(Excerpt)

Cabello / Carceller
At short distances. Notes on collaborative artistic creation

BERND & HILLA BECHAR, Blast Furnaces, 1985

“The author is a modern personage, undoubtedly produced by our society to the extent that, by leaving behind the Middle Ages and thanks to English imperialism, French rationalism and personal faith in the Reformation, it discovers the prestige of the individual or, in more noble terms, the “human persona”.

Roland Barthes (1)

“The personal is political”.

Slogan of the 70s feminist movement

1.
Different cultures, different mythologies. Myth building is a slow process, a meticulous task carried out over time and which does not end until the myths are settled into the collective mindset, until it seems as though no other alternative was ever possible. Afterwards, it is merely necessary to nurture the myths, to establish a solid infrastructure to maintain them, advertise them and preserve their capacity to seduce while remaining as intact as possible. It is difficult for individuals to rebel against acquired myths and discover their nature as cultural constructions. It is even more difficult when this implies proposing alternatives to systems of thought that were originally meant to free us from bonds, searching for other paths for the mind and for creative action, but which, in the end, can become ideological prisons, in new spaces just as imposing as those supposedly left behind. And it is still more complicated when the new myth is seductive enough to end up being exported to other cultures. The Western world invented a grand myth, one of the most attractive ones. In a secularised thought space lacking credible gods, all creative responsibility was unloaded onto the individual and the artist was transformed into the genius in charge of transmitting a demiurgic knowledge. In the late XVIII and early XIX centuries, with Romanticism, the conception of the artist as transmitter of divine knowledge reaches its greatest exponent, in the words of Novalis, one of the great Romantic poets, “In the beginning, poet and priest were one, and only later were they separated. But the true poet is always a priest, in the same way that the true priest has always been a poet. And shouldn’t the future hold the rebirth of the ancient condition?.”(2) This idealised vision of the artist still persists in the collective subconscious.

GENERAL IDEA, Nazi Milk, 1979

As occurs with the construction process, the modification of the myths that give rise to our imagery is almost always slow; thought does not change at such a swift pace as emerging technological discoveries. Scientific advancement coexists with a conservative collective mentality which gives way to itself, and which, in fact, quickly reacts to the ideas aiming to modify the essence of the social structures sustaining us. During the mid XX century, substantial changes were produced in thought and in the way things were contemplated and how creative actions were carried out; indeed, radical and even utopian modifications were proposed, but these alterations in the status quo were never even partially adopted and an infrastructure that would permit their subsistence has still not been concocted. The entire framework surrounding the artistic act continues to try to recreate an idealised past. This framework accepts the new postulates as inevitable, but actively rejects them if they do not comply with tradition. Artists are still basically beings rooted in Romanticism, individuals endowed with innate capacities to penetrate Nature, possessed by Art (an abstract and inexplicable entity) and transmitting ulterior truths as if they were mediums. The emphatic tone of Romantic artists and writers has been varied considerably, yet the idea they expounded has persisted, transformed into a collective fantasy. In the words of Christine Battersby, “Post-structuralists assure us that the author is dead, adding their voices to previous generations of Marxist critics who have undermined the authority and isolation of the lone author. But in popular culture we find the old vocabulary, and the figure of the artist as hero, as alive and well as ever.”(3)

In the late 60s, in his influential text The Death of the Author, the French theorist Roland Barthes proposed a shift in the authorship of the creative act, “Nowadays we know that a text is not composed of a line of words that shed one meaning alone, a theological one, in a certain way (for it would be the message of the Author-God), but by a multi-dimensional space in which diverse writings, none of which are original, are converged and contrasted: the text is a fabric of quotes issuing from a thousand cultural centres.”(4) This shift transferred attention from the author to the text and from the latter to the reader, positioning the author of the texts as products of the historical events of his society and thus reducing his role to that of a mere instrument of cultural transmission. To be sure, the disappearance, or rather, the unmasking of the author also implied the disappearance of the critical apparatus sustaining him. Barthes’ texts, initially written in the sphere of literature and literary criticism, soon found an echo in the world of the visual arts. By theoretically killing the author, he opened a door that liberated the creative act from transcendental authorship and that brought the artist closer to society, allowing him to step down from the altars. In those years, the collaboration among artists was considered in several spheres as an act with political connotations and social implications; those were years in which the role of the structures constructed around the author to validate the work, was indeed being questioned. Museums, galleries, publications… they were presented as control mechanisms created and protected by political and economic powers. Artists sought ought new directions, distancing themselves from the spheres of power and approaching society. In a certain sense, we could say that there was an attempt to achieve a humanisation of art.

GUERRILLA GIRLS, Get Naked,1989-2002

Currently, the art scene has changed once again to reappraise the power of museums and the structures controlling artistic production, but, once a path is open, it is not so easy to close it, not completely at least. Along with the post-structuralist theorists like Barthes, other schools of thought emerged, also questioning the historical role of Art and artists. The art world was a world closed to differences, an elite world legitimising not only the system of patriarchal beliefs, but also an heir of colonial politics. We women did not find a place in that system, not beyond the role of lover or companion and, if there was indeed a presence during the creative moment, both the most reputable art critics, museums and historians erased with a pen stroke the existence and the influential role played by women artists: finally, the masculine creative genius remained intact in his glass case. For this reason, and paralleling experiences such as the Art Workers Coalition (AWC) that united in New York artists, critics and students concerned about how the work of creators was affected by commercial and museum politics. Alternative groups were formed, such as Women Artists in Revolution (WAR), which protested the exclusion of women artists from museums. This political implication of female and male artists and this consciousness of being a part of a society and that the art world did not only reproduce the miseries of that society but, in some cases, lent them theoretical backing, brought about the absolute questioning of the figure of the artist as an isolated individual, thus shortening the distances from other means of artistic production, breaking existent barriers between the different disciplines and giving rise to the formation of groups and teamwork, thereby creating a climate that encouraged constant interaction between creators.