The Collective Conscious
By HOLLAND COTTER


Contemporary art is a multibillion-dollar global industry. But why
does such a big deal look so small, so slight, with its bland
paintings, self-regarding videos, artful tchotchkes and shoppable
M.F.A. artists-to-watch? There has to be another way to go, an
alternative to a used-up "alternative." By far the most interesting
option so far, one that began to be news a few years ago and has
increased its visibility since, is the work of miniature subcultures
known as collectives. Basically, art collectives do away with the
one-artist-one-object model. They come in various sizes and formats:
couples, quartets, teams, tribes and amorphous cyberspace communities.
Sometimes a group of artists assumes the identity of a single person;
sometimes, a single artist assumes the identity of many. Membership may
be official, or casual, or even accidental: friends brainstorming in an
apartment or strangers collaborating on the Internet from continents
away. And they may or may not refer to their activities as art.
Research, archiving and creative hacking are just as likely to produce
objects, experiences, information that is politically didactic or
end-in-itself beautiful, or both. One way or another, joint production
among parties of equal standing — we're not talking about master artist
and studio assistants here — scrambles existing aesthetic formulas. It
may undermine the cult of the artist as media star, dislodge the
supremacy of the precious object and unsettle the economic structures
that make the art world a mirror image of the inequities of American
culture at large. In short, it confuses how we think about art and
assign value to it. This can only be good.

Consider, for example, the work of a collective with the name
0100101110101101.ORG. It consists of two young Spanish artists, Eva and
Franco Mattes, who call their art "media actionism." Last year, they
produced an elaborate international promotional campaign (posters,
magazine, trailer, etc.) for a Hollywood-style war film titled "United
We Stand," starring Penélope Cruz and Ewan McGregor.

The images in the poster and trailer, with barely disguised but
heroicized references to the current war in Iraq, can be taken as
typical examples of Hollywood-style propaganda-as-history. But the
layers of deception go deeper. The film itself, echoing President
Bush's triumphal "Top Gun" turn, exists only as advertising. It is a
fiction built on fantasy. But thanks to an extensive poster campaign,
the nonexistent film may lodge in our consciousness all the same.

For an earlier project, the collective created a benign computer virus
as a work of art and made it available on a computer disc. For another,
it hacked the Nike Corporation's Web site, inserting an "official"
announcement of Nike plazas to be built in cities all over the world.
If art can be defined as the purposeful shaping of images to embody and
expand ideas, this collective's activities easily qualify.

If you want to locate the discrete work of art, however, you have a
problem. You can own a piece of the "United We Stand" project by buying
(or stealing) a poster, and you might get the virus whether you want it
or not. What's really on offer, though, is conceptual substance: ideas
about surveillance, ownership and the pervasiveness of the cultural
propaganda otherwise known as popular entertainment.

Other collectives, several of which are represented in the 2006
Whitney Biennial, which opened last week, stretch conventional
definitions of art and artist even further, into the realm of activist
politics, scientific experimentation and historical reclamation.

Critical Art Ensemble, now well known because of the 2004
investigation of one of its members, Steve Kurtz, on suspicion of
bioterrorist activities, combines the first two elements. Well aware of
1960's communalism, and directly influenced by collectives from the
AIDS movement — Act Up, Gran Fury, Group Material — Critical Art
Ensemble operates as a combination of scientific investigative unit,
anticapitalist guerrilla cell, public service agency and multimedia art
studio. It has conducted research into government and corporate control
of biotechnology and biogenetics, and then presented its findings in
publications, exhibitions and public performances that sometimes take
the form of laboratory demonstrations. For a German performance with
the artist Beatriz da Costa, the collective tested food brought by
visitors for genetically modified organisms, whose import European
Union officials claimed had been banned.

A related performance about genetic engineering and organic food was
scheduled for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in the
summer of 2004. But it was canceled after the police, answering a 911
call that Mr. Kurtz made from his home after his wife had a fatal heart
attack, confiscated what they deemed were suspicious bacterial
substances.

The substances were materials for one of the collective's art
projects, which are always science projects. It would be easy to think
that the government officials prosecuting Mr. Kurtz are simply too
obtuse to see the "art" in Critical Art Ensemble's work. Yet it is just
as likely that they see an art of potentially subversive information
and don't like it.

Critical Art Ensemble is one of many art collectives operating on the
principle that information is power and that it is most effectively
made available through a combination of science and aesthetics. Another
such group, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, combines history,
environmental science and art to reveal the use, or misuse, of public
land in the United States, with particular emphasis on what it sees as
the excesses of the defense establishment.

The means that the collective uses are organizationally complex and
specialized, beyond what any individual artist could manage. They
include environmental research, book publication, exhibitions, an
elaborate Web site and guided tours of military sites, chemical-weapon
incinerators and abandoned shopping malls.

They are far less interested in producing art objects than in
providing an experience of the world through a scientifically based
aesthetic language of symmetries and disharmonies, tones and shades,
concreteness and abstraction. Like the earth artist Robert Smithson,
they locate the poetry of dissolution in geology. Unlike him, they
don't physically shape the land itself, but shape the way you think
about it. Through their art-as-science, or science-as-art, you make the
environment, natural and constructed, your own without owning it.

If this collective model represents an alternative to the
object-fixated market economy of art, other models are notable for
turning conventional ideas of what an artist is inside out. For the
singular artist-as-genius that is the foundation of the entire art
industry, including sales exhibitions and criticism, they substitute
multiplicity, anonymity, unpredictability.

Otabenga Jones & Associates, for example, is the identity assumed by
four young African-American artists based in Houston (Dawolu Jabari
Anderson, Jamal Cyrus, Kenya Evans and Robert A. Pruitt). Ota Benga was
a real person, an African pygmy brought to the United States in 1904
and exhibited in a cage at the Bronx Zoo as a kind of living
illustration for Darwin's "Origins of Species." Otabenga Jones is an
invented character who is both a conceptual artist and a historian with
an interest in critically reconstituting the connective tissue between
African and African-American cultures.

In a recent solo show in Chelsea, his work revisited the Bronx in the
1970's and 80's, when hip-hop and graffiti, art forms with a communal
base, were first becoming widely known. At DiverseWork in Houston in
2005 he and the four artists who sometimes use his name installed the
equivalent of a sidewalk flea market selling bootleg DVD's and designer
knockoffs.

The installation carries references to other artists: David Hammons,
who once sold snowballs on the street in New York, and Georges Adeagbo
from the Republic of Benin, who creates marketlike, altarlike outdoor
installations. The piece also suggests that as commercial operations,
there is no essential difference between the "art world" and the "real
world," the gallery and the flea market, except for a protective
divide. Outdoors, you could get arrested for selling bootleg goods;
inside the art world's precincts, you're probably safe.

Otabenga Jones is four artists acting as one, with their four voices
simultaneously blended and distinctive. The collective called the Atlas
Group/Walid Raad, also devoted to recovering a social history, is one
artist acting as many, specifically as the nonprofit research
foundation called the Atlas Group. The subject in this case is the
war-torn history of modern Lebanon, considered through installations of
materials ranging from videotapes of prisoners being interrogated and
tortured to photographic archives assembled by one Dr. Fakhouri.

But there is no Dr. Fakhouri. And although some of the Atlas Group
material is based on real sources, much of it was produced by Mr. Raad,
an artist based in Beirut and New York. Once you know what you're
seeing, the work, usually presented in installation form, takes on an
absurdist comic edge. At the same time it vividly evokes the almost
preposterous horror of war itself, which Mr. Raad experiences both
first hand and from a distance, and has evoked as semifictional
collective memory.

Surely the most complicated of all collectively conceived art
personalities in circulation at present is the polymath entity named
Reena Spaulings, who is an artist, an art dealer and a character in a
novel. The gallery that carries her name on the Lower East Side of
Manhattan, is by this point the best known and most conventional aspect
of the Spaulings enterprise, though it didn't start out that way.

It was initially a storefront studio for the artist Emily Sundblad,
who was in the United States from Sweden and was legally required to
have a mailing address for residency. She and her partner, John Kelsey,
used the space to create what amounted to an art project in the guise
of a gallery, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, playing host to performances as
well as exhibitions that lasted, in some cases, only a matter of hours.

Although artists have often become dealers, the Spaulings story flips
the order around. It was only after the gallery became commercially
viable that Spaulings had a solo show in a Chelsea gallery, a
collective effort that incorporated elements from the Lower East Side
space. At the same time, an autobiographical novel titled "Reena
Spaulings" (Semiotexte, 2004) appeared.

To further confuse matters — and confusion of authorship, gender,
media and other categorizing labels that the art market relies on to
track product is the point of the Spaulings project — the book is the
work of a second collective, Bernadette Corporation, with which Mr.
Kelsey is affiliated. In the 1990's it created a fashion line and
published a magazine (Made in U.S.A.); last year it established an
underground film studio in Berlin. The novel itself was written by
dozens of contributors, primarily via the Internet, and in the
assembly-line mode once used by Hollywood film studios to produce
scripts.

Indeed, like many collectives today, Bernadette Corporation exists
largely in cyberspace, demonstrating that artists no longer require a
place — a studio, a Chelsea — to make and show work, or a gallery
system to promote it. In addition, just as collectivity de-emphasizes
the singularity of the artist, digital media eliminate, or transform,
the idea of the personal "touch" marketed as creative individuality.
(The strenuous call for the revival of painting in the past few years
might be seen as, in part, a reaction to the perceived encroachment of
digital forms.)

Internet-savvy collectives like this one — and some collectives exist
exclusively on the Web — take a holistic view of art as a long-term
social process, rather than a short-term formal event. Just as
important, they want to get their work out, free, to as wide an
audience as possible, and the Internet lets them do so.

Unsurprisingly, both Bernadette Coorporation and Reena Spaulings were
created by artists well versed in anticapitalist and anticorporate
politics. Nor is it surprising that the gallery itself, after its
free-form early days, became a going commercial concern, in the process
having its edge blunted through its capitulation to the system it
supposedly bucked. The gallery, in fact, has recently received critical
reprimands around matters of self-promotion. So where will its founders
take their project now?

Finally, it's important to acknowledge that making art collectively is
by no means an automatic guarantee of radicalism, as the example of the
much-touted Wrong Gallery proves.

A collaboration of three highly visible art world movers — Ali
Subotnick, Massimiliano Gioni and the artist Maurizio Cattelan — it's a
sort of free-floating curatorial project with no permanent address. For
awhile it occupied a niche behind a locked glass door on a Chelsea
street where it gave short-run shows to chic young artists. In
conjunction with the biennial, it has organized a group show at the
Whitney.

The Wrong Gallery's Whitney show is on a bad-boyish theme that Andy
Warhol more or less finessed with his "Most Wanted Men" paintings 40
years ago. And this collective itself feels like tired old news. It's
strictly an insider operation, limited to mildly tweaking the
conventions and protocols of the art world while supporting
business-as-usual. No wonder the industry thinks it's just the
cleverest thing and gives it full approval. Like the art world in its
present form, the Wrong Gallery is prominent and powerful, and
trifling.