Olchar E. Lindsann

Creative Sociality and the Traditions of Dissent


If we examine any mainstream historical treatment or ‘analysis’ of creative currents (‘Anti-Art’, ‘Avant-Garde’, ‘Alternative’, etc.) standing in defiance against the commercially and institutionally mediated infrastructure of ‘High Art’, we will nearly always find that this analysis and historiography focuses upon productions (objects, performances, etc.) and ideologies (units and systems of thought to be explained, pinned down, categorized). The structures of these groups and traditions, their internal dynamics and modes of interaction, organization, and communication, are effectively ignored or marginalized.
Since the majority of such anti-institutional projects in the ‘creative’ domain have been emphatically collective endeavors, the willful ignorance of the strategies and modalities of this collectivity, the slight of hand by which they are whisked under the rug in official pedagogy and historiography, can only be a politicized blind-spot. It is incumbent upon those of us attempting to continue this tradition of dissent to ask why, and to haul the issue into the open.
One consistent project of this dissenting tradition—possibly the primary project—has been to abolish the social definitions and discursive, disseminative, and commercial walls that pen creative activity within the edifice of ‘High Art’ and keep it from infecting life itself. The collective impulse—in all of its countless manifestations—represents a focus on creative sociality, the conscious re-designing of how humanity can relate to itself. This consciousness and involvement in how we relate to each other and to society constitutes the greatest revolutionary potential of the creative project—and the greatest threat to the commercial and institutional structures whose function is to constrain it.
The maintenance of this social prison, ‘High Art’, has therefore necessitated the mediating of creative relationships through institutional structures. In this way, new forms of sociality that would destabilize the discursive and commercial infrastructure that this notion of High Art veils and supports can be curtailed, for all of these relationships are annihilated in their passage through the impersonality and homogeneity imposed by the institution. Creative agents are segregated and neutralized as ‘producers’ and ‘consumers’, ‘creators’ and ‘critics’, ‘practitioners’ and ‘theorists’. Ideology is as subject to this operation as the production of objects or actions; it becomes something to be consumed or rejected, not discussed and activated.
Within anti-institutional traditions, a group’s productions and the ideology they articulate have traditionally reflected the deeply radical stance of the group through their transgression of the boundaries of dominant social ideas of ‘Art’. These gestures were metonymic, not self-sufficient. A new technique or material was an element and manifestation of a deeper revolt; its goal was analogous to, not equal to, an alternative vision of human potential. Moreover, as originally presented, these ‘artistic’ gestures were inseparable from the presence of the collective, because the collective permeated the context of the creative act, its ‘production’ and its ‘reception’.
The dominant institutional discourse with which we are faced today—‘Post-Modernism’ or its derivatives—has rendered this kind of transgression inadequate. Such gestures are immediately recuperated into its brand of ‘relativism’—merely a euphemism for the abdication of an ethical responsibility for which it continues to gather the fruits. The artistic ‘production’ can no longer be effectively transgressive so long as it can somehow be consumed.
The same ‘Post-Modern’ logic neutralizes any ideology by obscuring it through a metadiscourse of ‘irony’. Even an explicit challenge to orthodoxy becomes atomized, packaged, and imported into the self-assured commercial and status-economy of the institutional infrastructure. Anti-Institutional gestures end up published by Phaidon. This is why it has been possible for this system to discuss the productions and ideologies of Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, etc.
But the creative sociality developed in these and other collective efforts cannot be recuperated in this way; they are not symbolic of a dissenting stance, they constitute a tangible structural threat. The functioning of a non-mediated or self-mediated community makes the functioning of a stabilized commercial infrastructure literally impossible, it renders a controlled and centralized discourse powerless. This is why mainstream historiography—always an instrument of subtle propaganda—has attempted to ignore and bury it.
Radically new and productive modes of sociality have always continued to develop—Mail Art, multiple names, new forms of international cooperation enabled by technological development (at least in certain nations)—and forms of collectivity inherited from earlier generations continue to be developed and expanded, in both local and international configurations. Nonetheless, much of the discourse coming from within or occurring between dissenting communities continues to focus almost exclusively on transgressive forms and ideology, thereby limiting the revolutionary potential of the creative structuring of interpersonal relationships, which in practice underlies the production and the thought of dissenting communities. It also effectively limits the applicability of this discourse, constraining it (as the institution also does) within the social boundaries of High Art.
We must recognize that the frontier between ‘life’ and ‘art’ has largely shifted to the level of structure rather than ideology.
Without abandoning ANY of this discourse then, we must begin to articulate explicitly and in detail that what is at stake are not only new forms of making, but new forms of living, thinking, and relating. We must examine the various strategies of socialization that have been adopted, their successes and failures, and we must explicitly address these issues among and between communities continuing these struggles and explorations. Only by forcefully establishing and maintaining rigorous and strategic alternate historiographies to combat the propagandists of the commercial Institution can we locate and attack the governing structures themselves that support that orthodoxy, recover the significance of creative activity itself (which would cease to be ‘production’ and ‘consumption’), and begin the definitive erosion that constrains the potential of our various developments to a bounded ‘subculture’ of educational elites, while the rest of our society withers. We must collectively strategize, both within and between the various communities involved in this heteroclite struggle; and our collective strategizing and our strategies of collective action must constantly reinforce and develop each other. Only in this way can we dissolve the foundations of this particular avatar of Power, and deny it the opportunity to rebuild.