The Aesthetics of Collectives

Art collectives immediately foreground the question of organization, particularly the organization of labor in art making as well as the individuation of the artist and art work. Moreover political collectives, research collectives, and social/familial collectives help to make visible the division of social reproductive labor in particular. This seminar is a comparative examination of how collectives explore their conditions of possibility. It will focus especially on how collectives attempt to experiment transversally with organizational form to address these questions. Special attention will be paid to these questions in the decolonial context, where the state presents particular obstacles and economic ‘development’ more still.

We will enter into conversation, live and via zoom, with a number of contemporary collectives including Weekend Affair and Post-Museum in Singapore, KUNCI in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy in California, USA. Some of the questions we will raise with the collectives include the gendered division of labor, state surveillance and sponsorship, collective approaches to the (dis)identity of the artist, the artwork, and the show.

We will also examine our own practices of collectivity or barriers to such practices.