Production Lines

The History of Modernism is, it would seem, inscribed with collaboration and collectivity. The succession of international, interlinked avant-garde movements which make up the historical and mythical trajectory of modernist art is founded in a perception of artists coming together with a mutual and coherent project in mind. The very notion of artistic movements bearing a collective label intimates the noble abandonment of individual identity in the name of forging an heroic artistic ‘breakthrough’ which is greater than the sum of its individual artistic parts. Have we not been told repeatedly that Fauvism liberated color from the prison house of naturalism? That Futurism mobilized the newly available resources of massmedia communication to publicize itself as a polemical entity? And that the frantic activity of several dealers and critics transformed the disparate efforts of a few Parisian painters into a movement called Cubism?