Collaborative Arts

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 Zealand.

In the last ten years or so collaboration has moved into the mainstream of contemporary art practice. The fact that four Turner Prize nominations have been for collaborative duos indicates just how established and accepted collaboration has become. So while collaboration can now be taken for granted as one of the numerous ways that artists may choose to operate how is this reflected in the Fine Art curriculum? How do Fine Art undergraduate courses support students who adopt this kind of practice? Has the curriculum been updated or are courses only responding when it is necessary? Does collaboration highlight problems in the way that student work is assessed? Does it challenge staff’s expectations of how students will work?

It is clear from looking at Fine Art course literature and web sites (including our own) that there is still a strong emphasis placed on enabling students to develop their own individuality and personal approach. This supports the belief (that is often expressed by pre-degree students at interviews) that studying Fine Art is mostly about self-expression and finding one’s own unique inner voice.

One could say that all education has the aspiration to enable students to develop their own individuality to some extent but in the case of Fine Art it can be promoted as one of the main functions of the course.

… emphasis is placed on the development of the individual … (University of Lincoln)

Fine Art is a lively and dynamic subject where students develop a heightened sense of their own individuality … (University of East London)

… students learn … to develop a personal approach … (University of Brighton)

… the course aims to help you develop your individuality … (University of Huddersfield)

… your own personal creativity and artistic expression are the main focus on this course … (University of Luton)

Students are encouraged to define their personal creative practice in an individual way … (Leeds Metropolitan University)

… the course ethos is based on the development of the individual … (Norwich School of Art and Design)

Fine Art is aimed at students who want to develop an individual studio practice … (University of the West of England)

… enables you to identify your individual concerns … (Camberwell school of Art and Design)

… essentially ‘student centred’ our emphasis is on the development of a practice particular to the individual … (Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College)

… concentrate on developing your individual practice and developing personal areas of creativity … (Staffordshire University)1

On one level this emphasis on the individual and self-expression is not surprising, presumably it originates from the western tradition of the artist as a solitary individual with a unique ‘voice’ creating art objects that can be identified through a signature style. As James Hillman observes, ‘… the western tradition that the soul is only located inside one person and that this soul is the home of the divine spark of creativity promotes the idea of ownership … Owning is already there in the fantasy of the origins of art before the art moves from studio to gallery to collector. It is perceived as a possession of the individualized psyche who owns his emotions, his fantasies, his dreams, and talents.2

The idea of the solitary genius and the relationship of this idea with capitalism is something that has been critiqued, questioned and undermined by artists and theorists (at least since Duchamp ‘collaborated’ with Leonardo or later when Rauschenberg painstakingly erased De Kooning’s drawing.)

Meanwhile ‘learning outcomes’ for Fine Art courses will usually say something about enabling students to place their work in a historical and contemporary context. Inevitably then the critiques, questions, and methods artists have used in the past and continue to use now to undermine and confront ideas about authorship, ownership and the status of the art object form an important part of the material discussed. There would be little disagreement that a basic understanding and knowledge of these issues and how artists have addressed them is fundamental for Fine Art students. So why is it then that Fine Art courses still promote the expectation that students will work independently to develop an individual practice?

Of course the normalisation of collaborative art practice has had an impact on students’ perceptions of what it may be to be an artist and it does appear that more students are choosing to work in this way. When students decide to work collaboratively they are to some extent taking a position in opposition to the image of the lone artist, in opposition to the institution and its desire to assess their individual progress.

Apart from a few notable earlier examples, the roots of collaborative art practice can be found in the social unrest of the 1960s with the uprisings and student protests across Europe and the US. At this time artists set out in various ways to undermine and subvert traditional or conventional ideas about the function and role of the artwork in relation to its audience and the institutions that host and support art.

… we sought … not to be the authors of our work so much as agents in a practice that produced it.3

In recent years the act of collaborating has been embraced by some as one way to shift the emphasis away from the individual to a more socially engaged form of practice.

… the artists appear of course here and there, but are noticeably undefined as ‘authors’ amongst other participants. Research and process are conflated, so that each project becomes both a sum of its parts and a component of the entire practice.4

With the Internet and art projects that actively involve participation from a public, collaboration has been an appropriate way of working without an emphasis on the subjective, personal experience of the artist but more of an emphasis on the process of dialogue with different groups.

… work in partnership has arisen from a mutual interest in processes of collaboration with non-artists and the subsequent complex issues of ownership and authorship, public and private.5

This model of ‘socially engaged’ collaborative practice is so well-established that Patrick Brill chose to take on the double persona of collaborative artists Bob and Roberta Smith in order to ‘… communicate the idea that people can make their own art, that they do not have to have me do it … art is changing and the business of viewing is changing …’6 In this way he is both making artworks that critique notions of authorship while also playfully critiquing this intention.

Meanwhile at a practical level it is understood that in many artistic practices there is already an element of collaboration – artists collaborate with institutions, curators, and experts from other fields. The collaborative group Haha said of their decision to work together, ‘… adding a few more people to the mix is in some senses a small step – the hardest part is when old ideas, residual ideas of what art should be interfere.’7

As Nicholas Bourriaud discusses in his book Post Production, contemporary artists (like DJ’s) may select from a world already full of existing and virtual cultural material, ‘These artists who insert their own work into that of others contribute to the eradication of the traditional distinction between production and consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original work…Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape..”8
The collaborative group IRWIN have developed their own culture of sharing, ‘Functioning as a group, the members of IRWIN allow each other to borrow and apply various ideas. This is also how we perceive the history of art, which we regard as an open book.’9

So while collaborative art practices continue to undermine and question the image of the solitary artist this may not always be the primary motivation artists have for working together. After all artists have taken their ‘role models’ for collaboration from a wide range of sources that certainly includes corporations, bureaus and political groups alongside more unlikely sources like rock groups and comedy double acts.

In our research we wanted to establish how widespread collaboration now is on Fine Art courses, what students’ motivations were for working in this way and how compatible this was with the Fine Art curriculum.

The majority of the responses to the questionnaire sent out to Fine Art course tutors indicated that there were apparently no problems posed by students choosing to work together. A few respondents mentioned that assessment could be an issue, particularly in establishing each individual student’s contribution to the work. All of the respondents thought that collaborative art practice, whether organised as a one-off project for students or something that students chose to participate in independently had positive benefits for the students involved.

… students become more employable, they are better able to network in the art world…

… development of good negotiation and inter-personal skills …

… improvement in students’ ability to communicate …

… development of team-working skills …

… learning to articulate processes and communicate with precision …

… it helps to develop students’ confidence …

… gives students a confidence and focus they may have previously lacked …

… an ability to take on much more ambitious projects …

… students can ‘dare’ more together …

… sharing of research methodologies …

… they get better organised and efficient as the group/partner provide motivation and support …

… brainstorming is more original …

… a dynamism that can be good for the whole student group …

… they learn a lot from each other …

… being able to bring an enhanced range of skills and attributes to visual and conceptual understandings …

… they learn about their partner’s discipline [in cross-disciplinary collaboration] which makes them reflect upon their own …

… students become more conscious of and receptive to their peers …

… the losing (or submerging) of ego …

… breaking down the cult of personality of the individual artist …

… developing a more flexible and open approach …10

A small number of courses have organised projects that encourage or require students to undertake some form of group work. Typically these were either a first-year mini project where students were asked to make an artwork in teams for a short period as part of a larger project or a second-year professional practice project where students were asked to work in teams to either put together a proposal or critique a current exhibition or art project.

What tutors found useful was the way that these projects encouraged students to see each other as colleagues rather than only as friends or competitors. These projects encouraged students to discuss and critique art works and approaches to art practice without having to always focus on their own individual work. Usually the kinds of collaborative practice that have developed out of these projects are reflexive and critical.

From our survey so far it is evident that staff teams are generally supportive of students working collaboratively and will tailor the curriculum as and when the need arises. However there was a tendency for it to be seen as something that could be ‘tolerated’ when and if it arose rather than something that would be actively encouraged.

Questionnaires are ungainly ways of seeking out information and inevitably interviews with students who work collaboratively proved more informative. In these informal interview sessions we asked students about their reasons for choosing to work together. To summarise, students’ reasons for collaborating were that they wanted a more challenging and critical kind of practice and wanted to try new or more ambitious ways of working after getting ‘stuck’ on their own.

… we were both just sick of doing something for art’s sake we wanted to do something exciting that got us in to the work …

… I thought that we could get away with more, if there are two of you doing it you egg each other on …

… I’d got quite bored on my own anyway. I think that I was trying to get all arty and I was getting nowhere …

… I was scratching around trying to find my thing … then when we did the group presentation [for professional practice] together that was more enjoyable than anything I’d done before …

… I wanted to make bigger more ambitious works and so initially it was financial and we share similar interests …

… mutual interest in 16mm film and we both felt a bit lost – we both knew how we didn’t want to work …

… it was quite anti establishment, after our group presentation [for professional practice] we were the ones in the group that really wanted to pursue the proposal further …11

Students were asked what the benefits of working collaboratively were, many of their comments related to the observations of Fine Art course tutors quoted above.

They recognised an increase in the level of their confidence and ambition and an emphasis on time management. Students thought that their confidence came from ‘strength in numbers’ and that by having more feedback and discussion with each other they had less need to seek approval from other people, this then gave them the courage to push boundaries and challenge themselves.

Students also thought that they learnt a lot about themselves as an individual through the process of working with someone else. That working on their own could actually be less personal, where it was something that they could ‘take or leave’, in contrast the sense of competition and responsibility inherent in collaborative practice drove them to invest more in their work.

… keeping the enthusiasm up, when one slightly loses it the other can keep things going …

… the critical side of it – I found that when I worked on my own I could be critical but I’d end up going around in circles, with two people it kind of evolves rather than just stopping dead …

… confidence to do the work – you can be more ambitious … and we’ve learnt a lot about time management …

… you talk more about things, you can ask a question and get feedback right away …

… refining ideas down, also when I was working on my own it would take me ages to build up the confidence and the courage to choose one idea to do. If you’ve got someone to bounce ideas off you get started a lot quicker …

… the commitment to it now is much stronger than when I worked on my own …

… less individual liability if something goes wrong …

… you do find strength in numbers and more confidence … you do things just to push the boundaries a little …

… you learn a lot about yourself as an individual when you work with someone else…

… you don’t need approval from other people so much …

… I’m really bad at having an idea and just letting it trail off thinking that its not really good enough – but when there are two of you you’ve got a reason to finish it and see it through …12

Students also identified some problems. While Fine Art course literature and tutors might clearly state that collaboration would be supported, in practice students found that it was down to the preferences of individual tutors and technicians. Of the two students we interviewed that worked together but at different institutions, one had encountered hostility from the head technician and some scepticism from the staff, while the other spoke of a high level of support and encouragement.

All of the students interviewed had some anxiety about the status of collaboration as a practice within the institution, and thought that it might be seen by staff or other students as an easier option even though in their experience it was more challenging and rigorous than working on their own.

Finally students were asked what changes they would recommend for the Fine Art curriculum. All of the students interviewed thought that there were some issues with assessment. Some students said that they should be given the same mark for the work but a different mark to indicate their own understanding of it. Others thought that the mark should be exactly the same and that they had chosen to work together so that was the deal. Others recommended that the criteria for assessing could be slightly different for collaborative practice with recognition for the other things that they had to overcome such as negotiation and time management.

Students thought that group projects and an emphasis on teamwork were not necessarily going to encourage collaboration and that students should decide for themselves who to work with and when to do that. They thought that the implications of working together should be discussed more and that seminars or lectures that looked specifically at collaboration should be an established part of the curriculum.

It is interesting to note that of the students interviewed most were not ‘high-fliers’. Some were very ambitious and articulate students from the outset, some were unexceptional students who through working together had become more ambitious and one pair had both been struggling before working collaboratively. When these two started working together there was an astounding transformation as they were able to channel their negativity and irritation at the art world in general and the Fine Art course in particular into their work.

Clearly there are ways that we can make changes to our courses to better support students choosing to work collaboratively, however we may be missing an opportunity to think about how we understand and promote what we do. While we should certainly avoid imposing academic structures that require students to pursue collaborative partnerships, we should also be wary of adopting a complacent attitude by simply waiting and reacting to situations as they occur.

From the seminar discussion at the CLTAD conference it became clear that students working both individually and collaboratively should be included much more in discussions about the aims of the course, assessment processes and curriculum development. There are practical things that we can do such as establishing some form of negotiation with students about assessment criteria, where for example, students could choose which of the criteria were most appropriate to their form of practice. But the questions that collaborative art practice raises should also encourage us to have some serious discussions about what Fine Art education stands for in the first place.

Footnotes and references
1 Quotes are from Fine Art degree course web sites.

2 Hillman, J. (1984), Team Spirit, Sollins, S. & Castelli Sundell, N. (org.exh.cat.), (Washington, DC,: Smithsonian Institution)

3 Michael Baldwin quoted on Art and Language, in Green, C. (2001), The Third Hand, Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, p. 47, (University of Minnesota Press)

4 Doherty, C. (2003) catalogue text,  Naming a Practice: Tracey Mckenna and Edwin Janssen from One Clover and a Bee, V/h de Gemeente, Netherlands

5 Patrick Brill, from:
http://www.contempart.org.uk/economist/econ_arch18.htm

6 Kelly Large and Becky Shaw from:
http://www.upintheair.org.uk/zero/kelly

7 Haha, House, R., Jacob, W., Palmer, L. & Ploof, J. (2000), ‘Contemporary collaboratives’, YLEM newsletter, 12, 20 (Nov/Dec 2000)

8 Bourriaud, N. (2000), Post Production (New York: Lukas and Sternberg)

9 IRWIN: Dusan Mandic, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjek, Borut Vogelnik, excerpts from an interview by Marina Viculin, 1990, in Team Spirit, Sollins, S. & Castelli Sundell, N. (org.exh.cat.), (Washington, DC,: Smithsonian Institution)

10 Excerpts from responses to a questionnaire by Dunhill and O’Brien sent to undergraduate Fine Art course tutors and programme leaders.

11 Excerpts from interviews by Dunhill and O’Brien with undergraduate Fine Art students, 2004.

12 Excerpts from interviews by Dunhill and O’Brien with undergraduate Fine Art students, 2004.