Out of the domino effect that the financial crisis has had on every aspect of life including the art industry as we know it, perhaps one domino just fell, well, sideways, away from the pack. Sideways, such that unwittingly it could potentially transform into this positive and long-term drift by which the industry itself will start to recover and redirect its structural development.
In Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar, a book of critical essays on art and democracy, he mentions his contemporary Peter Schjeldahl, who talks about what it takes to create an art movement, or “trend” if one would like to use a consumerist-savvy word. To paraphrase, he said that all it took was for a bunch of artists to move to a city, meet at a bar, decide that they have something in common, create a big splash around it, and there you have it - a movement is born. It is that simple and that’s the beauty of it. While sometimes it is hard to gauge the existence of such an endeavor amidst all the contrived marketing and branding ploys typical of institutionalized art, there are some that pop up on the radar if you look hard enough. I have come to know (and be a part of) one such collective, functioning parallel to the larger, art system - the South Asian Women’s Creative Collective (SAWCC).
The SAWCC operates together as a network of creative minds and business professionals that at once exudes a fascinating virtuousness towards the practice of art, reminiscent of the amiable purity of a 1950’s Hollywood romantic classic, and the fierceness that has come to define movements born out of the post war 1970’s feminist movement in America. And of course there is the charmingly simple story of its beginnings. Jaishri Abichandani, artist and founder of the group, set out into the streets of New York to seek anyone who fit the conventional, physical personification of an artist (in New York that would be anyone whose dress code moves away from the black, white and grey color suits that might signify a banker or lawyer), and she found some very interesting personalities.
Soon the group grew to over a thousand women, the majority of them being artists while others are curators, auction house specialists, gallerists, museum professionals and even a couple of lawyers and bankers. What strikes me about such an endeavor, and I’m sure there are many such groups in New York and perhaps other parts of the world, is that it brings together individuals based on ethnicity and gender, rather than defining a single unified artistic vision or manifesto. Though one might read the criteria for membership as restrictive, it really presents an ironic response to those who might think of it as propagating the exoticization of Non-Western art practices. This is because while many of the members have their roots in South Asia, in reality they were born Americans, Europeans, South Africans, Australians and so on and so forth. This makes it much more inclusive and challenges your perceptions with regard to defining the works of these artists. I believe SAWCC supports the idea of community, which then provides a strong support system based on the unified goal of these members – to sustain the artistic growth of its members, but to stay away from defining any boundaries, so that each artist can have complete freedom to choose to work in their own individual manner. It gives its members a sense of self-sufficiency, which is not to be mistaken for arrogant dismissal of the larger whole. It is in many ways a means by which the group has been able to function. You are a part of it but you’re not tied down to it.
SAWCC comes together annually to curate shows, thus giving conceptualized contexts for the artists, conducts benefit auctions to raise funds for the functioning of the organization, and has more intimate group meetings, sometimes at artist’s studios, where members can get together to discuss and debate their works. All of this is in addition to what artists may have in terms of shows and projects that are outside of the purview of the collective, owing to say, gallery representation. SAWCC quite successfully amalgamates each individual member’s unique artistic practice with a different level of the art business and provides network capabilities that traditional institutions such as galleries and auction houses offer. So it is unique in that, while the members have defined roles within the larger industry, they come together to play the same role in supporting fellow members and thereby the group as a whole. It’s in many ways an extension of the hybridization that came about when, to quote an example, Christies, an auction house, acquired Haunch of Venison, a gallery. SAWCC is a hybridization of numerous artist collectives that have come about in the post modern era, such as The Yes Men group (another artist/activist collective).
And again, the success of this collective is attributed to the fact that, to these women -
artists and professionals - there exists at the most basic level a sense of community, which unfortunately has often been lost in the entire buzz around those artists who have been packaged, and marketed their way up to the top of the food chain. It is with this basic sense of ‘sisterhood’ that the group has been able to work together in playing an important enough role towards establishing each others careers. If you were to go on to the collective’s site, you have women talking about topics that vary from hunting for studios to artist grants or all the happenings around NYC from exhibitions and performances to heated debates that deal with issues of identity, language and everything that can possibly feed the mind, heart and soul. All this may sound inconsequential to some who would rather pay attention to the “who’s who” of the industry and their undertakings, but collectives such as this exist as an analogous support system to the art world - one that will, in my opinion, prove to survive in times like this.
What this kind of collective success in the art world does is remind us that art is not separate from life. Rather it is an extension of it. When we say that the art industry is dead, we speak of the clog in the fiscal arteries and veins of the industry that makes the exchange value of art for money a lot more conservative than it was a couple of months ago. But works of art are essentially the product of the various levels of interactions between the individual psyche with that of things such as artist collectives and society at large. It is a part of the larger visual world that is embodied in television, billboards, kiosks or even the unabashed display of visual promiscuity that Times Square symbolizes. And all of this continually bombards our senses on a day-to-day basis. Therefore art will survive. And collectives’ characteristic of SAWCC, which functions from this standpoint, could be the ones to show us an alternative at a rather bleak moment in our history. It is one of those significant sparks that surprises you into a state of awe because you didn’t see it coming. But then all collectives are subject to the possibility that their own success may eventually lead to their eventual institutionalization. And then it remains to be seen, since history has taught us enough about movements and visions that caused a stir or went against the norm, whether or not, unwittingly, such collectives become subject to rules and regulations that are typical of institutionalized art?
