Topologies of Collectivity in Art of the 2010s: Aesthetics of Self-Organization

The idea of a horizontal self-organized community as the most substantial purpose of artistic practice can be traced in the artistic field of the 2010s. The utopian nature of this idea allures artists, curators, and art researchers to work with “horizontality” as a gesture, a material, a medium – to imitate “horizontality” and try to transfer the method of such organization “by chain reaction” to other participants in the art sphere. Based on the aesthetic concepts of G. Agamben, J.-L. Nancy and J. Rancière, this thesis explores the departure from the model of the institution of contemporary art, which developed towards the end of the 20th century, which is an exhibition space and an archive, and analyzes the “institution-plus-self-organization” model, which involves the rejection of unconditional institutional hierarchies, encourages social inclusion and the idea of “commoning” into cultural and artistic production by as many spectators/visitors as possible. The spaces occupied by art become spaces for the dissemination of the idea of self-organized cultural production. Artistic self-organization becomes a medium of art and spreads itself through the creation of various collectivities at the intersections of the artistic field with the scientific, social activist and political. XXI century have been marked by the emergence of various theories of the “end” of the contemporary art project, provoked by institutional criticism and the failure of art to live up to the program of social responsibility and “usefulness” stated by it. Self-organization, using collectivism and various forms of collective fabulation and artistic research, seems to be one of the options for responding to the supposed “end” of the global contemporary art project.