February 2011 in Artforum
“Collaboration Now”: Going from one to two is going overboard. Working with others means exceeding, sharing, even contaminating—whether with an intimate partner or a band of outsiders. Well after the Surrealists assembled their exquisite corpse and artists dropped in at Black Mountain, after Gilbert met George and Fischli met Weiss, artists continue to collaborate in arrangements that span loose underground communities, corporations (ersatz or actual), offices, brands, collectives, and pairs.While many of these endeavors have become well known, the actual terms of association often remain opaque. In this issue of Artforum, a suite of essays and artist statements presents specific vantages on the premises and promises of collaboration, looking less toward broad engagements with the public sphere than inward, toward disturbances within and between subjects.
· Tom Holert surveys the rise and fate of artistic collaboration within the networked global economy, where we all find ourselves connected as participants and “team players.”
· Curator Nicholas Cullinan enters the enclaves of Slavs and Tatars and Chto Delat?, two contemporary collectives for whom the design firm may be just as potent a model as the Proletkult.
· Maria Gough unpacks the various incarnations of the Soviet collective, from Unovis to Brezhnev-era painters’ brigades.
· Claire Bishop teases out the cooperative projects of Paweł Althamer, which permit new patterns of familiarity and strangeness, identity and interaction.
· And an array of collaborating artists from around the globe—AA Bronson, Gelitin, MadeIn, Guyton\Walker, Das Institut, Claire Fontaine, and Tiny Creatures—speak to their working modes and mandates.
· Also this month: In a special project for Artforum, Kai Althoff (himself no stranger to collaboration) offers an otherworldly narrative in photographs and invented script.
· Branden W. Joseph probes politics and punk in the work of Australian artist Marco Fusinato.
· David Velasco takes his time with Christian Marclay‘s epic new montage, The Clock.
· James Quandt accounts for late style in the final films of the French New Wave.
· Plus: Michael Ned Holte parses the work of Carter Mull; Amy Taubin recaps the documentary on street-style pioneer Bill Cunningham; Luc Sante confronts the new warning imagery on cigarette packaging; Hua Hsu replays the legacy of audiocassettes; Jeffrey Weiss paces through Carl Andre‘s exhibition at the Chinati Foundation; Carol Armstrong untangles MoMA’s “On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century”; Romy Golan reflects on Michelangelo Pistoletto at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Sabeth Buchmann tours Manifesta 8; artist-designer Susan Cianciolo charts her Top Ten; and much more.
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