Group Works bookcover

Group Works

Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence
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Description

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.

Product Details

PublisherFordham University Press
Publish DateApril 25, 2023
Pages192
LanguageEnglish
TypeBook iconPaperback / softback
EAN/UPC9781531502706
Dimensions8.0 X 5.0 X 0.4 inches | 0.5 pounds

About the Author

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.

Reviews

. . . Group Works offers not only a rich and fascinating academic exploration of artistic small-group formations past and present but also a tentative scaffolding to experiment with our forms of reading and study. By asking how we come into and out of groups, how they coalesce and disassemble, the book invites readers to join in and elaborate its collective impulse.-- "e-flux"
. . . Philbrick's book manages to preserve both the powerful fantasy of assembly alongside its more noxious aspects. Assembly can be hopeful; it can unleash new forms of power; it can create a new sense of being. But it can also exclude, block, deny, rule, silence, corrupt, and destroy. By finding moments of unconventional grouping. . . Philbrick takes the failure to cohere as a marker for the dissonant ensembles that our moment requires and that we can find in odd groupings of dancers, dreamers, slackers, and reluctant revolutionaries.---Jack Halberstam, Bomb Magazine

With Group Works, Ethan Philbrick has created a rare text with which to think and act. Although there have been studies of the crowd, the mass, and the collective, as well as critical accounts of community and participation in the art world, Philbrick presents a novel theory of small groups and their political potential. Much like how Simone Forti's dance construction Huddle disperses to allow the formation of new huddles, Philbrick invites readers into the work and then releases them into the world, freshly prepared to live differently together.

---Danielle Goldman, Associate Professor of Critical Dance Studies at The New School and author of I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom
Ethan Philbrick has written an erudite and compassionate book about how and why we fall into and out of groups. Taking some classic group forms from the late twentieth-century--performances ranging from dance, music, psychoanalysis, literature, and collective living--he sifts them carefully for their uses in surviving our own violently disjointed moment.---Tavia Nyong'o, author of Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life

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