Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence

By Ethan Philbrick

An exciting new reflection on the role of artistic collaboration, collectivism, and the politics of group formation in the neoliberal era.

The artist and author Ethan Philbrick’s Group Works re-imagines the group by undertaking an historiographic archaeology of group aesthetics and politics.

Written against both phobic and romantic accounts of collectivity, Group Works contends that the group emerges as a medium for artists when established forms of collective life break down. Philbrick pairs group pieces in dance, literature, film, and music from the 1960s and 1970s downtown Manhattan scene alongside a series of recent group experiments: Simone Forti’s dance construction, Huddle (1961), is put into relation with contemporary re-performances of Forti’s score and huddling as a feminist political tactic; Samuel Delany’s memoir of communal living, Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love (1969/78), speaks to performance artist Morgan Bassichis’s 2017 communal musical adaptation of Larry Mitchell’s 1977 text, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions; Lizzie Borden’s experimental documentary of feminist collectivity, Regrouping (1976), sits alongside visual artist Sharon Hayes’s 2014 piece on Manhattan’s Pier 54, Women of the World Unite! they said; and Julius Eastman’s insurgent piece of chamber music for four pianos, Gay Guerrilla (1979), resonates alongside contemporary projects that take up Eastman’s legacy by artists such as Tiona Nekkia McClodden.

By analyzing works that articulate the politics of race, gender, and sexuality as questions of group formation, Philbrick approaches the group not as a stable, idealizable entity but as an ambivalent way to negotiate and contest shifting terms of associational life. Group Works presents an engaging exploration of what happens when small groups become a material and medium for artistic and political experimentation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Apr 25, 2023
• ISBN: 9781531502713

Ethan Philbrick

Ethan Philbrick is an interdisciplinary artist, cellist, and writer. He has taught at Pratt Institute, Muhlenberg College, and New York University. Recent performance projects include Choral Marx, 10 Meditations in an Emergency, The Gay Divorcees, Mutual Aid among Animals, and Slow Dances.

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Cover: Group Works, Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence by Ethan Philbrick

Group Works

ART, POLITICS, AND COLLECTIVE AMBIVALENCE

Ethan Philbrick

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK  2023

Copyright © 2023 Fordham University Press

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Printed in the United States of America

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First edition

Contents

Introduction

1. Huddle

2. Commune

3. Groupuscule

4. Ensemble

Afterword

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX

Introduction

Growing up, my mom had two sayings that have become something like the moral refrains of our relationship: judgment and posture and good people do bad things in groups.

The first, judgment and posture, was pretty straightforward—a reminder that she would call out as I left the house, a supportive command for clarity and uprightness as I made my way through the world. I’ve come to think of it as one of my first lessons in the field I was eventually to do my graduate studies in: performance studies. My mom subtly taught me about techniques of the body and the performance of everyday life while also helping me understand that judgment and decision-making were not abstract cognitive pursuits but also bodily processes of posture and positioning.

The second of my mom’s phrases, good people do bad things in groups, is a statement and a sentiment with a long intellectual and political history. In Europe, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the group circulated as a dangerously passionate and irrational crowd, a monstrous conglomeration that induced a loss of self-boundedness, a mad mass in which ethical codes and individuating capacities disappeared into a swirl of collective suggestibility. The French social psychologist Gustave Le Bon published The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind in 1895, describing the group as a troubling relational formation in which even the most educated individuals lose their critical faculties in the swirl of group suggestibility. In 1921, Sigmund Freud penned Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, describing the group as an unsettling collective psychic situation in which a number of individuals … have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal.¹ Both Le Bon and Freud were suspicious of the group, associating libidinally and affectively charged gatherings with the individual’s loss of moral, ethical, and critical faculties. The mad-bad group became a figure through which to shore up an ideology of the individual as the appropriate unit for human rationality, agency, and goodness. As one might expect, the mad-bad group was also racialized, gendered, and classed. These cautionary discourses around the group were articulated in moments of class anxiety about the organizational capacity of the industrial proletariat, imperialist worry about the apparent engroupment of colonial subjects, and patriarchal concern about the inappropriate grouping capacities of feminine subjects.

While my mom’s utterance might have had a long history of racist, sexist, and classist anxiety, she stepped into this discursive inheritance not to voice an anxiety about an unruly, uprising crowd but in an attempt to counsel my twelve-yearold proto-gay self as I navigated middle school when, unbeknownst to her, a group of boys was harassing me every day during and after school. I was having an acute experience of the violent masculinist group—getting pressed into corners and swallowed up in injurious huddles of thrashing bodies and lacerating words—and she would call out as I went to school, Remember, good people do bad things in groups! She was worried that I might fall prey to group suggestibility and be bad toward someone else, unaware that I was in the midst of an injurious group formation myself. Under these conditions, I experienced her utterance as confusingly caring. It became a call for a prophylactic forgiveness of the boys amidst their violence, a displacement of person-directed rage for an abstract sense of their impersonal badness, an urge to imagine the potential good of the individual within a moment of collective violence. It also became a call to engage in something like structural analysis: to recognize the ways in which the middle school boys were participating in toxic structures of masculinity, a common ideological inheritance that was injuring us all—a more abstract sense of the bad group, a system of domination that preceded us, and we were all ensnared in it.

In many ways, I’ve come to think of this book about art, politics, and the group as one big, circuitous, and indirect attempt to move through and disentangle my mom’s refrain. When I began work on this project, I was a graduate student in New York City in the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street’s general assemblies in Zuccotti Park. I had a desire for collectivity that was filled with the promise of Occupy’s novel group formations. Yet, simultaneously, much of my work outside research and artmaking was increasingly becoming a scene of neoliberal group exploitation—brainstorming co-working sessions and team-building training sessions followed by collaboratively authored reports. With this ambivalence in mind, I began to think about group formation not in order to flip the terms of my mom’s phrase and argue for the goodness of the group,² moving from the phobic figure of the mad-bad group to a normative figure of the rational-good group, but to meditate on the ambivalence of the group by performing a historiographic archaeology of group aesthetics and politics in the neoliberal era. To do this, I turned to artists in Manhattan in the 1960s and 1970s that were engaging with the small group as a material and medium for artistic and political experimentation and put them in conversation with more recent group works. I was curious about how the group surfaced in art and politics beyond images of the bad or the good and focused on the 1960s and 1970s because the decades hold such a central position in the current political and artistic imaginary—circulating as a kind of temporal image of social fecundity and political resistance while also marked by neoliberal reactionism and the transition into the neoliberal epoch. I wanted to see if the shifts and impasses surrounding the figure of the group in New York City in the 1960s and 1970s might have something to say about the shifts and impasses in group formation I was experiencing in New York in the present. I also wanted to add some more cross-generational refrains to my existing maternal transmissions about the group and see what they would do to my desire for collectivity. I wanted to investigate the intensities of group experience and yet upend what I thought I already knew, asking questions about group formation under neoliberalism to get at a broader set of questions about the relationship between the individual and the collective, politics and art, the past and the present.

As I began my inquiry, I was especially taken with individual artists in the 1960s and 1970s who worked with an impulse to collectivize in their work but were just off-track from the artists and collectives often centrally included in historiographies of the post–World War II New York avant-garde.³ The artists I was drawn to didn’t necessarily attempt to form solid artist collectives or embark on successful collaborations. Instead, they were solitary figures that circulated an ambivalent urge to experiment with group formation. They didn’t approach the group as good or bad, but as a medium through which to explore the political frustrations and aesthetic possibilities of their time. Eventually, I landed on four group works by four individual artists working in four different mediums in the 1960s and 1970s that have become the center point of each chapter that follows: Simone Forti’s dance construction, Huddle (1961); Samuel R. Delany’s memoir of communal living, Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love (1969/78); Lizzie Borden’s experimental documentary of feminist collectivity, Regrouping (1976); and Julius Eastman’s insurgent piece of chamber music for four pianos, Gay Guerrilla (1979).

These works were all created in the years surrounding the transition into the neoliberal era. For the feminist social theorist Lisa Duggan, neoliberalism names the pro-business anxious response to the redistributive social movements and progressive internationalism of the 1950s and 1960s.⁴ It is a set of economic policies and political ideologies that cohered in the early 1970s—and were consolidated in the 1980s and 1990s—that emphasized governmental deregulation and privatization, valued individual responsibility and competition, and supported the free mobility of capital globally while repressing the mobility of laboring bodies. As the lead-up and context to the emergence of the neoliberal ethos, the 1960s and 1970s were a time when inherited categories of life in common were in flux, and collective forms of resistance and refusal gathered around categories of race, gender, sexuality, nation, and class in novel ways (i.e., the New Left, third worldism, the women’s liberation movement, the Black Power movement, the gay liberation movement). During that period, neoliberalism came into focus as a new configuration of domination in a defensive response to these attempts to redistribute the world. As scholars such as Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello have shown, neoliberalism, as a political and economic logic, attempted to absorb the resistance movements of the 1960s and 1970s by presenting its own forms of decentralized, nonhierarchical sociality, shifting the terms of economic exploitation toward group experience (i.e., co-working, brainstorming, team-building) while simultaneously fragmenting inherited collective forms of resistance such as the political party and the labor union.⁵ The neoliberal era is a regime of networked governance and management in which racialized capitalism spreads imperialistically under the guise of freedom and global connectivity while bringing a rise in inequality and heightened isolation everywhere it touches. The small group emerged for artists such as Forti, Delany, Borden, and Eastman in this fractured scene as an ambivalent figure and material. It was not a stable, idealizable entity. Instead, it was a kind of doing with the difficulties, impossibilities, and blockages of collectivity. The small group arose as larger collective forms broke down. As a medium, the small group seemed to offer these artists a way to negotiate and contest the shifting terms of life in common as the neoliberal era emerged.

Since the 1960s and 1970s, the small group has remained an especially charged social form for both the dissemination of neoliberal worldviews and the contestation of their principles and practices. Now, twenty years into the twenty-first century, I wanted to put the group works of the 1960s and 1970s in conversation with group works from today—not only to disentangle my mom’s phrase but also to think about how the group has functioned as material for artists within the context of neoliberalism’s emergence and how it continues to function now as the neoliberal world order both intensifies and fractures with the rise of global fascism and technocapitalism heralded by figures such as Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos. To do this, I have placed the works of Forti, Delany, Borden, and Eastman alongside a series of recent group experiments: Forti’s Huddle is put into relation with contemporary reperformances of Forti’s score and huddling as a feminist political tactic; Delany’s Heavenly Breakfast speaks to performance artist Morgan Bassichis’s 2017 communal musical adaptation of Larry Mitchell’s 1977 text, The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions; Borden’s Regrouping sits alongside visual artist Sharon Hayes’s 2014 piece on Manhattan’s Pier 54 Women of the World Unite! they said; and Eastman’s Gay Guerrilla is paired with contemporary projects that take up his legacy by artists such as Tiona Nekkia McClodden.

In what follows, I spend each chapter attuning myself to the disruptions, incursions, and evasions of these group works from then and now. I write alongside them—amplifying and extending the forms, concepts, and impasses they elaborate and work out—in an attempt to extract the mutating terms of gathering and assembling in the 1960s and 1970s and consider what they might have to offer our present moment. Over the past few years of research and writing, my mother’s refrain good people do bad things in groups has turned into something like: What kind of a good-bad thing is a group to do? When do we do things in groups, and why? How do we group, and how does the how matter?

To give a sense of my points of departure for investigating these questions, I offer three short essays on the group tuned to three different registers—group theory, group politics, and group art—before turning to archival traces of one visionary small group from the 1970s, the Combahee River Collective, and the resonance of their work in Cauleen Smith’s 2018 film Sojourner. I hope these mini-essays and initial case study will provide a sense of what is to come and set up some of the stakes for the chapters that follow.

Group Theory

A group is always a regrouping and rearticulation of a prior engroupment. It is not some scene of newfound collectivity suddenly made by otherwise isolated, solitary individuals. There is no individual before the group. Said another way, we are always already engrouped. A group is not a gathering of discrete possessive individuals in search of cohesion, merger, and unity;