Collaborative Arts

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 ‘Co-operators’. This group exhibition highlighted the recent trend among the younger generation of British artists to work in pairs. The artists included in the exhibition were Henry Bond and Liam Gillick, Ramsay Bird, Hope, Andrea and Philippe, Jane and Louise Wilson, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Alan Kane and Jeremy Deller, Langlands and Bell, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin, and Critical Decor.

In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Worsdale claimed that the current levels of collaborative working were unheard of since the 1960s. He felt that this was partly due to an increase, in the late 1980s, of artists making work that was explicitly concerned with the cultural situation that it was produced within. Because the British attitude towards contemporary art was, at best, dismissive and, more frequently, openly hostile, this new generation of artists produced artworks that embodied a highly combative attitude. Worsdale suggested that this situation could well have encouraged artists to collaborate ‘as an act of resilience’. Of course, the attitude of society towards new art began to change at that time, partly due to the success of this new generation of artists, and Worsdale went on to suggest that the confidence that then flowed through the artistic community during the 1990s boom also allowed collaboration to continue, despite the changed circumstances. Instead of working collaboratively as an act of resilience, now, he argued, artists were confident enough to choose collaboration as just another way of working among many others, a kind of pseudo-medium: video, sculpture, performance, installation, collaboration, etc.

It is interesting to note that Worsdale also highlighted differences between the earlier and later collaborative practices; in the 1960s, he argued, collaboration was an attempt to deny the expression of the individual - celebrating unified ideas rather than individual expression - whereas contemporary collaborators seemed to actively encourage differences between the individual artist-collaborators to feed into the final work.

Whatever the reasons, Worsdale had certainly picked up on a discernable trend. In fact, collaboration became so popular at that time that some artists even invented fictional partners so that they could pretend to collaborate with them. Perhaps the most entertaining example of this is the elaborate pretence that is the art-partnership Bob and Roberta Smith: the fictional brother-sister collaboration that is the pseudonym of artist Patrick Brill. The Smiths were even included in exhibitions of collaborators; curators were unaware that the work was the product of a single artist. There is a long-running joke that ‘Bob’ - Patrick - has to continually apologize for Roberta’s absence at events, often making up quite absurd excuses as to why she cannot be present.

But what caused this phenomenon, this sudden increase in collaboration? Why were young artists suddenly coming out of art schools and choosing to collaborate on producing co-authored artworks?

The Art School Problem
For collaboration to become a viable mode of operation, there first of all has to be prevalent a conception of art that allows for collaborative practice. That is to say, if you believe art to be about individual creative expression, you aren’t likely to take up collaborative practice, whereas if you believe that art is - for instance - a language of decipherable metaphors whose purpose is to explore aspects of contemporary society, then there is no ideological reason why you should not work collaboratively.

Furthermore, for young artists to be collaborating, such a conception of art - i.e. art not being based around the individual - needs to be common within art schools. Now, contemporary art may have had these battles in the 1960s and before, but that’s not to say that art schools had necessarily taken on board such concepts. It’s worth remembering that young artists who made their names in the 1960s and 70s were senior tutors by the 1980s. Before this time the media had less interest in contemporary art and there were fewer specialist art magazines around, so it used to take a long time for current debates to filter through to art schools around the country.

But before any conceptual or ideological considerations, it should also be remembered that there is an entirely practical reason why art schools have rarely encouraged serious collaborative practice. The fact is that tutors find collaborative projects problematic when it comes to grading students; they tend to assume that one collaborator has all the ideas while the other just comes along for the ride, and always want to find out which is which. Within an overall discussion of collaborative artistic practice this may seem a trivially prosaic, even silly reason for a previous lack of collaboration, but practical considerations should never be overlooked (they often have the most direct impact). The classic recent example of art schools struggling with collaborative practice would have to be the anxiety that the twins, Jane and Louise Wilson, caused their tutors when they decided to present identical graduation exhibitions, even though one was studying in Newcastle and the other in Dundee. (This was a double trap for the tutors; not only did they have the familiar tutors’ problem of who-did-what in the collaboration, but they had the additional issue of what grade the other institution would give.)

The Shift in British Art
It is well recognised that Goldsmiths College in London had a progressive attitude in the 1980s, due in no small part to the group of influential artists they had running the courses. The students that Goldsmiths produced had a major influence on other institutions around the country and therefore the kind of work that other young artists were producing. This was partly due to a higher profile for art in the press; suddenly even non-specialist newspapers and magazines were running features on young British artists.

It is this shift in the kind of work that was being produced in the UK throughout the 1990s - and the conceptions of art that would underpin it - that led to the increase in collaboration. During that period, as Worsdale alluded to, a multiplicity of media and styles were adopted. This pluralistic approach opened up ways of working that particularly suited collaborators, as opposed to more traditional forms of painting and sculpture that had been dominant in art schools prior to that time. These new modes of working - such as video, installation, institutional critique, computer-based work, archive and documentary-based work, etc - all had less reliance on the notion of the single artist-author than traditional painting and sculpture. They were also more suitable to collaboration in very practical ways. It’s interesting to note that, of all the collaborative partnerships that have sprung up in recent times, still very few of these rely on traditional painting and sculptural practices (There are exceptions, of course: painting partnerships such as the Russian artists Dubossarsky and Vinogradov, for example, or the Austrian artists Muntean and Rosenblum, but these are certainly in the minority).

The Current View
While there was a noticeable increase in artists working in partnership in the UK throughout the 1990s, it is questionable whether that rate of increase has continued. Although there are, no doubt, more collaborators now than there were then, there are also more artists in general as Britain, and London in particular, has become a recognized centre for international contemporary art. The conceptual and ideological barriers to collaborative practices have been broken down as much as they probably ever will (and in fact there may even be some kind of backlash against the conceptions of art that so suit collaboration). It’s just that British art and British art schools are feeling the changing debates in international art more directly now than they probably ever have.

One example of how trends can affect collaborative practices would be the recent vogue for documentary and archival-based work. The clearest expression of this form of work was probably the ‘Documenta XI’ exhibition in 2003, where a significant percentage of the work was produced by artist groups. Again, this trend was so strong that - like Bob and Roberta Smith - artists were pretending to work collaboratively. For example one of the highlights of ‘Documenta XI’ was the work of the Lebanese artist Walid Raad who worked under the name, The Atlas Group: a fictional organization that documented the recent history of Lebanon.

A note of concern for those who would champion collaborative work is the current prominence, especially visible in London, of relatively traditional painting. While this is partly due to changing debates in current art, it is also fuelled - on a practical level - by the sudden increase in collectors of contemporary art in London (an inevitable outcome of art’s new, high profile there). Traditional paintings remain the easiest art objects to sell, and these new collectors have created a boom in small galleries who serve them by taking on young painters. This, in turn, is one factor behind painting’s current high profile, which has to a certain extent edged out the kind of media that collaborators tend to work with.

Ideologies and Fashion
The Photographers’ Gallery in London recently made a re-presentation of the Californian photographers Mike Mandel and Larry Sultan’s ‘Evidence’ project from 1977, this gave an interesting insight into the kinds of issues that prompted artists to consider collaborating back in the 1970s. Mandel and Sultan are quite clear that their decision to collaborate was entirely made as a deliberate re-buff to the San Francisco art-photography scene that the two artists found themselves in (they met and began collaborating while studying photography in San Francisco). The accepted conception of art-photography in San Francisco at the time was still based on the Beat generation’s ideas of individual creative expression. Mandel and Sultan rejected this ‘expressionist’ motivation and instead followed a conceptual route that sprang from their background in Los Angeles, which already had a strong conceptual influence in its art scene. For Mandel and Sultan, the act of collaborating was a deliberate rejection of the notion of the artwork as an individual’s expression (and, in fact, the ‘Evidence’ project consisted of found photographs that neither artist had taken themselves).

So are current collaborative partnerships driven by such ideological intentions? Are they seen in this way? Or are they just a part of the pluralist milieu of current art practices? It would seem that the sea-change that has happened within the British art scene over the last two decades has ensured that young artists no longer have to fight those particular ideological battles, and that collaborative practices have been absorbed and accepted, even within art schools (although there are no doubt some lingering practical difficulties in some schools).

This is not to say that collaboration is no longer noticed; it always affects the viewer’s understanding of a work of art when it is known that it has been produced collaboratively, even if this has only a minimal bearing on the work. Although collaboration signifies certain attitudes towards the production of art, these attitudes are no longer unusual, and nor is the fact of collaboration itself. And while changes in the British art market may well make collaborative practices less visible in the short term, these practices are not going to disappear; they will simply rise and fall with the tides of fashion in the international art world.