Together not separately. Collective Practices in Art and Outside of It- Monika Kostera & Anke Strauß

A dual lecture accompanying the exhibition Peer-to-Peer. Collective Practices in New Art.

“It is like going to a club– we like seeing other people there. Of course, it is also nice to dance by yourself at home but reality opens up and unveils more opportunities when there are more people dancing. Take other activities– people constantly collaborate. I believe they call it management…”– the analogy was used by the Austrian Gelatin collective in response to the question concerning working together. When asked to define collective practices, the artists, known for their sense of humour, highlighted similarities between collective creative work and organisational structure. More similarities and relationships between the two worlds of art and business were presented and explored at the event in two lectures read by Monika Kostera and Anke Strauß.

Monika Kostera is a professor of economics and humanistic studies; she works at the Jagiellonian University and at the Linnaeus University in Sweden. Her publications deal with organisation and management sciences and her current research studies focus predominantly on archetypes of organising, organisational ethnography, disalienation of work, and humanistic management. In 2014 she published a book entitled Occupy Management: Inspirations and Ideas for Self-organization and Self-management devoted, inter alia, to the organisation of collective practices.

M. Kostera was speaking about female and male organisers working for the common good.

Anke Strauß is an organisation researcher at Viadrina European University. At the WZB Berlin Social Sciences Centre she examined different attempts at collaboration between art and business. Together with the performance artist and choreographer Christina Ciupke she investigates into artist-run organisations and their efforts to (re)organise cultural production. One of her books entitled Dialogues between Art and Business: Collaborations, Cooptations, and Autonomy in a Knowledge Society was published in 2017.

In her presentation A. Strauß addressed working relationships that develop within artist-run-spaces.