The following text is based upon a seminar delivered at the CLTAD conference, Enhancing the Curriculum in Art and Design. It draws upon an AHRB funded research project involving interviews with artists, undergraduate Fine Art students and questionnaires sent out to Fine Art course tutors mostly in the UK but also in Europe and New […]
Text written for the exhibition publication for An Experiment in Collaboration, curated by Sarah Williams at The Jerwood Space in Summer 2008
In 1996 Nicolas Bourriaud (1996) proposed the concept of ‘relational aesthetics’ in order to identify the common artistic practices that were evident in the exhibition Traffic. He subsequently claimed that the ‘interhuman sphere: relationships between people, communities, individuals, groups, social networks, interactivity’ that existed in the work of artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Maurizio Cattelan, […]
Most of us live in families, work and play in teams, form clubs and join societies with abandon. We collaborate. Many kinds of artists, too, work in groups as a matter of course, e.g. musicians, actors, dancers, filmmakers, architects. In fact it is almost exclusively in the visual arts that collaboration has recently—since […]
An essay commissioned by www.collabarts.org
In 1996, in the middle of the boom in new British art (just after ‘Brilliant!’ at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, but before ‘Sensation’ at the Royal Academy) the curator of the Southampton City Art Gallery, Godfrey Worsdale, felt that the time was right to put together an exhibition called […]
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.
Most forms of art-theater, film, dance, architecture, music-are inherently collaborative. With rare exceptions, all involve the participation of more than one individual. Only those forms of art-such as literature, painting, sculpture, and musical composition-that we think of when we speak of the author, artist, or composer are generally taken to be the work of one extraordinary human being. But in fact, this was not always so. The concept of the isolated genius emerged in the Renaissance along with capitalism and, while most writing or musical composition seems indeed to be a solitary endeavor, every mode or style of visual art can be made collaboratively.
Artists appear in their art, voluntarily placing themselves center stage in self-portraits but also at the margins of all their other works, constructing themselves through brush marks, in signature style, by individual preferences, and through repeated motifs — in short, from the intersection of subjectivity with medium. As a basic tenet of connoisseurship, this seems obvious, but there are degrees of self-conscious intention that complicate this process…
A collaborative circle is a primary group consisting of peers who share similar occupational goals and who, through long periods of dialogue and collaboration, negotiate a common vision that guides their work. The vision consists of a shared set of assumptions about their discipline, including what constitutes good work, how to work, what subjects are worth working on, and how to think about them.
It was, so they say, very hot that summer in Rome, and there they are: Dunhill and O’Brien, the two of them sitting there beneath two trees, on parched grass with a blue sky behind them. However, they are not simply enjoying the Italian summer they are at work; and sure enough between them like […]
Are Wood and Harrison alter-egos for Estragon and Vladimir, Beckett’s existentialist anti-heroes condemned to wait for Godot? Are their ‘elevations’, ‘relaxations’ and ‘elongations’ similarly marking time, one small death after another? Certainly their procedures share the same apparent futility of Beckett’s piece of Absurdist theatre. They are baffling, inconclusive, yet deeply compelling. Enacting a series of choreographed experiments in silence, within the frame of a white void, Wood and Harrison remove themselves from time and place. Narrative is strictly contained within the parameters of each exercise and becomes cyclic, like the fate of Beckett’s protagonists, as each climax or denouement is replayed on a continuous loop. The artists assume random parts. They are victim and conspirator. They are stooge and hoaxer. They are the odd couple.
I recently came across Mackenna and Janssen’s small booklet ‘Till Now’, a visual compendium of projects from 1998-1999. It was caught rather fortuitously inside the cover of Douglas Crimp’s On the Museums Ruins. Whilst not wishing to read too much into the accidental conjunction of the two, it occurred to me that the format of this modest booklet, set against Crimp’s academic tome, gives a surprisingly accurate indication of the shifts in the production and distribution of contemporary art since the publication of Crimp’s book in 1993.
“Placeless places, beckoning thresholds, closed, forbidden spaces that are nevertheless exposed to the winds, hallways fanned by doors that open rooms for unbearable encounters and create gulfs between them across which voices cannot carry and that even muffle cries: corridors leading to more corridors where the night resounds, beyond sleep, with the smothered voices of those who speak, with the cough of the sick, with the walls of the dying, with the suspended breath of those who ceaselessly cease living; a long and narrow room, like a tunnel, in which approach and distance – the approach of forgetting, the distance of the wait – draw near to one another and unendingly move apart.”
In these words Michel Foucault summons the fragmentary fictions of French philosopher and novelist Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot’s texts are unsettling and complex, noted for their unerring sense of foreboding. They encapsulate the precarious existence of the modern individual through spatial metaphor. On reflection, Foucault might just as well have been describing the work of Jane and Louise Wilson.
Rhodes, Venice, Brighton, London, Lyon, Bristol, Melbourne, Llandudno, Birmingham: a series of locations joined together by no reason other than Adam Dade and Sonya Hanney have stayed in hotels there. The couple appear to be - and in the most part actually are - young tourists in town for a few nights. When they check out of their rooms there is no evidence that anything out of the ordinary has happened there.
What comes after the critical analysis of culture? What goes beyond the endless cataloguing of the hidden structures, the invisible powers and the numerous offences we have been preoccupied with for so long? Beyond the processes of marking and making visible those who have been included and those who have been excluded? Beyond being able to point our finger at the master narratives and at the dominant cartographies of the inherited cultural order? Beyond the celebration of emergent minority group identities as an achievement in and of itself?
Between the late 1960s and early 1970s, small, close-knit groups of artists chose short-term collaborative projects for works that stretched conceptualist redefinitions of art to the limit, self-consciously upturning traditional artistic identities (that of the solo artistic genius being the most obvious) through cooperative teamwork. The collaborations should be viewed within the context of political and activist art as well.
