On Collaboration

Abstract “On Collaboration” attempts to situate the withdrawal of support from the magazine Artforum (precipitated by the firing of its editor-in-chief David Velasco in October 2023) within a longer history of institutional antagonism. It compares strategies of opposition available to the avant-garde and counterculture in the 1960s (as exemplified by Fluxus's George Maciunas and the novelist Thomas Pynchon) with those that emerged in the 1970s, with particular attention paid to the machinery that sustained the appearance of the art world and, more broadly, the public sphere. Citing Vito Acconci's contributions to the exhibition ROOMS P.S. 1 (1976), it argues that much of what has been historically recognized as strategies of institutional opposition from the 1970s onward, including institutional critique and the alternative space movement, might be better understood within a framework of “institutional collaboration.”