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Collaboration as a problem of art's cultural formJohn Roberts

Online Publication Date: 01 November 2004To cite this Article: Roberts, John (2004) 'Collaboration as a problem of art's culturalform', Third Text, 18:6, 557 - 564To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/0952882042000284961URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0952882042000284961

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Third Text, Vol. 18, Issue 6, 2004, 557–564

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © 2004 Kala Press/Black Umbrellahttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/0952882042000284961

Collaboration as a Problem ofArt’s Cultural Form

John Roberts

Taylor and Francis LtdCTTE100158.sgm10.1080/0952882042000284961Third TextOriginal Article2004Taylor & Francis Ltd186000000November 2004JohnRobertsjorob128@aol.comCollaboration in art is fundamentally a question of cultural form. Bythis, I mean that the decision to teamwork with other artists and/or withnon-artists directly involves shaping the ways in which art finds itssensuous and intellectual place in the world. In this it draws into viewthe very nature of how, and under what conditions, art might appear inthe world. That is, how and with what art might produce its use-values.Consequently, we should not confuse the critical ideal of collaborationwith the simplistic notion of ‘sharing ideas’ in art, or with art’s generalposition within the social division of labour. All art, within or beyondthe studio, is subject to the discipline of the social division of labour. Thesingular painter is as much reliant on the labour of others (paint manu-facture, canvas preparation, studio assistants) as the artist-duo, who, inthe spirit of early Moholy-Nagy, order their spray-covered metal paint-ings over the phone from the foundry. The processes of collaboration arein the widest and non-contentious sense, then, constitutive of art as asocial practice, even if these processes are invariably hidden or dissolvedby the artist, critic, and dealer into the innocuous notion of ‘technicalback up’.

Collaboration, as a self-conscious process of production, however, isa different matter. In this way the socially produced character of art ismade explicit in the form of the work. Teamworking, sharing skills andideas across disciplines, manipulating prefabricated materials (the labourof others), negotiating with various institutions and agencies, becomethe means whereby art’s place within the social division of labour ismade transparent as a form of socialised labour. In this way the collabo-rative content of shared labour becomes a distinct mode of productionthrough the subordination of the artist’s individual will and identity tothe group. The individual artist’s identity is dissolved into the collective-artist, and, perhaps more pertinently, into the collective identity of thenon-artist, just as the identity of the non-artist collaborator is subsumedunder the identity of the artist-collective. Authorship is defined asmultiple and diffuse. This mode of production, therefore, is not to beconfused with the artisanal model of teamwork, in which the directed

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labour of others (artist-assistants and technicians) is subordinated to thesignature style of the artist. The modern version of this is Warhol’sFactory in the 1960s in which collaborative authorship is mediatedthrough the personality and profile of a singular named author. Theartist manages and directs the labour of others on the basis that heretains sole authorship. This model remains pervasive, particularlyamongst those artists who have successfully adopted Warhol’s post-Duchampian deflation of handicraft in the studio, such as Jeff Koonsand Damien Hirst. Collaboration on this basis – contracted labour in thestudio – is seen as coextensive with the identity of the post-Warholianartist as editor/appropriationist/ideas-manager.

By collective mode of collaboration, I mean something closer to the‘laboratory’ model of the early avant-garde (the Werkbund, the Bauhaus,Rodchenko’s Metfak faculty at the VKhUTEMAS and early SovietProductivism) in which the technical procedures of various disciplines arebrought into critical exchange and alignment. On this basis, the produc-tion of the art-object is subject – in the manner of the design studio, thearchitecture’s office, or the industrial workshop – to the demands of func-tionality, research, and group discussion. In the early avant-garde, thisapproach was divided into two main models: a post-autonomous defenceof art as social praxis (as in Rodchenko’s propaganda kiosks for the‘Sculptural and Architectural Synthesis Group’ at the VKhUTEMAS, orMoholy-Nagy’s architecture and light experiments) or the dissolution ofart into industrial production itself, as in Boris Arvatov’s Productivism.As Arvatov argues in Kunst und Produktion (1926), ‘art goes hand inhand with technology and science and then once this happens it becomesan equal and organisational effect and progressive factor in the formationof society’.1 These models of collaboration are social, therefore, in aprecise sense: they offer a model of collective labour and connectivityacross disciplines that exists in primary conjunction with the transforma-tion of collective experience and the social world. In this they are modelsof convergence between art as collective practice and the collectivisedlabour (intellectual and manual) of the factory and workshop itself.Labour in the factory and labour in the studio are part of a wider worldof shared collective labour. In other words, these practices make nodistinction between revolutionary or critical art practice and revolution-ary or critical social practice. By dissolving the artist into various hybridartistic-identities ( artist-engineer, artist-designer, artist-educator, artist-constructor, artist-worker), the artistic ‘laboratory’ functions as a prefig-uration of non-alienated labour, and the breakdown of the divide betweenmanual and intellectual labour.

In these terms, this collective model of collaboration in the 1920s washighly critical of those collaborative models in art that were divorcedfrom any organising function, that is, which identified collaborationsolely in terms of artistic interdisciplinarity, rather than in terms ofpolitical alliance with proletarian reconstruction. During this period, thefierce debates that took place between productivism and constructivism,and between revolutionary Soviet constructivism and European revision-ist constructivism, centred on whether a given collaborative practicepossessed or did not possess explicit transformative social content.Hence, although a number of European constructivist artists/designerssuch as Theo van Doesburg argued against organising artists on an

1. Boris Arvatov, Kunst und Produktion, Karl Hanser Verlag, Munich 1972.

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individual basis, because of his failure to align this with the liquidationof the barrier between ‘artistic technique and general social technique’2his version of constructivism as art was roundly denounced for its‘(mechanised) aestheticism’.3 Indeed, the resistance to the aestheticisa-tion of collaboration was largely what divided the Russian avant-gardeof LEF and the VKhUTEMAS from other cultural groups, producing aclear separation between those who saw revolutionary content in termsof the adaptation of the traditional artisanal arts and those who sawrevolutionary content in terms of the transformation of art’s technicaland productive relations. But this collaborative ideal was soonconfronted by the realities of underdevelopment and the drive of theSoviets to develop heavy industry. Very little of constructivism andproductivism survived the chronic material shortages of the 1920s andthe subordination of the factory to a Taylorist disciplinary labourregime. The collective model of collaboration remained largely a studiopractice, unable to establish any kind of vanguard consultative role inSoviet industry and culture. At the point of its theoretical richness andcritical efficacy, the collective model of collaboration was stillborn.4

But, if the revolutionary content of this model since the 1920s hasbeen overwhelmingly utopian, its critique of the separation of ‘artistictechnique and general social technique’ continues to provide the specula-tive basis of various collective models of collaboration. The interchangeand melding of the function of the artist and the non-artist, the break-down of the division between manual skills and intellectual skills, thecritique of collaboration as aestheticised interdisciplinarity, the idea ofart as social research, have formed the horizon of various collectivemodels of collaboration since Conceptual art. In fact, there is anargument to be made that the ideal of collective collaboration hascontinued relatively intact, despite the very different and inhospitablesocial and ideological conditions under which notions of collectivecollaboration have been pursued since the early avant-garde. Collectiveartist groups continue to emerge with broadly the same programme: thedissolution of artistic technique into social technique. For example, toname two: the American, Group Material in the 1980s, and the Danishgroup Superflex in the 1990s. The convergence between artistic tech-nique and general social technique in constructivism and productivism,although it may appear impossibly utopian today, has not diminishedthis move as a necessary precondition for any radical transformation ofthe cultural form of art. As such, collective collaboration continues toprovide an experimental space in which the scrutiny of art’s culturalform can be maintained – irrespective of prevailing social conditions.Although the post-1960s collective model of collaboration is divorcedfrom any sense of collective convergence between art as revolutionarypractice and collective revolutionary practice, it promises a space ofreflection on the division of labour and the relations of production frominside the social relations of art.

In this way, since the 1960s the content of the imagined convergencebetween artistic technique and general social technique has been recu-perative. The model of collective collaboration has acted as a privilegedpoint of transmission between the early avant-garde and art today.Hence, this model provides more than a historical glimpse back to someadmired set of precedents; it actually reworks and continues the

2. Ibid, p 12.

3. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, quoted in Victor Margolin, The Struggle For Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy 1917–1946, University of Chicago, 1997, p 73.

4. For a discussion of this crisis, see Brandon Taylor, Art and Literature Under the Bolsheviks, vol 1: The Crisis of Renewal 1917–1924, Pluto Press, 1991.

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occluded revolutionary content of the early avant-garde: its critique ofthe capitalist value-form.

The value-form is the basis of capitalist rationality and expansion:the labour time expended on a commodity should not exceed theamount of labour time socially necessary to produce it. Thus, it isimperative, if capitalists want to continue to remain in production andprofit, that they fall within the bounds of this law, otherwise they willbe producing goods too expensively. In this sense, it is the inner logic ofthe value-form that lies behind the real subsumption of labour undercapital and the drive for efficiency.5 The relentless development oftechnology in the workplace is not the inevitable outcome of scientificprogress but an expression of capitalist domination over the worker.The deskilling of work in this century and the last is the result, essen-tially, of this one-sided development of technology.6 The subjective skillsof the worker have to be minimised and controlled if the social forms oflabour are to be internalised technocratically. Indeed, this separation ofthe intellect from the expenditure of labour is the very precondition forthe socialisation of labour and economic ‘growth’: the collective labourof a number of specialised workers disappears to be stored as the ‘natu-ral form’ of a higher technological power. Consequently, with thisdevelopment, machinery now possesses use-value in relation to societyin the abstract (capital), and as such now stands against the worker,reducing the worker to the collective force of socialised labour. In otherwords, the objectification of labour as labour-power corresponds to thede-realisation of living labour. 7

Technology, then, is anything but neutral. It is the means by whichthe dominant relations of production and class-relations reproducethemselves. Yet, the critique of capitalist value-form has played a mini-mum part historically in the critique of capitalism. Many writers havemisunderstood or omitted its fundamental place in Marx’s writing,preferring to think of technology as a set of instruments freely usableacross different modes of production. Indeed, this failure to critique thehidden logic of value-form has been commonplace in political writingsince the 1920s. The place where it has found its most fruitful expressionhas been in philosophical aesthetics and avant-garde art theory. For bothhave placed the use-values of art at the centre of the critique of capitalistrationality. From Romanticism to the Frankfurt School the sensuousnessof art (its non-instrumentality) has played a defining role in the imaginedde-alienation of socialised labour. However, if in philosophical aestheticsthis has largely taken the form of a defence of art’s autonomy againsttechnology, in the early avant-garde theory it took the form of a critiqueof capitalist social relations of technology. The one-sided development oftechnology immanent to the logic of the value-form becomes the centralplank of the attack on the aestheticised separation of artistic techniquefrom social technique. In this respect, the defence of collaborativepractice in avant-garde art is an attempt to derive use-values inopposition to the subordination of labour to capital from within thesensuous practice of non-alienated group labour, rather than in relationto the aestheticised realm of individual artisanal practice, where ‘aesthet-ics’ tends to stand for the abstract autonomy of the artist. In otherwords, the critical interdisciplinarity of the group, and as such the break-down of the separation between manual and intellectual labour, is an

5. See Karl Marx, Capital, vol 1, Lawrence & Wishart, 1970.

6. See, Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Monthly Review Press, 1974.

7. For a range of post-autonomist writing on the value-form, see Paul Slater, ed, Outlines of a Critique of Technology, Ink Links, 1980.

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attempt to challenge the one-sided development of technology, to reforgeit in the interest of a collective spontaneous subjectivity.

Collaboration through art, then, becomes the cultural form throughwhich the aesthetic critique of the value-form and alternative uses oftechnology is played out. This is what I mean by the ideal of collectiveparticipation in art being a space of social experimentation and specula-tion. This tradition of critique, as I have mentioned, has been marginalin both art theory and Marxism. It is there expressly in the first volumeof Capital, there in Rodchenko and Arvatov (although, perhaps, wewould want to ask how far in fact Arvatov’s critique of Taylorism actu-ally went), provisionally in Karl Korsch and fleetingly in early Lukács,fragmentarily in Benjamin, and then stops. It is only really taken upagain by the Situationists and Italian autonomists and recently in post-autonomist theorists such as André Gorz and Antonio Negri. Both Gorzand Negri privilege the critique of the value-form for a new politics. InGorz, this is based on the supposition that because skilled waged labouris a universally diminishing condition, Marx’s critique of the socialisa-tion of labour – the process of deskilling put in place by nineteenth-century capitalism and presently generalised across all sectors ofcapitalism – now becomes a political actuality. Given that waged-labourcan no longer be credibly associated with the free development of theindividual, the possible non-alienated content of socialised labour is ofnecessity placed back on the political agenda.8 In Negri, there is a similarrecognition of the diminishment of skilled waged-labour as a universalcondition, and as such a source for a renewed confrontation with thevalue-form. But for Negri, labour is not just a realm of heteronomouscontrol and de-skilling (or although to be fair, neither is it totally forGorz). Rather, it is a fractured and contradictory realm of the heterono-mous and autonomous, which is exacerbated by computerisation at thepoint of production and distribution. There are problems with the polit-ical outcomes of Gorz’s and Negri’s critique of value. Both writers tooeasily place the source of the agency of the critique of the value-formoutside the traditional working class. But what I want to argue for now,along with Negri, is that the critique of the relations of production hasagain become a key issue for political theory and cultural theory, giventhe way in which the limits of the value-form have become heightenedwith the advance of microelectronics at the point of production.

Much has been written on the new technologies, and much of itmisleading. Contrary to expectations, the new technologies have notdecreased waged-labour but, in fact, increased it (on a rountinised basis)on a global scale. This is because the introduction of new machinery, asa means of keeping running costs down, is not just a means of reducingthe workforce quantitively, but a means also of increasing the productiv-ity and intensity of labour-power. Thus it is possible (as the history ofcapitalism reveals) both to reduce the length of the working day and toincrease levels of surplus value extraction at the same time. And this isprecisely what has happened with the introduction of microelectronics inthe workplace since the 1980s. In certain sectors, conditions might haveimproved for many workers but the intensity of production hasincreased overall. This reveals something significant about the value-form under the new microtechnologies: there are actually more peopleworking with computers in some capacity than before, and therefore

8. See for example, André Gorz, Paths to Paradise: On the Liberation From Work, Pluto Press 1985. For his recent position, see ‘économie de la connaissance, exploitation des savoirs’, entretien avec Carlo Vercellone et Yann Moullier Boutang, Multitudes, no 15, Hiver 2004.

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more workers developing skills that are transferable. For Negri, thisrepresents an actual qualitative change in the character of the relationsof production.9 While the mass worker under Fordism and post-Fordismwas only to able to re-establish his or her autonomy through the sabo-tage or slowing down of machines, under the new digital economy theworker-as-technician ‘enjoys’ an increasing capacity to re-appropriatecomputer technologies for other ends. Moreover, given the frequencywith which technology breaks down (is mis-programmed, for example)it also enables the worker to recover skill levels in the face of the exigen-cies of management. Negri tends to exaggerate these changes, just as heis overly optimistic about the quality of the forms of re-appropriationoccurring. The workplace, in fact, is arguably at present more demand-ing given the insidious application of the rhetoric of ‘participativemanagement’ across all sectors, just as the free time of the worker is nowsubject to the vast intrusions of the commodity form.10 But there isnevertheless an important point at stake here. Because capital is drivenby the logic of the value-form to displace the skills of the worker, it isalso compelled to produce machines that potentially diminish the needfor skilled waged work. This contradiction between the increase in routi-nised waged work and the crisis of waged work is now a daily, socialisedreality; and it is this, I would argue, that has had a huge impact on therise of collaborative practices in art the 1990s. For in the limited autono-mous spaces provided by these technological changes at the point ofproduction, there is, nevertheless, an opportunity to link the politicalcritique of value-form with the artistic, or avant-garde, critique of thevalue-form.

It is easy to be misunderstood here. The rise of politicised collabora-tive practices does not follow directly on from changes in the relations ofproduction. This is an instance of vulgar historicism and leads to theconclusion that collaborative art practice and the ‘new work space’ aresomehow moving behind our backs in a similar direction towards somepractical and theoretical convergence. Nothing could be further from thetruth. Let us remind ourselves: the growth of collaborative practice in artremains utterly peripheral in terms of the day-to-day business of theartworld and what passes for cultural debate today. Yet, because of thedynamic of the value-form (the increasing socialisation of labour) and itslong-term potential for the destabilisation of the system, the linksbetween collaborative practice in art and the critique of the value-formhave certainly become more explicit. That is – and I say this with acertain amount of hesitancy in the light of what I have just said – we cansee a bit more clearly how artists and workers are engaged in a commonstruggle over technoscientific use-values, encouraging, I would contest,the need for an unambiguous political defence of art’s continuing avant-gardist condition.

The shared intervention into the realm of technoscientific use values,however, brings into view what remains the central political problem ofcollaboration as a cultural form. If collaboration in art is part of acommon struggle with labour against the capitalist value-form, in whatways is this activity to be nominated as art rather than as some other kindof practice, such as politics itself? Do we need a new model of politics, aswell as a new model of use-value in art; or are there problems immanentto art, rather than politics, that are not resolvable by collaborative

9. See Michael Hart and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, 2000.

10. See Nick Witheford, ‘Circles and Circuits of Struggle in High-Technology Capitalism’, in Jim Davis, Thomas Hirschl and Michael Stack, eds, Cutting Edge: Technology, Information Capitalism and Social Revolution, Verso, 1997. See also Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Democracy, Secker & Warburg, 2001.

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practice? This problem runs through the current theoretical literature oncollaboration and centres precisely on the post-autonomous or deflectedautonomous status of collaborative practices. Is collaboration essentiallya post-autonomous condition? Is it the means by which art is able todissolve its use-values into everyday practice? Or is it the space whereautonomy (or rather the necessary fiction of autonomy)11 is defended andimplemented? Much of the recent literature is definite on this score:collaboration is the means by which this dissolution of autonomy is ableto take place. It is the agency of this dissolution. As collective practice, artmanifests itself as a practical distribution of skills and competenceswithin a given place and context, and not as fabricated objects for themarket.12 But what post-autonomous defenders of collaboration fail toregister is where exactly the boundaries are of art as praxis. The completedissolution of art into social praxis is, in fact, an impossibility. Once artrefuses to designate itself as art – that is, refuses to nominate itself as a setof practices circumscribed by the histories and institutions of art – it quiteliterally disappears. Hence no post-autonomous collaboration is able tofunction in this way, because it always returns to the artworld to nameitself as art. For otherwise it is unable to proceed as a practice distin-guishable from other practices. The idea of post-autonomy in art, there-fore, fulfilling the promise of an artistic praxis without the mediatoryfunctions of the art institution and the claims of aesthetic judgement issuspect. In this respect, it is interesting to note the rhetoric of the CriticalArt Ensemble’s digital interventionism, and Nicolas Bourriaud’s work onrelationality in art, which both stress in their different ways the disap-pearance of artistic form into portable technique.13 Both suffer from theweakness of much post-autonomous (and Negrian-type) thinking: theidea that changes in the logic of the value-form, opened up by the newtechnology and the ‘new work space’, means the progressive assimilationof artistic technique into social technique, separate from actual changesin property relations. Hence I would argue that both are far too easilydismissive of the residual problem of art’s autonomy under capitalism. Inother words, they confuse the real crisis of authorship and artistic form(and as such the technical and political requirement of collaboration)with the end of art as aesthetic negation. Aesthetic negation is that sphereof production and attention in art that derives the meanings of art fromits distance or critique of heteronomous labour and thinking. The insta-bility of art as a category and a phenomenological experience is preciselywhat constitutes its relationship to freedom and human emancipation.On this basis, an adequate understanding of art is one in which the de-alienated labour of art is a model for the de-alienation of socialisedlabour. Which is not to say that this model of autonomy will supersedeheteronomous labour in all realms. The disappearance of all necessarylabour is an impossibility and potentially repressive in a post-capitalistsystem. But, nevertheless, it is the appearance of aesthetic labour in therealm of heteronomous, socialised labour that will unlock the coercionsof the capitalist value-form. Forms of artistic praxis that short-circuit thistransformative presence of aesthetic labour, in the unmediated interestsof ‘political critique’ as art, will leave art if not trapped by the means–ends rationale of heteronomous thinking, at least in thrall to its function-ality. Thus we might ask: how can art as a critique of the value-form beanything but divergent from the constraints of socialised labour and the

11. As in Adorno’s understanding. See Aesthetic Theory, trans C Lenhardt, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.

12. See for example the journal, Multitudes.

13. See The Critical Art Ensemble, The Electronic Disturbance, Autonomedia, 1994, Nicolas Bourriaud, Esthétique Relationnelle, les presses du réel, Dijon, 1998.

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rule of non-aesthetic reason? This is why aesthetic negativity puts post-autonomous thinking on art into productive crisis, in so far as it registersthe need for a space of aesthetic freeplay in the critique of heteronomouspractice under capitalism. The imagined or hoped for dissolution of artinto social praxis simply abandons this aesthetic experience to heteron-omy.

This does not mean, however, that the only collaboration worthy ofthe name is locked into the production of objects and the generation ofconventional aesthetic judgements. But, rather, that as social praxis, artcannot dissolve the question of cultural form – how art appears in theworld – simply into portable technique, when such portability isperfectly compatible with the art institution’s ‘conceptual’ administra-tion of such art. What collaborative practice brings to the critique of thevalue-form, then, is a space of collective resistance, even ‘asociality’ tothe interventions and experience of art. Under conditions of capitalistadministration, paradoxically, art needs to defend itself as art, as otherto non-aesthetic reason, in order to resist its complete instrumentalisa-tion. Under prevailing relations of production, the meeting of artistictechnique and social technique, consequently, will itself be a contradic-tory and fractured process.

Current debates on collaboration in art tend to follow the post-autonomous path. Nevertheless, they point to something that is unprece-dented since the revolutionary constructivism and productivism of the1920s: the necessity for the discussion of art to overlap freely with adiscussion of labour. In a period where the labour of the artist and thelabour of the worker are largely hidden as values, this is what under-writes the significance of the turn to collaboration today. The debate oncollaboration is the means whereby labour in the artwork is madeconspicuous and critical.

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