The Brooklyn Rail

These days all of our relationships—with institutions, corporations, objects, historical figures, ideas, and one another—are apparently collaborations. Any type of relating has become a vehicle for the buzzword, which somehow encompasses the McDonald’s Saweetie Meal, Taco Bell’s Doritos Locos Tacos, Christo and Jean-Claude, Asco, ACT UP, the Black Panther Party, and marriages everywhere. “Collaboration” is so expansive that it is nearly void of meaning, joining “liminal,” “praxis,” and “embodied” in the oversaturated curatorial spelling bee. The word lends itself to misuse and can be seen haphazardly attached to flattened accounts of otherwise rich and nuanced dynamics. This is a shame, because as ubiquitous as the term is, there remains a need to address the nuances of collaborative processes. Part of this charge is a new vocabulary, which cellist, artist, and writer Ethan Philbrick begins to undertake in Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence.

Philbrick puts forth “the group” (n.) and “grouping” (v.) as alternatives to the monolith of collaboration, getting at the particularities of a certain togetherness without succumbing to the weight of the C word. He attends to examples that engage the group as medium, organizing his book around four works that, while individually authored, engage in a kind of group work-ing (v.): Simone Forti’s performance Huddle (1961), Samuel Delany’s Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love (1969/78), Lizzie Borden’s film Regrouping (1976), and Julius Eastman’s piano piece Gay Guerilla (1979). Elucidating the uneasy conditions under which collectives unfold, build, and more often than not, fall apart, Philbrick corrects historical accounts of collaboration that fetishize conditions of production over content or “politics of circulation.”

One of Philbrick’s primary targets is the idealist thought that collectives form one uniform conglomerate. He finds a crude example of political grouping in Abraham Bosse’s frontispiece for Thomas Hobbes’s The Leviathan (1651), which pictures bodies of the laboring class amassed to form the image of a monarch. For Philbrick, Simone Forti’s performances Huddle and Scramble (1970) directly oppose Hobbes’s representation of homogenous social cohesion. The score for Scramble instructs performers to move around a space with the directive to fill in any perceived gaps between bodies, resulting in a dynamic whirlpool of individuals that, while tangled up in one another, demonstrate their own autonomy and agency. As such, Scramble conjures a collectivism with no illusion of lost identity, drawing out individuation as a central facet of collaboration. In ascribing stakes to Simone Forti’s score, Philbrick quotes philosopher Paolo Virno, who writes, “[The collective] is the terrain of a new and more radical individuation… within the collective we endeavor to refine our singularity.” This sentiment becomes a throughline in Group Works, as lasting impressions of Simone Forti’s separate yet knotted bodies come to form a sturdy jumping off point for the text.

Philbrick’s critical framework also revisits flattened accounts of historical groupings. In the third chapter, he analyzes Borden’s film Regrouping to deconstruct the popular conception of the feminist movement as a unified political identity, instead framing it as a dynamic process. This perspective accommodates the movement’s differences and historical fractures along lines of race, gender, sexuality, and class, which he finds visually represented by discontinuous jump cuts, competing voice-overs, and abject camera angles. In Philbrick’s words, the film “persistently fragmen[ts] into a disjunctive series of cinematic assemblages as if from the weight of [the group’s] own internal incoherence.” This methodology carries into the final chapter, in which the author tenderly considers Eastman’s Gay Guerilla, recounting the experimental musician and pianist’s initial successes among New York’s white audiences and eventual disappearance from the historical record. Philbrick’s revisionist gesture is not to fill in the musician’s “biographical blurriness” or erase the influence of anti-Blackness and homophobia. Rather, he seeks to return Eastman to the cacophonous “ensemble,” a scene of collaboration that makes room for his cyclic departures, whether those departures be self-motivated, externally inflicted, or set in stone by historians after-the-fact. Where Philbrick uses Borden’s Regrouping to disrupt the fixedness of the 1970s white feminist movement, he reasserts Eastman as an active participant in the development of Minimalism while also accounting for his autonomy. With his last two chapters, Philbrick steps into the role of the historian, showing us that the group is not only a medium, but a lens through which we can understand the past. Group Works gestures towards “ambivalence” by flickering between historical account and manifesto, between representation and personal investigation driven by his own negotiations with “group-ing” as an artist and musician.

Whether motivated by a desire for legitimacy or simply the external pressure to name, collaborators often bend to fit into a rigid, more palatable container. Delany tends to the pressure and limitations of group representation in his meditation on communal living, writing in Heavenly Breakfast: “Living as constantly close as one does in a communal situation, almost all exchanges are between ‘I’ and ‘you.’ ‘We’ was a term ‘we’ at the Breakfast, at any rate, only used with visitors.” If “we” constitutes the one-dimensional view of collaboration meant for external consumption, then it is representations like Group Works that provide a view into the many “I,” “me,” “my,” and “you” of relating as an infinitely-dimensional and ever-unfolding process. By building his text between four different works—each with their own desires, ambitions, and attitudes towards the group—Philbrick enacts the procedures of individuation within his collective body of text, ultimately adopting a syntax more poetic than scholarly.

A small group ourselves, we recognize the inevitability of “we” just as we know the necessity of naming a process as ineffable as collaboration, however innately reductive that naming may be. Philbrick’s “group” begins the movement to break down the big C word, calling for a swath of new terms in its wake.