RESOURCES
This page is for books, links and other information related to art being made by groups, art groups running art spaces, and independently run art spaces and centres. It is definitely incomplete and can use your input in building it up. Please contact us if you have resources to add.
GROUPS
- Quotes About Collaboration from a Variety of Sources and Practice by Temporary Services | Download
- Group Work, by Temporary Services, Printed Matter. 2007 | Group Work provides a multitude of perspectives on the theme of Group Work by practitioners of artistic group practice from 1960s to the present. The publication presents interviews with Canadian collective General Idea; Chicago collective Haha; the dutch punk band The Ex; the Vienna-based WochenKlausur; Croatian artist group What, How & for Whom (WHW); Funkadelic album designer Pedro Bell; and Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D); along with essays on The Abortion Counseling Service of the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union (better known as Jane) and the anarchist Guerilla street theater group The Diggers. A list of words used to describe group practices and a working list of hundreds of collectives from the last four decades rounds out the publication. More Info
- Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, Blake Stimson & Gregory Sholette | Contributors explore the ways in which collectives function within cultural norms, social conventions, and corporate or state-sanctioned art. They examine the impact of new technologies on artistic practice, the emergence of networked group identity, and the common characteristic of collective production to blur the typical separations between artists, activists, service workers, and communities in need. More Info
- Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art. University of California Press, 2004 | Provocative, accessible, and engaging, this book, one of the first full-length studies on the topic, situates these socially conscious projects historically, relates them to key issues in contemporary art and art theory, and offers a unique critical framework for understanding them. Grant Kester discusses a disparate network of artists and collectives--including The Art of Change, Helen and Newton Harrison, Littoral, Suzanne Lacy, Stephen Willats, and WochenKlausur--united by a desire to create new forms of understanding through creative dialogue that crosses boundaries of race, religion, and culture. Kester traces the origins of these works in the conceptual art and feminist performance art of the 1960s and 1970s and draws from the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin, Jürgen Habermas, and others as he explores the ways in which these artists corroborate and challenge many of the key principles of avant-garde art and art theory. More Info
- Self-organisation /Counter-economic strategies, by Will Bradley, Superflex | The book Self-organisation / counter-economic strategies was initiated by the artists’ group Superflex, but it is not about them. It is about the many approaches to the creation, dissemination and maintenance of alternative models for social and economic organisation, and the practical and theoretical implications, consequences and possibilities of these self-organised structures. The counter-economic strategies presented here are alternatives to classical capitalist economic organisation that exploit, or have been produced by, the existing global economic system. More Info
- Collective Creativity, Edited by René Block, Angelika Nollerty, Revolver, Frankfurt, Germany, 2005 | More Info
SPACES
- Phonebook | Phonebook is the essential travel guide to artist-run centers, small, not-for-profit fringe galleries and other exhibition and presentation projects. This new edition adds over 50 news spaces in the United States and over 40 Canadian centers alongside updated entries, periodical listings, a series of essays from across the country and some road-trip tips from the editors. More Info
- decentre: concerning artist-run culture/a propos de centres d'artistes | decentre is a book about artist-run culture that describes the breadth and quality of artist-initiated programs, projects and events, the issues we face in this milieu and how effectively we deal with them, that aims to both celebrate artist-run culture and demonstrate the vital role artist-initiated activity plays in the larger cultural scene. More Info
SELF-PUBLISHERS
- Artist Publisher: Forum for artist book publishing
- Publishing in the Realm of Plant Fibers, and Electrons, by Temporary Services, 2014