A response...
A colleague at the University is looking into the role play has in urban design. I agree with your assessment, however I would argue that art is the only vehicle to challenge this state of play ( pardon the pun). Further, that in the social ecology of the artist collective play could become a powerful tool. I found this article ( see link) that might be of interest?
You know, John, the more we think about "play" after what you've written, the more the concept reveals itself as something far more ambiguous than it is...It's like you seem to grasp it and then it's somewhere else, completely altered in form and substance. Talking of play both as an attitude and an aesthetic...The question that have risen at a certain point is: how can we play and talk about play-asethetics (playful aesthetics?) in the framework of a wider debate about the resources artists, critics, curators, museums and so on can deploy to build an alternative to the present? How can we do that without confronting ourselves with the incontrovertible fact that play is subsumed into a globally spread perspective of gamification of life? From memes to apps, from consoles to productivity tricks, even the projects of a general basic income...everything seems to point to a society where work will be disguised as play in order to be as addictive as ever. So, the doubt is whether can we subtract to this logic or not. Or better, should we be amoral? Can we deploy play as a strategy that contrasts the logics of capitalism? Can we get rid of it or should we appropriate of play (in its widest sense) conceiving it as a viral/unfair strategy to produce a sort of reaction/shock?
Our typical day. . . . . . . . . when we still were renting a studio space (we are looking for it at the moment) we met in the studio around 9.30 and then started. It depended on the day: sometimes you had some commercial work to finish so there was no talking at all. You just entered, waved a hello, and turned on the computer. The first who arrived chose the music. At first we had the bad habit of smoking in the studio, it looked so Mad Men, but then Nico became a vape-man and accordingly smoking became forbidden. Lunch was always quick and easy. Pasta most of the time. Then another 4 hours of postproduction or video editing and then we went out to see some gallery openings. But, as said before, it really depended on the day. If we were working hard on a project or exhibition, there were no working hours and the studio was a mess. When we were creating the Meditation Rocks series, we were burning things and the studio floor was covered with sand, rocks and other stuff. It was a mess, actually. You couldn't do anything but producing those stones those days. Now we work separately. It's a momentary solution, but it's a nonsense to rent a co-working desk or something like that. We are looking for a cheap and flexible space, which is something rare in Milan. As a city, Milan is probably the only place to be in Italy if you don't want to leave the country and still work in the art system. Rome is disconnected and overwhelmed by archeology and bureaucracy, in Venice everything is swallowed by the Biennale and so on...Milan is probably a good compromise between a ugly city, a place designed only to work, a City (business), building speculation, and connections with the rest of Europe. Turin is far more interesting in our opinion, but it's smaller. On the one hand it's easier to create connections there, but it's not active as Milan. Milan is a stratification of different games, different circles, different networks.
HAHA! This is great! Yes another machine invasion- probably for the better in this case. I now have an image of Don Draper looking really confused :D and trying to think how to market Vaping. Maybe this could be an alternative universe.
But, there's a question for you. As you may have noticed, we're contradictory because we alternate moments of great excitement with days in which we strongly criticize our role, our utility, our purpose as artists. Perhaps these two sides coexists always in everything we do, even if we sometimes express one or the other. We were interested in understanding the aim of your research, because, according to the things we have discussed so far, it's not just an interest toward how an artistic collective works, but something more. It seems that the artistic collective may become a paradigm or an association model. If we're wrong, please, correct us!
Yes! You are right at least in how my research is panning out. It seems to be apparent that there is a ‘deeper level’ of human agency at work in the collective. What I mean by this is, through beginning to develop an historiography of the evolution of the artist collective, what seems to be emerging is something I hadn’t quite expected. There is an almost imperceptible discursive thread which seems to have evolved out of the immense social and political changes which occurred during the early 19th century. This thread which unsurprisingly, follows the development of modernism, seems to have produced a paradigmatic shift carried by the notion that, change was and is possible. My research has actually pin pointed this to a set of thinkers, writers, curators, architects and artists/critics all operating within Britain from around the 1820s to 1900. They include Pugin, Ruskin, Morris, Dickins, Marx and Engels (in Manchester). There is a sense of a re-imaging of the ‘artistic guild’ overtly within Ruskin and positioned in other ways with the other writers. This guild was different to previous guild-type iterations, as it wasn’t principally about installing a framework for manufacturing crafts or workshops. This time it had a political engine. Proto-collectives such as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Morris & Co developed directly from these writings. After this era the same thread migrates to France, Germany, the then USSR and Italy and exponentially developed and was questioned. The thread became consumed by the socialist movement and eventually the internationalist tendency to develop manifesto’s and wider groups such as the Futurists, October, DADA and Bauhaus emerged. However, this thread has a perceptible shift again after 1945 and both wars, when we enter the cold war era and overtly politically engaged artist collective Internationalist groups take a centre stage such as The Situationists etc.
Of course, in the West, capitalism begins to take hold and we enter a third distinct era of evolution, where very specific groups occur during the 60s -the late 80s such as Art and Language, Black British Artists and Artemesia (feminist collective) these were highly linked to civil rights movements.
Now my argument comes to its main point that I contend we have entered into a different phase of evolution of the artist collective. One as we have discussed, with all the problematic connotations of which the human race is grappling to understand. It is in the face of this history and accumulation of capital that the collective appears once again in a spectral form. Changed and shifted in its focus but with ghosts of its collective past still very much alive within its intent. The ominous drive for professionalisation within a neo-liberal economic model exerts tension and locates a friction within its socialist tendencies.
I must point out that this is a very brief summary and I have glossed over vast elements. Off course this is not a linear progression either, with artist collectives forming at different times and for different social and political reasons. However, there is a thread which I intend to prove (as best I can within Humanities) that exists within the artist collectives cultural DNA. In a sense this history is (un)historical as it is entirely contemporary in a time when history appears as a space or place to engage with.
Anyway, I’m going to leave it there for now. I just wanted to sign off with a few questions for you in general. Firstly, this is a co-authored project so If you think we need create any changes let me know? or if you have any suggestions. Secondly, I have been invited to deliver a paper at a conference in Toronto at the OCAD University (art and design) in March and I intend to highlight our project on YARN. I wondered if there was anything you wanted me to show? as I will have a presentation to accompany my paper.