Recollections and Reflections on Collectivity

By Karen Cordero Reiman

Ana Victoria Jiménez, All the Tlacuilas y Retrateras, at Biblioteca México before a performance, Mexico City, June 24, 1984

• Situating My Voice

I am writing this reflection based on my experience with collectives over the course of over forty years, as a situated recollection, perhaps somewhat arbitrary, but coherent with what I have learned from this passage through collectivity: that one can only speak for oneself, and yet the sum of those singular voices, when placed in a horizontal, respectful dialogue, can potentialize the sum of multiple subjectivities in ways that suggest new models of power relations for society.  The essay, originally written for the catalogue of the Guangzhou Image Triennial 2021[1], and from my perspective as an art historian and curator, inevitably focuses in large part on experiences of collectivity in the art world, but also draws on broader aspects, particularly in the context of feminism, and a good number of the reflections can surely be extrapolated to other contexts. My point of view is also inevitably culturally grounded: I grew up and had my first experiences of collectivity in the United States but have lived and worked for 42 years in Mexico, so my vision encompasses both these territories to some degree, though it draws primarily on my experiences in the world of art and higher education in Mexico. I feel it is important to begin by laying on the table these points of departure since, rather than constituting a conventional academic essay—a medium I am more comfortable with—this text uses my own memory as the basis for a series of observations and arguments that, inevitably, are entwined with the memories of others with whom I have entered into dialogue directly or indirectly over the years, through their documentation in various formats and/or their imbrication in my consciousness.

This essay also draws on my conviction that the impulse to work in collective fashion is based on a somewhat utopian intent to counteract how societal experience (in what may conventionally be defined as Western capitalism, albeit its many variants and nuances) has constructed our subjectivity, as well as many of the conceptions that define art and the art world in this context. As the Australian author, anarchist and activist John Englart has noted in his essay “Collective Organisation”:

As a result, collectives serve as microcosms or laboratories for modeling and exploring the implications of alternative political structures, founded on dialogue and solidarity rather than individualism and competition, an aspect that is often perceived as threatening by institutions invested in existing hegemonies. It is also challenging for the participating individuals, who must observe and unlearn old habits and practice new ones, but at the same time offers a fertile context for the construction of new aesthetic and social possibilities.

• The Context: An Initiative to Deactivate Collectives

While I was writing the original version of this essay in Mexico City in January 2021, the community of cultural producers in various disciplines: the visual arts, theatre, dance and literature, was battling a surreptitious government initiative to deactivate artist collectives, primarily because of their role as vehicles of political organization that visibilize and protest against the precarious work conditions of a large majority of the professionals in the arts. Many work free-lance or in non-permanent positions with low wages and no social security or medical benefits. Moreover, at the time, the government had launched a policy of defunding longstanding cultural institutions and projects, in favor of funneling exorbitant amounts of money into two flagship initiatives of the regime that many deemed unnecessary and ecologically unsound, given the delicate economic situation of the nation, that had recently been compounded by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The negotiations of an aggrupation of collectives with the Ministry of Culture in this respect broke down when in December 2020 in a meeting between these two groups, a government representative accidentally projected during a Zoom meeting a chat between the official participants titled “Deactivate Collectives” which was construed by the artists’ groups as clear evidence of the lack of a sincere commitment on the part of those representatives to resolve the issues at hand.[3] As a result, following a widely circulated letter demanding the destitution of the Minister of Culture, Alejandra Frausto, over 125 artist’s collectives and organizations came together to present a petition to the President requesting a government commitment to a National Congress of Cultural Agents that would propose wide-ranging legislative and policy reforms based on a horizontal dialogue, with broad participation by regional and national officials and cultural actors.[4]

This situation reflected the widespread and longstanding practice in the arts of organizing to defend the interests of the sector, and also the fact that these non-hierarchical collectives are perceived as threatening by a cultural system founded on hierarchy, individualism and authoritarianism.

This is one side of collectives—their public projection as a vehicle of political unity and lobbying—but their internal impact is, for me, even more important.

• Learning about Collectivity: Feminist Origins and Vital Experiences

Cover of Lucy Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art (New York, Dutton, 1976)

My own experience of working in a collective, while it had some initial grounding in activist activities in high school, was founded consciously in my undergraduate years as part of my growing feminist awareness: in the Alice Paul Women’s Center of Swarthmore College, a small liberal arts college of Quaker origin in the state of Pennsylvania[5]. I joined a consciousness raising group in the center. There—in a similar fashion to many women of my generation—I became familiar not only with the essential literature of the feminist movement that analyzed the theoretical and practical implications of the feminist point of departure: “the personal is political”, but also with the practice of working in small groups in dialogue with other women, where we learned to listen to each other, discovered our shared experiences and feelings, learned that many of them were related to structural aspects of patriarchal society, and together developed strategies in relation to ourselves—our bodies and our subjectivity—as well as in relation to others, that allowed us to begin to create structures, words, images and actions that represented us—individually and as women—in our specific contexts. 

In my experience, the visceral anger I felt at the objectification of my body by men when I walked on the street—exacerbated during my sophomore year abroad in Madrid, only recently emerging from the shadow of Franco’s rule—made a connection with the information on “assertiveness training” shared in our women’s group, as well as the information on the emerging feminist art movement that I received through publications like Heresies and Chrysalis, products of feminist art collectives[6], and through reading From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art by Lucy R. Lippard and Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist by Judy Chicago[7]. Both through my own painting practice at the time, and through the senior thesis I decided to write titled Demythologizing the Muse: A Study of Contemporary Feminist Art I gleaned new conceptual lenses that allowed me to reread the history of art in which I was only beginning to be trained and to explore other ways of framing both the discipline and my own voice within it. Through these formative experiences I found a mode of enunciation that resonated with my own corporeal and emotional experience and that of other women who gave voice to similar experiences of differentiated awareness through art and poetry; the words of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich were as essential to my thesis as those of theorists like Shulamith Firestone and Juliet Mitchell. And at the same, publications such as Our Bodies, Ourselves by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective guided me in the discovery and demystification of my corporeal specificity and my sexuality[8]. The results of feminist collectives’ work embraced and emboldened me in ways that I still carry with me closely today.

At this time and in the immediately following years I also had my first experiences with collective living, both in the Philadelphia area and then in Barcelona, as well as through somewhat brief interactions with several rather utopian anti-capitalist communities, both in the U.S. and in southern France. The everyday experiences of negotiating spaces, cooking, shopping and domestic decision-making, and both the satisfaction and the frustrations they involved, became intertwined with my understanding of conceptual art and the work of artists’ groups in Catalunya during the Franco regime, the creation of artistic strategies to deconstruct and subvert authoritarian and repressive structures both through form and content. The centrality of the body to all of these experiences, as a vehicle which inexorably links the personal and the political, resonated with my feminist learnings and allowed me to understand their broader implications for artistic creation and for critical positions in relation to normalized social structures and conventions that perpetuate systemic violence on many different levels in which we participate on a quotidian basis.

• Collectives in the Mexican Art Community

Fast-forward a few years to my arrival in Mexico to do research for my Ph.D. dissertation—involved with demythologizing the idea of collectivity and a nationalist ethos in the popular arts in the early twentieth century—and my simultaneous reencounter with feminist art and art history, as well as with work in artistic and art historical collectives[9].  

In 1983, shortly after my arrival in Mexico, when I was still exploring the cultural context and situating myself in relation to it, I saw an ad in the Tiempo Libre weekly magazine—a sort of Time Out that listed the weekly cultural activities—for an extension course on Women and Art in the graduate division of the National School of Fine Art. It resonated with my earlier experiences in this area and was the first sign of feminist art activity that I had seen since my arrival in Mexico, so I signed up. I found myself in a course conceived by feminist artist Monica Mayer, who had recently returned from studying in the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, with Suzanne Lacy and other pioneers in what now is known as social practice art. Rather than adopting a formal magisterial structure, Mayer organized the seminar in a workshop fashion, as a collective that first focused on researching the situation of women artists in Mexico (an article in the feminist magazine Fem was one of the results[10]) and then proceeded to conceive of artistic strategies to visibilize the concerns that emerged from that research. The concept of artistic creation as a group—in which the complementary diversity of experiences and viewpoints enriched our proposals—was posited against the conventional vision of the “great artist” as a semi-divine (white, male) individual whose unique perspective was expressed through his personal creative process: part of the founding myth of Western art history exemplified in the 16^th century Italian author Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects.

Mayer, together with Maris Bustamante, had just founded the first feminist art group in Mexico, Polvo de Gallina Negra (Black Hen Powder[11]), and—emulating that initiative—the participants in the course quickly organized our own feminist art group, Tlacuilas y Retrateras (Scribes and Portraitists[12]), that carried out actions from performances to participation in demonstrations for the legalization of abortion, culminating in an event titled “La Fiesta de XV Años” (The Sweet-Fifteen Party), a multidisciplinary and multifaceted process oriented piece, that resignified the canonical space of the Academy of San Carlos (Mexico’s national art school founded in the colonial period) as the site of a feminist deconstruction of the traditional coming-of-age party for adolescent girls, through a program of performative actions and an exhibition. The event involved many figures from the art world in various roles as well as the community from the surrounding neighborhood in the center of Mexico City, revealing the unsuspected potential of collective organization: 200 participants were expected but around 2000 ended up attending. Our fledgling collective was so overwhelmed by the reverberations of the event that it was unable to process them productively as a group and disintegrated shortly after, leaving a somewhat legendary heritage in popular memory and lessons to be learned in retrospect about the collective organization of public art events.

The period of the 1970’s and early 80’s in Mexico had been characterized by various groups focused on the conception and production of conceptual art actions, objects and installations, known as the “Generación de los grupos” (Generation of the Groups), that explored modes of public art intervention, questioning the established boundaries between “high” and “low” art and culture, and establishing fluid links between art and daily life that subverted conventional definitions of spaces for art and elite modes of aesthetic consumption. These collective organizations, building on the aftermath of the political mobilizations related to the 1968 student movement, sought to generate alternatives to the official art institutions and their focus on individual artistic identities and market-oriented production. By the 1980’s however, around the time the abovementioned feminist collectives formed, most of the “grupos” had disbanded and a more object-oriented focus had returned to the art scene. A few exceptions endured, such as Polvo de Gallina Negra which continued active through the early 1990’s, but—curiously—the feminist groups have generally not been recognized historiographically as part of the “grupos” movement.[13]

The 1990’s, coinciding with the “multicultural turn” in U.S. and European institutions and NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement between the U.S., Canada and Mexico), witnessed a greater visibility of Mexican contemporary art on the international scene that affected the local institutions involved with contemporary art. In terms of collective initiatives in the arts, a number of “alternative spaces” began to emerge, on the margins of or in frank opposition to the neoliberal economic and cultural policies during the presidential period of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994). These spaces were more focused on the creation of critical strategies for analysis of the art scene, and on the introduction of neo-conceptual art forms such as artist’s books, performances, installations and video art, that little by little over the following decade found increasing acceptance in government—run museums and cultural centers.  Curare: A Critical Space for the Arts, a collective of writers, curators and art historians in which I participated, was one of these initiatives, and for longer than most (from 1991 to 2011) we worked—through the creation of archives, exhibitions, the organization of roundtable discussions and seminars, and the publication of a journal and various books—to put into play theoretical and political perspectives regarding Mexican art history that did not have a place in the existing public narratives.[14]

Cover of the journal Curare: Espacio Crítico para las Artes, No. 9, January 1996.

Among the diverse collective initiatives of this period, one of the most long-lasting and original is the group “Pinto mi Raya” (I Draw My Line) founded in 1989 by Monica Mayer (drawing on her experience with feminist collectives) and Victor Lerma (conceptual artist and archivist). Conceived as an “applied conceptual art project” it has the declared intention of “lubricating the art system so that it functions better”.[15]  Its activities over the more than thirty years that it has existed can perhaps best be understood as the creation of alternatives to the existing cultural system and its processes, through exhibitions, performances, publications, radio programs and perhaps most notably, the creation of an archive of news clippings that began in response to the paucity of bibliographic resources on contemporary art in Mexico, originally available in specialized compilations and now in digital form. Through its consistent proposal of critical and self-critical activities that challenge the conventions, borders and political limitations of the art system, this collective continues to offer spaces for reflection and creative imagination and production through the promotion of distinct modes of interaction and alternative cultural processes that cross disciplinary lines and continually evolve in methodological terms and in response to changing contexts and the challenges they propose.

• Collectives and Curatorship  

Finally, to close this series of reflections and recollections, I would like to comment on experiences of collectivity and curatorship.  Since the 1980’s, in parallel with many of the movements discussed above, and in relation to the concomitant globalization of the art system[16], the curator has come to be defined in a new role as an author or architect of exhibition discourses, rather than a specialized scholar in charge of  “the safeguarding, analysis, presentation [and enriching] of a cultural heritage”[17]. In this context the power and individual prestige of curators, as well as their role in the legitimation of certain artists, movements and theoretical perspectives on an international level has suffered a dramatic transformation that is astutely described by Nathalie Heinich and Michael Pollak in their essay “From Museum Curator to Exhibition Auteur: Inventing a Singular Position”.[18] The perceived creativity and originality of the curator at times displaces that of the artist(s) or artwork(s) as the focus of exhibitions, as they take on an increasingly scenographic character, and museums focus more on the presentation of distinctive temporary exhibitions than on their permanent collections.[19]  Moveover, the global  art system, that frames these exhibitions and curators within its power structure, often implicitly or explicitly threatens to deactivate or contradict the relationship of art works with particular communities. Several recent projects of collective curatorship, however, pose alternatives that subvert this ever more predominant pattern.

Entrance to the exhibition Tú de mí, yo de ti, Spring 2019, Museo de la Ciudad de México, Mexico City.

The exhibition and ensuing blog project “Tú de mí/yo de ti” (You for Me/Me for You) was conceptualized by the Entre Minas (Between Mines) collective in Mexico City, a group of young women artists in various media and disciplines that began to organize monthly visits to each other’s studios as a basis for dialogue and which aims to be a “network of support and solidarity through which we meet-converse-conspire”[20].  Emerging from mutual feelings of a need to strengthen ties independently of the male-dominated art system, they conceived a modality of collective exhibitions in which each participant selected and curated the work of another group member. In the context of the first edition of a city wide festival “Tiempo de Mujeres” (A Time for Women) in 2019 they proposed an expanded intergenerational version of this dynamic, in which, in a group of 26 women artists spanning various generations, each one visited the studio of another and, on the basis of that encounter selected a work for the exhibition, which was presented together with a text in which the “curator artist” described their dialogue and the reason for choosing the work presented. The pairs of artists—who worked in photography, sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, collage, dance and performance—were established by an internal lottery, and the exhibition design was also the result of a collective process, coordinated by four of the artists: Fernanda Barreto, María Cerdá Acebrón, Manuela García and Carla Rippey. During the run of the show at the Museum of the City of Mexico (from March to May 2019) various artists from different disciplines organized activations in the exhibition space that expanded the collective dynamic.

Following the exhibition, after much discussion, the group decided not to publish a conventional catalogue, since they wanted a more innovative, flexible format that allowed a continuation of the dynamic established by the collective. They chose to establish a blog[21] that documented the dialogical process and permitted its expansion to include other encounters between artists that were incorporated into this web-based vehicle, on the basis of proposals by one or more of the participants. More recently the project has expanded to include dialogues with researchers and curators of contemporary art who are close to the group, invited through the same dynamic.

This organic process has permitted the establishment of an ongoing network in which the participants take collective responsibility for the ways in which their work is presented, but that also allows for a diversity of voices and viewpoints in a manner similar to the horizontal dialogue in feminist consciousness raising groups that I described earlier in this essay. It thus eschews a hierarchical power structure, proposing a distinct, nurturing, multifunctional web based on sorority.

• Final Reflections

The cases mentioned here are only very selective tidbits of the many possible examples that speak of what collective experiences have offered for creating new models and habits of interaction and of being in distinct circumstances. Based on values and processes that privilege dialogue and a close reading of both individual and social contexts, they offer hope of a process of transformation that has its roots in our awareness of the political implications of the personal. The arts constitute an indispensable platform for exploring utopian, alternative paths and methodologies because of their potential for multisensorial and corporeal experimentation on the basis of interdisciplinary reflection, and like any vital practice require constant awareness and comparative historical reflection. I hope to have contributed in a small measure with this essay to this effort.

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[1] The essay was unfortunately censored, and only an excerpt was finally published in the catalogue: Wang Shaiqiang, ed.,  Intermingling Flux: 2021 Guangzhou Image Triennial (Guangzhou, SPM, 2023), 81-86. In the final publication, the original title of the triennial, Rethinking Collectivity, was also abandoned.

[2]John Englart, “Collective Organization”, http://www.takver.com/history/collectives/collective-organisation-john-englart.htm, accessed January 17, 2021.

[3] “RELATORÍA DE HECHOS, O de cómo fue que los Once colectivos llegamos a este punto, y por qué sería absurdo retomar el diálogo con una Secretaría de Cultura de mala memoria y poca palabra”, unpublished document of the group of collectives that seek to organize a National Congress of the Arts in Mexico, December 12, 2020.

[4] Pliego Petitorio Intercolectivos, an unpublished letter from the consortium of artists’ collectives to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, President of Mexico, January 21, 2021.

[5] I studied at Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, Pennsylvania from September 1975 to May 1979.

[6] Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics was a feminist journal that was produced from 1977 to 1993 by the New York-based Heresies Collective. Chrysalis: A Magazine of Women’s Culture was a feminist publication produced from 1977 to 1980 at the Woman’s Building in downtown Los Angeles. 

[7] Lucy R. Lippard, From the Center: Feminist Essays on Women’s Art, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1976; Judy Chicago, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist. New York: Doubleday, 1977 (Anchor Books).

[8] Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971.

[9] I arrived in Mexico in July 1982 for a year of research and never left; almost forty years later I continue to live and work here.

[10] “Tlacuilas y retrateras”, Fem: publicación feminista, Vol. IX, No. 33, April-May 1984, pp. 41-44.

[11] The name for Polvo de Gallina Negra (Black Hen Powder) came, as Mayer has indicated, from a “remedy against the evil eye, which we felt we needed given that we were women, women artists, and even worse, feminist artists”, reflecting the ironic deployment of humor that characterized much of the group’s production. re.act.feminism. 

http://www.reactfeminism.org/entry.php?l=lb&id=132&e=, accessed January 31, 2021.

[12] The name of the group takes up the Nahuatl word used to refer to scribes or painters in ancient Mexico and the popular term for photographers in Mexico, suggesting the interdisciplinary formation of the group’s participants.

[13] The majority of the “grupos” were predominately masculine though almost all of them included some female members, and gender issues, while present in some of their works (most notably in the work of Maris Bustamante in No-Grupo) were not their primary focus.

[14] Karen Cordero Reiman, “Un veneno benéfico, en pequeñas dosis y en forma de revista. Curare: Espacio Crítico para las Artes”, Revista de artes visuales Errata#, No. 11, July-December 2013, pp. 195-202.

[15] http://www.pintomiraya.com/, accessed January 31, 2021.

[16] For a detailed discussion of this process, see Hans Belting and Andrea Buddensieg, eds. The Global Art World: Audiences, Markets and Museums, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009.

[17] Nathalie Heinich and Michael Pollak, “From Museum Curator to Exhibition Auteur: Inventing a Singular Position” in Reesa M. Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne., eds. Thinking About Exhibitions. London and New York, Routledge, 1996, p. 233.

[18] Heinich and Pollak, pp. 231-250.

[19] Heinich and Pollak, pp. 235-237.

[20] Entre Minas group on Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/groups/entreminas, accessed January 31, 2021. Translation from Spanish to English by Karen Cordero Reiman

[21] Tú de mí, yo de ti. Mujeres artistas en México. https://mujeresartistasenred.blogspot.com/, accessed January 31, 2021