COLLABORATION

Why collaboration?• Artists have always collaborated, whether as part of a studio,

with another artist, with teams of other professionals (galleries, technicians, architects, dancers, curators, engineers, town planners...) the general public, specific communities or as groups.

• If you have not explored a range of practical approaches to collaborative practices you wont be able to assess how your work can benefit from working with others.

• You need to develop a theoretical/contextual understanding of collaboration, so that you can develop informed opinions as to its role within both historical and contemporary fine art practice.

Most historical art production is centred on collaborative practice.Masters with students

Commissioners with producersArchitects with artists

The skull is covered with 8,601 flawless diamonds - three times the number on the crown the Queen wears on state occasions

DAMIAN HIRST for the Love of God, 2007, made of platinum, diamonds, and human teeth. Who did this?

ArtistWorkers

Fabricators

Gallery owner CriticCollector

Diamond minersArtist’s mum

Idea

Presentation

Reception

ValueMoney

Survival

Who polished Damien’s diamonds?

Researchers

Technicians

Family network

An autopoietic network

Education

Collaboration can be bothHidden & Visible

Acknowledged and unacknowledged

So much depends on the idea of the artist.Lonely genius facing the world with an Existentialist dilemma

or Engaged social participant working within a particular area of

communication

Collaboration With Communities

Graham FaganWhere the Heart Is

Roston Road Project, 2002

• A collaboration with a community living in a Glasgow housing estate.• Issues: Background research, time taken to understand the role that an

artist could play within the community, establishing what the community values are, the development of a joint agreement.

• See: http://www.anewpath.org.uk/existing-artworks/5/details

Final artwork consists of the development and growing of a new rose hybrid that is named the Royton Rose. This rose to be planted at strategic points within the community.

WochenKlausurMedical Care for Homeless People, Vienna, 1993

• WochenKlausur are a Vienna based collective that develop and realise proposals for improving socio-political problems.

• See: http://www.wochenklausur.at/kunst.php?lang=en • Upon receiving an invitation from the Vienna Secession, the group

decided instead of putting on an exhibition, to carry out a project to improve the situation of homeless people.

• The artwork became a specially constructed van, plus medical support .

Artist Collectives

A box of matches with labelBen Vautier, 1966.

Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s.

Fluxus encouraged a do it yourself aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada before it, Fluxus included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice.

Fluxus-oriented artists continue to meet in cities around the world to collaborate and communicate in "real-time" and physical spaces.

Fluxus

CoLab• "We [Collaborative Projects] are functioning as a group of artists with

complementary resources and skills providing a solid ground for collaborative work directed to the needs of the community-at-large. Specifically we are involved in programs facilitating development, production, and distribution of collaborative works."

Several artists now known for their work as individuals cut their teeth with CoLab and developed a confidence in engaging with audiences from their experiences of working directly with the public and as part of a group.

Check out the individual work of:Jenny HolzerTom OtternessKiki Smith

A conceptual artist and art teacher, who began working with learning disabled, often emotionally handicapped students in the early 1980s, Tim Rollins kept working with them and now the group is called Tim Rollins + K.O.S. (Kids of Survival).  Typically they make works based on classical literature such as the Bible, Prometheus Bound, The Red Badge of Courage, Alice in Wonderland and Moby Dick.

The interesting issue with Rollins and KOS is that they were able to bridge the gap between community arts practices and what you could call ‘high art’. The work being shown in major galleries and art museums, rather than being ‘relegated’ to community venues.

Tim Rollins + K.O.S.

Recent Local Examples

Jan Williams and Chris Teasdale

Woolgatherer

Black Dogs

Leeds 13

Artist and other professionsWhen a boyfriend broke-up with her by email, French artist Sophie Calle asked 107 women to read the letter and to analyse it according to their professional interest. It was set to music, re-ordered by a crossword-setter, performed by an actress, and probed by a forensic psychiatrist, amongst others. The resulting artwork called Take care of yourself (after the boyfriend’s parting words) filled the French Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jun/16/artnews.art

ARTIST & ARTIST ARTIST

The power of people

• One of the main problems that faces an artist is that of having to make all decisions in isolation.

• Working with someone else gives you a critical friend as well as broadens the skill base available.

• The key issue is trust.

• “It was rather like a pair of climbers roped together”.

Braque on his Cubist collaborations with Picasso

CutUp The pair rip down billboard ads, cut them into roughly even rectangles and collage them together to form artworks which they then paste back onto billboard spaces.

Gilbert & George

Seed

pieces are made from piles of rubbish collected from London streets. A light is projected against the pile, and the shadow on the wall creates an entirely different image, typically one of the couple themselves: this is not at all apparent from looking directly at the pile.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster Dirty White Trash (With Gulls), 1998

Bernd and Hilla Becher were a German photographer team and a married couple, best- known for their collection of industrial building images examining the similarities and differences in structure and appearance.

Bernd and Hilla Becher

Langlands & Bell Maisons de Force   1991

Based in London. Langlands & Bell have been collaborating since 1978, and exhibiting internationally since the early 1980's They explore the web of relationships linking people and architecture, and the coded systems of circulation and exchange which surround us

Collaboration Strategies

INSTRUCTIONAL PROCEDURESWorks that contain written instructions call into effect the role translation has on an artwork .The notion of interpretation as an artistic principle is analogous to musical scores which…

…like an opera or symphony, go through countless realisations as they are carried out and interpreted by others. Procedural instructions exists in a static condition like a musical score, everything is there but the sound. The essential nature of this activity is imprecise and can be located somewhere between permutation and negotiation within a field of tension described by repetition and difference. Meaning is multiplied as the various interpretations of the texts accumulate, as no two interpretations of the same instructions are ever identical.

Strategy 1

Strategy 2

• Define a space within which to play.• Agree on separate starting points and then

gradually blend/merge/synthesise your two (three/four etc) approaches until a new form is arrived at.

Strategy 3

• Define a space to work in, this could be a sheet of paper, a canvas, a room, the street etc.

• One artist makes a set of responses based on their own way of working leaving spaces for the other artist/s to work in.

• The second artist works in the spaces left by the first one.

• Continue until a conclusion is reached.

Other strategies

• There is a handout available on eStudio designed to help you think through how you develop creative strategies.

• Every one of the approaches given can be applied to collaborative working.

• Above all this module is designed to ask you a fundamental question about how you work as an artist and who else might need to become part of your own art world.