Introduction

The Artist Collective Summer School is designed to be an informal, flexible and lively programme of activities and events, in which the participating students and attendees will take a leading role. It is intended to provide the opportunity for art-students and art-historians to learn from each other, and for Yale-based students to spend time with their UK-based peers and with other members of the UK’s art community. It will also provide a forum for stimulating discussion and debate on a theme – this year, forms of artistic collectivity – that is of interest to both art-students and art-history students, that is of relevance in relation to both historic and contemporary art, and that is investigated through the prism of British artistic and architectural practice. Finally, it is designed to bring together the creative and intellectual energy of all the participating institutions, and to enable us all to develop areas of common interest.

As well as the Paul Mellon Centre, the Yale Art School, the Yale Art History Department and the Yale Center for British Art, these institutions will always include an additional partner, which will co-host the summer school, play a part in selecting its UK-based participants, and help shape its intellectual agenda. We are delighted that the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) has agreed to be our partner for this first iteration of our summer school.

The bulk of the programme will be structured around:

• A series of day-long workshops, in which the participating students will work with a number of artistic and cultural collectives
• A series of talks by, and conversations with, art-historians, curators, critics and artists
• Meetings with artists, and visits to exhibitions

The emphasis will be on generating creative and collaborative forms of analysis and exchange on the part of the students, over the duration of the summer school itself. Accordingly, the last two days of the course will be devoted to sessions in which groups of students will present their reflections and responses – artistic and scholarly – to the chosen theme, and to the materials, events, and ideas they have encountered over the course of the summer school. These sessions, in turn, are intended to provide the basis for future outputs – publications, for example - which will serve to offer a permanent expression of the work done in the summer school.

THE THEME FOR THE 2019 SUMMER SCHOOL

This year’s summer school is designed to address the following three basic questions:

• ‘What does collectivity mean?’
• ‘What does collectivity mean to artists, both past and present?’
• ‘What is the relationship between artistic collectivity and the institutional structures of any given art world?’

The school begins from a point of acknowledged friction in its very structure: between collectivity as an active, and socially and politically urgent, mode of generating knowledge and art; and collectivity as a historical object of study. Today, artistic collectivity encompasses a broad spectrum of practices and motivations: from the conscious devolution of, and turning away from, the individual authorship of artworks, to the appropriating of corporate branding logics, to the establishing of alternative structures for working that bypass conventional understandings of artistic production. A unifying thread amongst some of the most interesting and ambitious contemporary artistic collectives – such as the Otolith Group, sorryyoufeeluncomfortable, and Collective Creativity – is the desire to challenge or negate the value formations and institutions that have become entrenched around individual artistic subjectivity in the modern era. This form of collectivity also raises the possibility of an important realignment in the understanding of art practice, as one that, in the words of Henriette Heise & Jakob Jakobsen, is “not exclusively related to the making of art works, but also includes the establishing of institutions for the experience and use of art and generally the making of institutions for human life.” To collectivise is to take on the act of organising communally, and to establish new structures for working, exhibiting, circulating, communicating, and living through shared consensus. From this perspective, to collectivise is to self-institutionalise. The summer school will investigate what this form of self-institutionalisation means for existing institutions and academies, which by their very structures and practices tend to limit collectivism to a space of exception. Can institutions and academies learn from non-conventional forms of contemporary artistic collectivity, and from the forms of discourse and production they encompass, to better understand their own areas of elision and reproductions of inequality?

As well as addressing these issues in relation to the contemporary artistic field, the summer school will explore oppositional, non-conformist examples of artistic collectivity from the past, and investigate the parallels and contrasts they offer to the present situation. From early in the nineteenth century, in particular, groupings of artists and art-workers who felt estranged from, and neglected by, the dominant institutional structures of the British art world regularly coalesced into what they defined as alternative, oppositional collectives. Significantly, these collectives often saw their role as one that encompassed far more than a collaborative, communal form of artistic practice; they, too, saw their example as one that offered an alternative model of self-institutionalisation, and a different way of living to those found elsewhere in contemporary culture. To explore these fascinating historical precedents, we will find out more about such artistic collectives as the Pre-Raphaelites in the mid-nineteenth century, who rebelled against the institutional and ideological directives of the Royal Academy, which was the dominant institution within the Victorian art world; the Independent Group of the 1950s, who operated both inside and outside the ICA, and who instigated innovative forms of artistic, social and intellectual collaboration as they did so; and the Hackney Flashers of the 1970s, a women’s photography collective which developed within the context of the rapidly growing Women’s Liberation Movement, and which believed that collective action was a vital element in bringing about social and political change.

Programme

The summer school will:

• Take place over 12 days, between Monday, July 8th to Friday, July 19th in London
• Be hosted by the PMC and the ICA. All student travel and accommodation costs, and the costs of four evening social events, will be covered as part of the course. All the organisational and practical arrangements for the summer school will be co-ordinated from the PMC; the PMC’s Education Manager, Nermin Abdulla, will be in charge of all the logistical aspects of the course.
• Involve the participation of 8 MFA students from the Yale Art School; 8 PhD students from the Yale History of Art Department; 4 PhD students based in the UK, and members of the PMC’s Doctoral Research Network; and between 4 and 8 members of theICA’s wider community.
• Be convened by Mark Hallett and Rosie Ram from the PMC, in tandem with Richard Birkett from the ICA and Ayham Ghraowi from the Yale Art School. It will also benefit from the input of other colleagues from participating institutions, including Tim Barringer of the Yale History of Art department and the PMC’s Deputy Director for Research, Sarah Turner.
• Involve the participation of members of three contemporary artistic collectives, to lead three one-day workshops on the topic. The collectives would be asked to lead the workshops with an emphasis on their particular understandings of collectivity, giving a sense of the multitudinous nature of the term and its applications. However, the selection of these collectives should also emphasise how any conversation around cultural collectivity in the current moment, should be led by groups whose creation has been made necessary by a lack of support and representation within dominant institutional forms. Involve the participation of curators, artists, critics, and art-historians, to help lead the workshops, seminars and trips that will focus on the historic forms of artistic collectivity being investigated by the course.