Groupings

A grand myth in Western culture is that we are isolated individuals struggling by the grace of our own good conscience and hard work to make a noble life. This is the myth of the Rugged Individual. This myth has a greatly exaggerated status in the United States. Here we are constantly regaled by the personal triumphs of billionaire celebrities and corporate executives who have, as the legend goes, built massive empires solely with their own hands. This myth deceitfully places emphasis on individuals rather than the complex web of people that makes these accomplishments possible. This myth often obfuscates the extreme exploitation of others that is necessary to achieve this kind of personal gain. 

The reality is that all of us are immersed in a complicated system of social relations and ethical responsibilities. This nexus eclipses extreme individualism. The myth of the ìRugged Individualî is so insidious because most people take it as a natural truth and not the product of complicated social and historical conditions.

Our daily actions and relationships with others betray this myth repeatedly. We rely on each other to fulfill our basic needs. We are extremely social creatures with a very complicated and nuanced array of groupings. We move from one grouping to another with such fluidity that we donít even stop to consider the ease with which we interact with others. Groupings define every moment of our lives, even when we are all alone. It is in this perpetual flux of groupings that we find the strongest evidence that the myth of Rugged Individualism is just that.

We need others to produce our food, prepare it, transport it, sell it, and dispose of the parts we donít consume. Our clothing and housing come to us in a similar fashion. We live near other humans and must respect their privacy and dwellings so that they in turn respect ours. We are educated by specialists that have been taught by other specialists. We write books and make art that we publish and exhibit for the stimulation of others. We have a thing called "culture" which we all implicitly share. It is impossible for us to have a place in the world without meaningful relationships with others. This makes us responsible and accountable to them.

A lack of responsibility and accountability to others is what allows companies to sell you clothing produced by children that work in unacceptable conditions. This corporate attitude takes all responsibility off the shoulders of the individual. The responsibilities get relegated to no one, allowing individuals to be complicit in the exploitation of others without feeling guilt. The myth of rugged individualism perpetuates a greedy and self-absorbed consumer culture. Individual consumption is reinforced in excessive doses on a regular basis through aggressive advertising that permeates all the spaces we move through. American television, for example, has recently bombarded its viewers with commercials for pizza and cereal that show family members cheating each other out of access to the food for their own personal satisfaction. It is presented in a manner that is supposed to be funny, but has a much more chilling resonance. A particularly absurd example is when consumers buy into manufactured hysteria that leads them to fight each other in stores for the chance to purchase popular products during Christmas shopping seasons. Shoppers practically run each other over in parking lots as they race to get into the stores. This behavior would be comical were it not so disturbingly pervasive. 

Rugged individualism insists on a refusal to see that we have a social and economic responsibility to others. This is where the denial of responsibility is at its greatest. The mitigating factors of race, ethnic and class differences often complicate our exchanges and relationships. We intuitively participate in collaborative relationships with other people every day, but we deny these collaborations for competition with others. Fierce competition allows for an increased lack of responsibility for one another. This competition helps to explain the presence of extreme wealth and extreme poverty that exist side by side in the world.

Our language betrays rugged individualism. We have hundreds of different words to describe the multiple, overlapping kinds of groupings we find ourselves in. The words at the beginning of this article are a basic introduction to this idea. 

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One particularly common and misleading instance of the myth of rugged individualism comes to us in the form of the artist-genius isolated in his studio making profound art. In this romantic image, a lone individual, usually male, struggles in solitude and obscurity. One day, a dealer or a famous collector magically appears and ìdiscoversî this artist. The dealer or collector gives the artist a show and everything is sold. The artist has more shows. A museum comes along and buys the work. Eventually, the artist becomes famous. Doors that were once closed to him are opened wide and the gravy train keeps right on rolling. This myth gives hope to un-empowered social misfits and dreamers who donít want to take responsibility for their own work. They are encouraged by the idea that they can remain mute and isolated and still find a massive audience for their creations. 

This Hollywood-style myth of being discovered by another lone rugged individual sells well and is reinforced in many art schools. Students are taught to defer to established power structures and relationships that subordinate their interests. They are taught that this is the only meaningful way their art can show up in the world. Here, students are subconsciously encouraged to perfect the fine arts of brownnosing professors, administrators and visiting artists, schmoozing at gallery openings, and figuring out a good gimmick that gets someone to notice their work. A market-based art world encourages this kind of self-indulgence and competition. Something that is much less romantic to write about is the fact that many artists form vast networks of relationships that they use to create opportunities for themselves and for each other. Artists are rarely so dependent on one person for the bulk of their success. 

Nonetheless, most artists love to pretend that they do all the work themselves. Artists are perhaps the most reluctant of any creative people to admit that they get a considerable amount of help from others. They are the least likely to admit that they didnít make their own work or that they got a good idea or suggestion from someone else. Artists love to take credit for everything. Filmmakers, choreographers, theater directors and conductors of orchestras canít pull this off. Have you ever seen a film with no credits, or a play where the program listed only one person? Have you ever read a newspaper that didnít have editors? Have you ever seen a professional athlete without a coach? A racecar driver without a pit crew? When most artists show in a gallery, the gallery name and the name of the artist are generally the only credits you will find. The people that help arenít publicly acknowledged. The assistants donít appear in photos of the artist in his or her studio. The few artists who openly acknowledge the role of their assistants and collaborators are, unfortunately, the exception.

The lives of all artists - like the lives of everyone else that works - consist of extremely complicated and varied arrays of social relationships. These relationships are massively entangled and reveal that in order for people to accomplish anything of real measure, numerous people must be involved - often in many different stages of the production of a work or works. Exhibitions are not realized by one artist working alone, but by many people. Artists often work with assistants. Many artists that exhibit internationally have a staff, like a small business. They have assistants, fabricators, and possibly even secretaries. They shop out their work to printers, welders, photographers, and computer and sound specialists. Many well-known photographers donít print their own photographs. Many widely exhibited sculptors barely touch their own sculptures. The history of artists being helped by other people is largely a hidden history. It is no surprise that the art market, which loves the idea of the rugged individual, prefers when this history stays hidden.

Temporary Services is only able to do the amount of work we do in a year because there are four of us. One person could never accomplish as much without getting a lot of help. Our projects are constantly realized through the assistance and generosity of others outside of our group. We work to build a more generous, reflective and ethical network of artists and people concerned with the experimental and non-commercial production of art.

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We are working to realize new ideas for Critical Mass. In order to do this we must negotiate numerous details when working with the curator of the exhibition. Curators generate questions about form, content and intent that artists must find ways to answer. The new work that is produced for an exhibit often gets shaped in part by the theme of the exhibit (most likely determined by the curator), the budget of the artist or institution, the architecture of the exhibition space, and possibly the ideas and projects of the other artists participating in the exhibit. Artists often rely on the services of fabricators to realize some aspects of their projects. Often these fabricators will provide ideas, suggestions, and skills that affect the final aesthetic qualities of the finished work. Gallery technicians are present during the installation of an exhibit. They are always a valuable source of knowledge and experience. They lend pristine hand-skills and years of problem-solving to the task of installing an exhibit. Their efforts have a massive effect on the overall visual impact of a show. 

Personnel at institutions like the David and Alfred Smart Museum of Art are entrenched in a complicated series of working relationships and collaborations. Artists and assistants work with curators. Museum curators work with their own assistants and student interns as well as museum education departments and the security and visitor services staff. Curators also answer to museum directors or operations coordinators who in turn answer to a board of directors, private donors, or corporate sponsors. 

This highly hierarchical structure is a reality of museums but it is not something we replicate in our own collaborative projects. When we work with others we always strive to avoid this rigid social organizing. We deal with these hierarchies enough in our day jobs where they are harder to avoid and work against. We seek equitable relationships with everyone that helps us realize our projects. From our perspective, everyoneís help is critical; every task matters. 

We have collaborated with everyone in this exhibition prior to our inclusion in "Critical Mass." A spirit of cooperation and collaboration has existed amongst this group of people for a long time. This is not a cutthroat competition, nor is it a show where teachers are honoring their favorite students or vice versa. The realization of this exhibit has been astonishingly friendly. All of us value and admire each otherís work. We are friends and deeply respectful of each otherís ideas. Where there are differences in age, intent, and educational background, they are eradicated by other factors that all of us can readily appreciate in each other. We are all collaborating on numerous details of this exhibit and realizing our own separate projects. We are cheering each other on. This is not terribly romantic.

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Temporary Services is currently a group of four people. We collaborate on projects as a group, initiate new projects of our own design, collaborate with other people and groups to realize new projects, and we work as a group to help realize projects that are initiated by other people. We insist that our art production have consequences in our daily lives. When we get invited to be in an exhibition, we maintain a very high degree of interest over how our work gets presented. In "Critical Mass" we have been offered a great degree of participation with regard to many details in the exhibit. This is a privilege that we deeply appreciate and that we know is unusual and special. It has been our pleasure to participate in as many aspects of the exhibition as we can find the time and energy to involve ourselves with. We embrace the mess of participatory democracy and we love to collaborate with lots of people. Group work can be a pain in the ass. It is also tremendously rewarding.

The rewards so far outweigh the negative aspects that we have decided to devote our participation in "Critical Mass" to a multi-faceted analysis of human groupings and group work. We call ourselves a group. For this exhibition we have undertaken a massive study of other groups - who they are, what they do, what they look like, how they organize, and how they function. Some of the groups we are presenting represent models that are akin to the ways we function ourselves. Other groups are represented visually in order to show continuity with the world of collaboration and group work as a whole. Collaboration exists in all areas of life but we donít feel in cahoots with every group or organization for this reason alone.

Our most visible contribution to Critical Mass takes the form of a monolithic wall display. The wall is filled with stripes of commonly found materials that we have collected as a means of surveying groupings and group work. The wall incorporates: wallpaper borders, commercially printed signs with the words for groups listed at the beginning of this essay, T-shirts and record jackets that prominently display images of groups, and hundreds of group images cut from books, magazines, and newspapers. This overwhelmingly dense display is intended to encapsulate these interests in a manner that is exhaustive yet playful. The materials we have selected allow us to quickly leap from group images of the casts of TV sitcoms, to racist organizations, to rock concert audiences, to Boy Scout troops, to corporate meetings, to political protests. Our intent is to present enough representations to suggest an entire world of people and the myriad ways we organize ourselves and participate in social situations.

In addition to this booklet, Temporary Services is producing three others. One of these booklets consists entirely of quotes on group work, group process, and collaboration. Among those quoted are diverse groups like: Autonomous Astronauts, Group Material, Sonic Youth, Act Up, Guerrilla Girls, Fugazi, Amon Düül II and disparate individuals who talk about their experiences working with other people. This booklet is intended to point out the common experiences and challenges that groups face while highlighting the elements of group work that make it so exciting and enriching.

Temporary Services has interviewed residents of a variety of housing cooperatives to present their ideas about and experiences of cooperative living. We will print a booklet of interviews and hold a potluck dinner at the museum with members of the various co-ops that have contributed.

The fourth publication that we are contributing to "Critical Mass" is a booklet written and designed by the Dutch band The Ex. The booklet reprints an essay written by their singer Jos that first appeared in the 1989 book Threat By Example. The book has been long out of print and the publisher, Martin Sprouse, has no plans to re-release it. In this essay, The Ex take the music industry to task with Josís caustic wit, while also articulating the underpinnings of their own fiercely independent and ethical methodologies. The Ex is currently a group of five people. They formed in 1979. While their current line-up has remained stable for over ten years, the group commonly collaborates with other artists and musicians. Recently, they released a CD as Ex Orkest (Ex Orchestra) which features the band playing with sixteen invited friends. The group just concluded a groundbreaking tour of Ethiopia that they organized with the similarly iconoclastic Dutch drummer Han Bennink. The Ex have sustained themselves as a band for nearly twenty-five years without compromising their ideals or losing the slightest bit of vitality along the way. In fact they are currently making the best music of their lives. Temporary Services are long-time admirers of this group and it is a pleasure to publish this essay and include them in this exhibit.

For a more direct confrontation with group work we have also invited the Chicago-based "disorganization" Peoples Republic of Delicious Foods. PRDF clearly demonstrate that a group of people can make a much bigger mess of a situation than one person acting alone. Here they will contribute their own multi-media mayhem to the "Critical Mass" opening reception festivities along with the participation of a guest group that they have invited themselves. PRDF have an ever-changing membership and they themselves donít always know who will show up to participate in any given project. Their unpredictable performances marry obvious visual intelligence with a love of chaos that is sometimes downright unhealthy. We have supplied PRDF with some raw material from our wall display; we expect theyíll do whatever the hell they want with it and will supplement this material with their own barrage of sound and projected images.

Finally, Temporary Services has organized a series of video screenings that mirror some of the concerns and approaches embodied by the various projects in Critical Mass. Two of the longer highlights of these screenings are a new documentary on The Ex called "Beautiful Frenzy," and a documentary of Jeremy Deller's recreation of a miner's strike, in England in 1984, called "The Battle of Orgreave." We will provide additional videos that visitors can screen in the Smart Museumís study room during the weekend of the Critical Mass Symposium.

We would like to thank and acknowledge the following people: Dan S. Wang, Stephanie Smith, Jackie Terrassa, Laurie Palmer, Greg Sholette, and Bob Peters, Céline Duval (for donating photos to our wall display), Ralph, Victor and Erik of the Peoples Republic of Delicious Foods, Jos and The Ex, the staff at the Smart Museum including Jessica Basta, Jonathan and Margaret, Elyce Semenec, Jeremy Deller, Tony and Tracy for design advice, Vic and Bad Dog Press, residents of the Qumbya cooperatives and Jesus People USA. Mad props to Rudy Bernal for his knowledge and wonderful stories.