Catalog essay for Unlimited Partnerships: Collaboration in Contemporary Art

CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, New York(July-December 2000)

Conversation Pieces: Collaboration and Artistic Identity

What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn't everyone's life become a work of art?

Michel Foucault, interview (1983)

Modern art is often associated with the emergence of the solitary genius out of the lumpen collectivity of the medieval guild or lodge. Somewhere around the time that Charles V stoops to retrieve Titian's paint brush the modern artist makes his triumphal debut on the stage of European culture, blinking in the glare of his new found fame like Plato's slave finally freed from the dark cavern of communal illusion and absolutist patronage. The future of (European, modernist) art from this point on is foreordained as the titanic struggle of individualistic progress against the stultifying conformity and consensus imposed, variously, by bourgeois consumerism, communist propaganda and, eventually, the history of modernism itself. The banner of the "imperialist ego," to use Levinas's felicitous phrase, will be borne by David, who rejects the paint-by-numbers dictates of the Academy, by Courbet's heliocentric "self-portrait," by Cezanne, who can't bear to be touched, by Gauguin and Pollock, Nevelson and Newman, right up to current day avatars of resistant subjectivity such as Matthew Barney, Damien Hirst and Cindy Sherman, whose works enact the now familiar mystery play of the complex individual skillfully parrying the slings and arrows of an outrageous dominant culture.

But there has also been, throughout the modern period, a parallel history of art practice that runs counter to this tendency. It is a subterranean tradition of dispersed or collective authorship, collaborative interaction and process-based forms of production that periodically emerges into art world consciousness, only to be written off as kitsch, activism, theater or any of the other pejorative terms reserved for the work of those who refuse the privileges of the exemplary subject. From the Jugendstil workshops to the communal ethos of the painters of Die Brücke, finishing each other's un-signed canvases in a Dresden attic; from David Alfaro Siquiero's "Experimental Workshop" to the Chicano mural movement of the 1960s, and from the Surrealist cadavre exquis to the performances of the Guerrilla Art Action Group, and finally, to the more recent projects of collectives such as REPO History, Critical Art Ensemble and Group Material, this collaborative impulse has expressed itself in a surprisingly diverse range of practices and methodologies.

Unlimited Partnerships presents a selection of recent collaboratively produced works from media-based artists and groups. Featured projects include Adál Maldanado and Pedro Pietri's El Puerto Rican Embassy, Two Degrees of Separation, a "conceptual mapping project" produced by Next Question (Emily Blair, Michelle Illuminato and Phuong Nguyen) in collaboration with young women in Buffalo, Mary Carothers and Sue Wrbican's exploration of tourist culture in Niagara Falls, Jessie Sherfin, Joseph Scheer and Peer Bode's Real Time Shifts, a retrospective of labor-based photographic works by Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, installations by the Culture and Conflict Group in CEPA's Public Art Window and Millie Chen and Evelyn Von Michalofski in the FLUX Gallery, and a selection of collaborative photo-performance works by Jill Casid and María DeGuzmán. This project comes at a time when institutional alternatives to the inter-locking system of art dealers, private galleries, and museums devoted to the celebration of the heroic individual are few and far between. As a result it has become increasingly common to assume that the only legitimate work of art is a singular object directly linked to the creative authorship (and salable identity) of a singular producer. Unlimited Partnerships seeks to open a space for contemporary artists and groups that challenge this view, and to reframe the definition of art and the aesthetic to encompass the process of dialogical and collaborative exchange itself.

I. An Aesthetics of Collaboration

In many ways the history of the modernist avant-garde can be seen as an awkward, unfolding attempt to reach outside of the monadic self and to make contact with otherness or difference; to collaborate, as it were with the unconscious, the "primitive," or the collective. But there is, I would suggest, an important distinction to be made between those forms of collaboration which perceive of the other as a mere resource for the spiritually bereft, but epistemologically privileged, artist (the other as muse, stylistic archive or antidote to bourgeois conformity) and those projects which actually begin to challenge the defensive autonomy of the artistic subject position itself. Collaboration thus carries with it an implicit ethical orientation in relationship to difference. It can, potentially, work against the grain of the image of the heroic artist struggling to assert his or her mastery over a recalcitrant nature, and evoke instead a form of art practice defined by open-ness, listening and intersubjective vulnerability.

In practical terms there is a continuum of collaborative interaction as well. On one end we have the artist working in tandem with a technician (Richard Serra, for example, supervising the physical production of his sculptures by foundry workers); an arrangement that often does as much to reinforce the individualistic image of the artist as it does to challenge it. Related examples would include the collaboration that occurs between an artist and a print-maker (e.g., Tamarind or Universal Limited Art Editions). Here the conventional hierarchy is corroborated; "art" is equated with conceptual production while the printer remains the master of a physical process whose goal is to bring the "artists" vision into reality. Although the act of collaboration in this case is central to the creation of a physical work it is ultimately incidental to the experience of the viewer-as-spectator, who remains the passive consumer of an a priori creative act.

At the other end of the spectrum are works that challenge the identity and stability of both the artist and the viewer through long-term collaborative engagements with specific sites and constituencies that often exist beyond the normative assumptions of the art world and arts institutions. Typical of this approach is the work of Carole Condé and Karl Beveridge, who have committed themselves to working with trade unions in Canada over the past twenty years through "a reciprocal process of dialogue and exchange." Other examples include recent projects by groups such as Ala Plastica and Grupo Escombros in Argentina, Wochenklausur in Austria, and Platform and Projects Environment in England. These works draw on improvisational, non-professional forms of creativity, community formation, and problem solving, exemplifying what artist Ian Hunter terms "immersive" practices. As Hunter argues, conventional disciplines tend to "aestheticize" problems by reducing them to neat, enclosed domains, which imply elegant, but simplistic, solutions, when in fact most problems are complex and interconnected. "Immersive" practitioners are defined by their ability to think outside of, and across, the parameters of existing disciplinary and professional problem-solving.

Thus, in 1993 the London-based group Platform started work on Delta, a project focused on the River Wandle. Delta involved a series of performances, public works and presentations which compared the role of the Wandle Delta in the life of London one hundred years ago and today. What had been a vital, river-side neighborhood (in North Wandsworth) had become polluted and filled with derelict buildings. The river itself was reduced to a trickle flowing through a concrete culvert. In order to involve the community in creatively re-thinking the significance of the river Platform set up a pilot program that involved an innovative design for a micro-hydro turbine that could generate electricity from the tidal flow of the river. The rising tide now provides light for the music room at St. Joseph's school in Wandsworth. A bell tower hangs over the turbine and marks the bottom and rise of the tide. The names of the animals which inhabit the river are inscribed on the turbine and bell tower to remind local residents of the life in the river. As a result of the project the students at St. Joseph's collaborated with architects to redesign the school along environmentally sensitive lines; it now has a bird watching hide, an ecological garden, a log amphitheater and nesting boxes built into the school wall.

We find a similar orientation in the work and writings of the London-based group The Art of Change (Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson). Dunn and Leeson have called for a "new aesthetic of collaboration," which they associate with "interdisciplinary approaches to changes in our environment, culture and communications." They advocate the development of a "trans-national network of organizations, institutions, groups and projects working. . . to activate and promote creative potential, both in the makers and users of social space." What would it mean to take this call seriously? What would a "collaborative aesthetic" consist of? To begin with, it would challenge some very basic assumptions about the art-making process, leading us to acknowledge aspects of collaborative interaction that are not typically valued by the discourses of art history and criticism. It is often the case that collaborative artists are as concerned with the experience of collaborative interaction itself, the new insights and new forms of knowledge that are catalyzed through this interaction, as they are with the creation of a physical product. Here the "work" of art refers as much to a process as it is does to an object. As a result, the expressive privilege of the artist is, at least partially, displaced in favor of a network of discursive and dialogical relationships among and between the artist and their co-participants. Primary emphasis is placed on the character of this interaction rather than on the physical or formal integrity of a given artifact, or the artist's experience in producing it.

This is evident in works such as Wochenklausur's Intervention Concerning Drug Politics (1994-5), which consisted of a series of performative "boat talks" on Lake Zurich featuring key figures in the debate over drug use in that city. These floating dialogues, insulated from the over-heated rhetorical climate created by press coverage of a controversial issue, led to an unprecedented consensus in support of establishing a boarding house for addicted sex workers, who had previously been forced to sleep out of doors. We see this same concern for dialogical exchange in Next Question's Two Degrees of Separation project, where the actual experiences of the participants (the young women who "mapped" the city of Buffalo through a process of collective documentation) is equally if not more significant than the final "product". Modernist art typically expresses its utopian power to think beyond the confines of existing discursive systems through formal innovation; the creation of objects that resist commercial or conceptual assimilation by rendering themselves opaque or semantically complex (e.g., Joyce's Ulysses or Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon). Collaborative art practices express this same capacity for indeterminance through an open-ended process of dialogical engagement, leading to new and unanticipated forms of knowledge; in the case of Two Degrees or Wochenklausur's Intervention, a new awareness of the gendered construction of urban space.

II. Advertisements for Myself

This approach marks a profound departure from the norms of contemporary art production which, even at its most adventurous, tends to remain wedded to the singular, self-referential consciousness of the artist and to a hermeneutics dedicated to physical objects. As both a teacher and a critic I have been consistently struck by the difficulty that some artists have in grasping the importance, or even the relevance, of the viewer's perception of the work of art. This is especially the case for those artists who identify themselves with the process of manipulating a specific material (paint, clay, photography, etc.). There is a tendency here to collapse the meaning of the work into the essentially private experience of physical and technical mastery (or, alternately, "play"), and an accompanying concern that allowing an awareness of the viewer's potential (or actual) response to intrude on this closed world will result in an unduly "didactic" and instrumentalizing work of art. It can be even more difficult for many artists to conceive of creation as something shared, or to conceive of the work of art less as a possession or expression of self, than as a process of dialogue and interaction with others.

This tendency is, of course, reinforced early on with popular images of the artist as a solitary, misunderstood genius, and in art school, with its obsessive devotion to the cultic value of the expressive object and its single-minded adherence to individual evaluation and validation in critiques and reviews. Typically, art students are taught to be "good producers"; to please and impress first their teachers and later curators, critics and, most importantly, collectors with their capacity to generate objects that are sufficiently complex to flatter the viewer's perceived acuity and sophistication, while still looking good against the hardwood floors and white walls of the gallery or museum. The kinds of collaborative practices evident in Unlimited Partnerships, however, tend to emerge in the work of artists who have become dissatisfied with normative modes of art-making, and suspicious of the paradigm of the artist as a 'resistant subject' whose relationship to the viewer is defined in terms of shock rather than dialogue.

There is a particular tendency in collaborative work towards photographic practices (one thinks here of teams such as Condé and Beveridge or Peter Dunn and Loraine Leeson, who work collectively while also using photographic production as the basis for collaborative involvement with others). The reasons for this would require a more lengthy inquiry, but I'd like to briefly outline two possible factors. First, the process of photography is culturally normative in a way that painting or sculpture (Bob Ross notwithstanding) are not. A considerable segment of the population has at least a glancing familiarity with the process of taking a photograph, and as a result the tendency to treat it as the auratic product of a divine and singular vision is somewhat less pronounced. Second, the process of making a photograph is ramified through a series of interrelated technical operations and as a result, is well suited to collaborative production.

This is especially the case with digital media and software (e.g., Photoshop), in which the discrete image has been superseded by a concept of photographic production that is expanded through a potentially infinite range of operations and sub-operations designed to modify, combine and recombine individual images. Here the creative process is exploded outwards to accommodate any number of potential levels of collaboration and creative interaction. For groups such as Condé and Beveridge or Dunn and Leeson the physical form of the image is simply one manifestation of a larger process, and it this larger process that constitutes the "work" of art. The creation of the image serves as the occasion for a series of social interactions among collaborators that can operate on a number of different levels: aesthetic and compositional questions, political strategy, and so on. In this sense the resulting image might be said to function as the token or "evidence" of dialogical exchange.

III. Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

In the current political climate, torn as it is between fundamentalist "family values" and a kind of Ayn Rand revivalism, collectivity is figured on the one hand as an idealized gemeinshaft and on the other as the gulag that is its ostensibly inevitable counterpart. At the same time we see a widespread tendency to retreat into privatized enclaves along with a refusal to acknowledge the relationship between economic privilege and consumption patterns here and lack of resources and opportunity elsewhere. What might be termed the re-segregation of American life is occurring at numerous points: public education is being replaced by a system of selective "voucher" schools which often violate the separation of church and state; fortified gated communities are proliferating among the wealthy as a way to simultaneously express class privilege (and paranoia) and to opt out of shared municipal services; with declining state and federal moneys "public" universities are becoming research fiefdoms for major corporations; and even the concept of a tax system (designed to distribute shared social costs) is being questioned by conservatives who argue for the elimination of the IRS tout court. Unlimited Partnerships suggests that we can reach beyond the narrow self-interest and theocratic idealism that have come to define contemporary political discourse. Further, the works in this exhibit reveal, in various ways, that collective or collaborative interaction can provide the framework for an emancipatory insight into the vicissitudes of daily life.

Grant Kester, University of California, San Diego