent reception of the work by viewers, during which the artist is typically not present. The critic’s task in this case often entails a speculative, quasi-philosophical engagement with the propositions presented by the artist through a given work. These propositions are not meant to be ‘tested’ per se, but rather, are offered in the form of hypothetical statements about the world, embodied in physical and spatial form. In addition, the work of art, whether an object or an event, has a clearly demarcated beginning and end, and its form remains fixed at the moment of its initial conceptualisation by the artist. In dialogical art practices production and reception co-occur, and reception itself is re-fashioned as a mode of production. As a result, the moment of reception is not hidden or unavailable to the artist, or the critic. Moreover, the experience of reception extends over time, through an exchange in which the responses of the collaborators result in subsequent transformations in the form of the work as initially presented.

 

This work requires new models of reception capable of addressing the actual, rather than the hypothetical, experience of participants in a given project, with a particular awareness of the parameters of agency and affect. What is the relationship between language, utterance, physical gesture and movement in these encounters? This would also necessitate an analysis of the gathering together and disaggregation of bodies within a given project, and the ways in which these varying proximities inflect the meaning of the work and the consciousness of the participants. And this requires, in turn, new research methodologies in which the critic inhabits the site of practice for an extended period of time, paying special attention to the discursive, haptic and social conditions of space, and the temporal rhythms of the processes that unfold there. A second set of concerns has to do with the perceived spatial and temporal limits of the work of art. Conventional object-based practices are clearly finite; they exist for a fixed period time (the duration of an exhibition or commission, for example), and then end. Moreover, the spatial field for such practices is also, generally, fixed (the space of the gallery, for example, or a series of discrete stations or sites organised through the commissioning process). Because the boundaries of the work are finite, and often pre-determined by the particular limitations of a given exhibition space or venue, the critic can easily enough identify the “object” of analysis.

 

Dialogical practices, on the other hand, can unfold over weeks, months and even years, and their spatial contours or boundaries typically fluctuate, expand and contract over time. As a result, this work confronts the critic with a very different set of questions. When does the work “begin” and when does it “end”? What are the boundaries of the field within which it operates, and how were they determined? At the most basic level, can we even agree as to what constitutes the object of criticism? Because we are dealing with an unfolding process, rather than, or in addition to, a discrete image, object or event defined by set limits of space (the walls of a gallery) or time (the duration of a performance or commission), these questions become decisive in the analysis of the work. The unfinalisable quality of dialogical production requires us to understand the bounded-ness of the field of practice, and how these boundaries have been produced, modified and challenged. This would include an analysis of the artist or art collective’s entry into, and departure from, the field itself, as well as the decisions that led them to define a given social context as a field of practice in the first place.

 

This work also requires a very different understanding of duration in aesthetic experience. Time, in the conventions of avant-garde artistic production, is always synchronic; new insight is transmitted to the viewer through a singular and a-temporal moment of shocked recognition. This model of reception assumes a viewer who is operating under the enforced thrall of an ideological system, which can only be broken by a countervailing moment of homeopathic violence. As a result, there is no understanding of receptive time beyond the moment of disruption itself. With dialogical art practices temporality is both extensive and irregular, marked by a series of incremental subdivisions within the larger, unfolding rhythm of a given work. As a result, it’s necessary to develop a system of diachronic analysis and notation that can encompass the project as a whole in its movement through moments of conflict and resolution, focusing on the productive tension between closure and disclosure, resistance and accommodation.

 

I want to present a set of three observations regarding the position of the critic relative to dialogical and collaborative art practices. The first concerns the status of “theory”. I believe there has been a gradual drift away from closer engagement with the materiality of art practice as a result of the often programmatic manner in which theory has been applied by many critics and historians. Too often critics use theory simply to provide intellectual validation for relatively unremarkable concepts or ideas that are already widely accepted within our discursive field, and which add little to our understanding of a particular project or work. I’d advocate here for a more reciprocal understanding of the relationship between theory and practice in art criticism. I’d like to see the theorist treated as a genuine interlocutor in the unfolding of a given work, rather than a gray (or perhaps more accurately, white) eminence. In this scenario theory can bring insight, but it can also be challenged in turn, perhaps by the very experience of practice itself. The second observation concerns the issue of reception. I want to encourage critics of this work to remain open to the possibility that a given project will enact forms of reception that don’t conform to existing models, which are typically based on the individual viewer’s experience of a static or fixed object. This open-ness is all the more necessary in the case of dialogical works in which the processes set in motion by a given project can’t be anticipated in advance by the artist, and which may move in directions quite different from those implicit in the original organisation of a piece.

 

Finally, I want to note that dialogical practices suggest a very different understanding of the relationship between consciousness and action. It is a commonplace to criticize social art practices for sacrificing an authentically “aesthetic” (albeit hazily defined) experience to a reductive concept of political efficacy. But all modernist art, even that which most violently rejects any demand for utility, is functional, whether as a protest against the very utilitarianism of modern society, or as a repository of specific quasi-spiritual values that are associated with an intellectual or creative resistance to capitalism. The operative question is, how, and at what scale, this efficacy is enacted. In the conventional view art can retain its cultural authority only so long as it operates through the incremental transformation of a single consciousness, in confrontation with a work of art. Once we attempt to extend this process (to make it “social” as it were), to understand the aesthetic as a form of knowledge that can be communicable within and among a larger collective, or in relationship to a set of institutions, rather than a single, sovereign consciousness, the autonomy of the aesthetic is endangered. This is why we so often see theorists imposing a firewall between the experience of the individual viewer and any subsequent (“practical” and therefore non-aesthetic) action in the world, which might be informed by this encounter in some way. Aesthetic experience, understood in these terms, is essentially monological. It seems to me that both of these constraints are being challenged by new forms of social art practice, in which we find a commitment to a broader, social articulation of aesthetic experience, and an interest in the creative, transversal relationship between consciousness and action in the world.

 

Grant Kester 2013

 

A PDF of the publication is available on the Create website:

 

www.create-ireland.ie/images/pdfs/create-news/Grant-Kester-Collaborative-Art-and-the-Limits-of-Criticism-CREATE-NEWS-14-May-2013.pdf