Group Works

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.