Collaborative Arts

Observations on collective cultural action by The Critical Art Ensemble

Group Material talks to Dan Cameron

Ant Farm, a California based collective (Chip lord, Doug Michels, Curtis Schreier, Douglas Hurr) working in the 1970s

An article on Canadian arts collective General Idea

A farewell from GranFury with a download of an interview with GranFury and Douglas Crimp

A review of Fischli and Weiss by Adrian Searle, 2003

A review of Noble and Silver

Noble and Silver’s 2002 exhibition at Beaconsfield

review of Ellard and Johnstone by David Barrett

An article on White and Sheward by David Barrett

An article on Tim Noble and Sue Webster by David Barrett

An article by David Barrett on the exhibition Co-operators, originally published in Frieze

Information about Michael P. Farrell’s book Collaborative Circles

collaborative projects by Narcisse Tordoir

The beautiful site of N55 artists Ion Sørvin and Ingvil Hareide Aarbakke

Click on Nov/Dec 2000 for PDF of issue of YLEM (artists using science and technology) on collaboration and new media

The Art of Collaboration interview with Charles Green by Geert Lovink

“Collaborative Practices in Environmental Art”, by Grant Kester

In the last 10 years or so collaborative art practices have moved in to the mainstream of cultural production, and collaboration is now largely taken for granted as one of the numerous ways that artists can choose to operate. Despite this, artistic collaboration still raises some interesting and crucial questions about the nature of authorship, […]

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.