Collaboartive Art--An Oppositional Device In and Of Itself?

Art History 101 Aspects of Western Art, and I assume 102 because I haven't yet taken it, is a class in which you are inundated with sublime iteration after iteration of individual artistic production. When learning how to identify a given work, you are told to reference the period, the date, and the artistic author of that work. You hear countless historical anecdotes about how geniuses like Donatello and Michelangelo were able to manipulate their respective media in ways that baffled their fellow contemporaries. However, collaborative art, in its very conception marks a departure from this individualized artistic epistemology. Instead of emphasizing the superior role of the singular artist, his vision, and his skill, collaborative art disrupts the hierarchical binary categorizing the separation between the artist and his audience. Or as Lind writes, “collaboration has again proved to be a good instrument with which to challenge artistic identity and authorship and therefore to stimulate anxiety.” In this way it seems that collaborative art by its very nature serves an oppositional function in so far as it opposes the primacy lent to individualist artistic production. However, Holmes wants to be more specific than this and affords the classification of oppositional to only certain iterations of collaborative art. I think the difference between the sort of artistically self-reflective, conceptual opposition I have tried to formulate and the specific and practical opposition to which Holmes refers is an important distinction to make. As we see in certain examples like Jacksonpollock.org, this difference in categorization proves quite salient.

Jacksonpollock.org is a wonderfully interesting and fun website. It allows you to mimic the methodology of the hugely influential and famous artist after whom the website is named. It is clear that the site would not substantively oppositional in Holmes estimation, but is it in fact conceptually oppositional? When you visit the site you are immediately thrown into artistic production, almost unknowingly. You could spend an endless amount of time moving your mouse back and forth to creating streaming lines of color and emotion along with forceful and jarring blotches of disruption. However, once you've completed all of your mimicry (which in and of itself somewhat mitigates the collaborative aspect of this art), you press a button and then appears the website creators name, written on top of a work of art that once belonged to you. As such it is clear, that although you spent the time creating the work, your authorial identity is displaced by that of the webcreator, confirming instead of challenging the individualistic authorial relationship between artist and viewer. Even if that viewer contributed to and indeed created the visual production, the artist-website creator claims the work as its facilitator. Accordingly, can this work be properly called oppositional, even conceptually, and therefore collaborative? I think no.

Other websites listed here appear to be more explicitly oppositional in nature, but it seems that this opposition may mitigate some of their more collaborative qualities. Take for example blackpeopleloves.com and rentanegro.com, these two websites are intensely oppositional on a subject that is often dismissed in American political and social discourse--race relations. However, the only real aspect of the websites that allows them to be engaging with their audiences is the fact that viewers can comment or send in letters about the websites. As such it seems that the viewers don't have any real direct agency in changing the substance of the art, but instead can only discuss it. Should these works then be considered interactive and not collaborative? I think yes. At least in the examples provided here, it doesn't appear that any examples of direct political opposition in art is explicitly collaborative. The VirtualGuantanmo project is more interactive like the other two examples I mentioned as the viewer engages an already completed software apparatus. Another question (on which I will finally end) then arises for me: must political oppositional artistic production be closed off in substantive ways to ensure that it is not co-opted by status-quo enforcing impulses?