Raw Presence

This text is published in the book Hadzi-Vasileva, Elpida (2009) Motectum, Gloucester: University of Gloucester/Artsway. The book is published to coincide with Elpida’s exhibition at Gloucester Cathedral. See http://www.elpihv.co.uk for further details.

Warr, Tracey (2009) ‘Raw Presence’

Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva produces artworks that are carefully balanced between the beautiful and the brutal. There is a disjunction between the materials she uses: a cow’s stomach, pigs caul fat, one ton of butter, duck heads, salmon skins – and the exquisite sculptures and installations that she creates. ‘Matter out of place’, Mary Douglas writes in her great study of pollution taboos, is dirt, and yet she explains, dirt has a powerful creative charge (1966: 35). The materials Hadzi-Vasileva uses have a raw, uncanny presence to them because we know (and can sometimes smell as well as see) that this matter was formerly part of a living organism: an animal, bird or fish. Her work is full of paradoxes, between animate and inanimate, transcendent and abject. She recomposes decomposition into gorgeous forms.

Trees, animals, birds, food, clothing and architecture are recurring motifs in Hadzi-Vasileva’s work, as she sets up a visual and material dialogue between the structures of the natural world and the structures of human culture. Her work is responsive to specific sites and engages with local industries, communities and environments: the fishing industries in Berwick and Brighton, for example, or Indian restaurants in London’s Brick Lane.

The culmination of her year-long residency in Gloucester Cathedral is Motectum, a work which has three parts linked by the overarching theme of birds. She has created a sound installation mixing human and bird song in the cloisters and re-landscaped the cloisters garden; a crinoline dress made by stitching together translucent yellow chicken skins; and forty portrait busts of the feathered heads of dead ducks, pheasants and chickens.

When you step over the threshold into Gloucester Cathedral time seems to slow and stop – partly because of the weight of history here, but also because of the sheer volume of still air. The columns, buttresses and vaults of the cathedral rise up around the visitor like a great stone forest. The earliest parts of the Cathedral were built in 1089, alongside the Benedictine monastery that had been on the site since 678. The Cathedral has witnessed the crowning of Henry III, the burial of Edward II and the burning of Bishop Hooper. The monastery was dissolved under Henry VIII and the Cathedral narrowly escaped demolition under Oliver Cromwell. Its stained glass windows include the earliest image of golf (1350) and a fabulous beaked two-legged grotesque. An Angel Orchestra play their instruments in the ceiling above the choir. Inside the Cathedral are forty carvings of Green Men and outside, gargoyles funnel rainwater away from the walls.

It is easy to imagine monks in the 12th century pacing the quadrangle of the cloisters underneath the intricate stone latticework of their fan-vaulted ceilings, or to see them seated at the stone carols contemplating the enclosed garden through a colonnade of arched windows. The monks were mostly silent so the Cathedral was the sounding space where voices could burst out.

Hadzi-Vasileva’s work repopulates the garden with trees, shrubs and birds and reinhabits the cloisters with the soaring sound of Thomas Tallis’ Spem in Alium. Tallis’ 16th century composition is a 40 voice motet. Hadzi-Vasileva has combined the human voices with recorded birdsong and live birdsong relayed from microphones in the garden and in nearby Highnam Woods. The sound installation along the four sides of the cloisters represents birds commonly found in four areas of Gloucestershire: the Forest of Dean, the Severn Estuary, the Cotswold Hills and Cotswold Water Park. The sound moves randomly between forty speakers placed in the cloisters, harnessing the extraordinary acoustics of the space. The ambitious scale of Hadzi-Vasileva’s work matches the vastness of the Cathedral itself.

Hadzi-Vasileva’s chicken skins dress creates a frisson of disgust. Dead skins, usually sloughed off, are here put back on, and worn against living skin. We sense or imagine a faint whiff of decay. ‘A voluntary embrace of the symbols of death is a kind of prophylactic against the effects of death’ (Douglas, 1966: 177). Jean Paul Sartre discussed stickiness as the queasy boundary between the self and other matter. Francis Bacon wanted his paintings to bear the trace of a life in the same way as the snail or slug leaves its trail of slime. Hadzi-Vasileva’s materials occupy this distasteful zone of inbetweenness. The laborious cleaning and preparation of organic materials in her work are reminiscent of the medieval textile processes of tanning, fulling, lacemaking and needlework. The chicken skins dress, housed within the carapace of the Cathedral itself, recall Gaston Bachelard’s discussion of a building as a nest or garment in his book The Poetics of Space (1969: 90-104). What is underneath and inside a material world of membranes and skins are recurring obsessions in Hadzi-Vasileva’s work. She takes dead waste materials and transforms them into new artefacts that show us the latent beauty of this discarded matter.

Hadzi-Vasileva’s portrait busts made from feathered duck, pheasant and chicken heads are in a dialogue with the heads of stone angels and saints in the Cathedral that have been worn down by erosion or damaged by Cromwell’s soldiers. The Cathedral’s angels and gargoyles are already hybrid bodies: composites of human and bird or animal. Hadzi-Vasileva’s work highlights this uncanny hybridity.

When the Cathedral was built in the Middle Ages, people did not have our contemporary euphemisms and squeamishness about food. They reared, killed and butchered their own animals, and would have trapped and eaten the songbirds too. Partridges, storks, cranes and larks were amongst the many species of birds that were eaten. Peacocks and swans were often skinned and cooked and then presented with their original plumage put back in place.

Sing a song of sixpence
a pocket full of rye
four and twenty blackbirds
baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened
the birds began to sing.
Wasn’t that a dainty dish
to set before a king?

A 16th century Italian cookbook included a recipe for pies with live birds inside that flew out when the pies were cut open. These illusion foods were known as entremets or subtleties.

Hadzi-Vasileva’s work skirts, but will not be pinned down to, any straight forward thematic reading. She evokes political topics such as animal welfare and ecological issues but she is not judgemental and does not explicitly engage a subject. She makes us aware of the discord between our attitudes towards the garden songbirds and our attitudes towards domesticated birds. Whilst we protect and preserve the songbirds, the chickens, ducks and pheasants are being exploited for food and sport. The difficulty she had in getting well-feathered heads for the project is evidence of the often appalling conditions in which many domesticated birds are kept. The abject birds are revalued in her work.

Her concern with craft and husbandry suggests pre-digital and pre-industrial eras, and ecologists’ current advocacy of the need for the reacquisition of old skills and life styles in a time of climate change. Her work questions the human control and structuring of the natural world. Hadzi-Vasileva’s work, however, is materials-led rather than concept-led. She allows the materials to unfold into their own potentiality rather than imposing an idea on the forms that the work takes.

The bird is a symbol of the soul. Like the angels, the birds are of the sphere of transcendence. ‘A thing of the field that loves the air between’, wrote the Gloucestershire poet and musician Ivor Gurney (Kavanagh, 1982: 206). Angels and birds are messengers from the divine to the human. Alongside the raw presence of offal in Hadzi-Vasileva’s work, birds, angels and song transcend. ‘That which is rejected is ploughed back for a renewal of life’ (Douglas, 1966: 167).

References
Bachelard, Gaston (1969) The Poetics of Space, Boston: Beacon Press.
Douglas, Mary (1966) Purity and Danger, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Kavanagh, P.J. ed. (1982) Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Weimar Lecture References

Here are the references I promised to post from my lecture at the ACC Gallery in Weimar on 31 March 2008.

Allenheads Contemporary Arts, Northumberland http://www.acart.org.uk

Bennett, Oliver (ed.) (1990) Edge 90: Art & Life in the Nineties, London/Amsterdam: Edge Biennale Trust/Stitchting Mediamatic Foundation.

Buckingham, Matthew (2004) ‘Muhheakantuck – Everything Has a Name’, extract
from narrated film script, in Collier, Caroline et al (2005) This Storm is What We Call
Progress, Bristol: Arnolfini, pp. 89-94.

Debord, Guy (1995) The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books: New York. Originally published 1967.

Dixon, John W. Jnr. (1982) ‘Towards an Aesthetic of Early Earth Art’, Art Journal, Fall, pp.195-99.

Flam, Jack ed. (1996) The Collected Writings of Robert Smithson, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gilchrist, Bruce (2001) ‘KnoWhere’, Performance Research, 6 (3), CD Rom.

Jablonskiene, Lolita (ed.) (1997) Ground Control: Technology and Utopia, London: Black Dog Publishing.

James, William (1890) The Principles of Psychology, Vol 1, New York: Henry Holt.

Kastner, Jeff (ed.) (1998) Land and Environmental Art, London: Phaidon Press.

Lebrero Stals, Jose (ed.) (1992) Edge 92: Artists’ Worlds/Mundos Artisticos, London/Madrid: Edge Biennale Trust/Ediciones Tabapress.

London Fieldworks http://www.londonfieldworks.com

Lovink, Geert (2005) ‘Hacking Public Spaces in Vilnius: Interview with Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas’, http://www.networkedcultures.org

Mauss, Marcel (1934) ‘Techniques of the Body’, reprinted in Jonathan Crary & Sanford Kwinter, eds. (1992) Incorporations. New York: Zone, pp. 455-72.

Nagel, Thomas (1974) ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’, Philosophical Review, Oct, pp. 435-50.

Newman, Hayley (2001) Performancemania, London: Matt’s Gallery.

Noe, Alva (2000) ‘Experience and Experiment in Art’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 7 (8-9), pp. 123-35.

Rugoff, Ralph (1999) ‘Lost Horizons’, Tate, 18, Summer, pp. 23-29.

Sharp, Willoughby (1970)’ Body Works’, Avalanche, Fall, pp. 14-17.

Something Like Spit http://somethinglikespit.org.uk

Tiberghien, Gilles A. (1993) Land Art, London: Art Data.

Towards a Science of Consciousness http://www.consciousness.arizona.edu

Tsong-zung, Chang, ‘Encountering Asia’ in Xu Jiang et al, Edges of the Earth, Hangzhou: China Art Academy, 2003, pp. 190-93.

Turrell, James (1992) Air Mass, London: South Bank Centre.

Varela, Francisco J. (1999) ‘The Portable Laboratory’ in Obrist, Hans Ulrich & Vanderlinden, Barbara (eds.) (1999) Laboratorium, Antwerp: Provincaal Museum voor Fotografie, np.

Velmans, Max (2000) Understanding Consciousness, London: Routledge.

Warr, Tracey (2007) ‘Feral City’, in Sladen, Mark & Yedgar, Ariella ed. (2007) Panic Attack!: Art in the Punk Years, London: Merrell.

Warr, Tracey (2007) ‘Interview with Marcus Coates’, The Dawn Chorus. Bristol: Picture This. DVD Publication Series.

Warr, Tracey (2007) ‘Contemporary Metaphysics’, in Farquhar, Angus, ed. Half Life, Glasgow: NVA.

Warr, Tracey (2005) ‘Measuring Beauty in the Upper Ice-World’, in Gilchrist, Bruce
& Joelson, Jo, eds. Little Earth. London: London Fieldworks, pp. 11-19.

Warr, Tracey (2003) ‘Image as Icon: Recognising the Enigma’, in George, Adrian, ed. (2003) Art, Lies & Videotape: Exposing Performance. Liverpool: Tate Liverpool, pp. 30-37.

Warr, Tracey (2003) ‘A Moving Meditation on a Dead Line’, Performance Research, 8
(4), pp. 130-136.Warr, Tracey (2002) ‘Tuning In’, in Gilchrist, Bruce & Joelson, Jo,
eds. London Fieldworks: Syzygy/Polaria. London: Black Dog Publishing, pp. 6-11.

Warr, Tracey (2001)’ Being Something’, in Coates, Marcus, Marcus Coates.
Ambleside: Grizedale Books, np.

Warr, Tracey (2001) ‘Circuitry’. Performance Research, 6 (3), pp. 8-12.

Warr, Tracey (2000) ‘James Turrell’s Roden Crater’, Contemporary Visual Arts, 30, September, pp. 42-47.

Warr, Tracey ed. (2000) The Artist’s Body, London: Phaidon.

Warr, Tracey (1998) ‘In the Dark About Art’, in Stankevicius, Evaldas ed. (1998)
Twilight, Vilnius: Centre for Contemporary Arts.

Warr, Tracey (1996) ‘Sleeper: Risk and the Artist’s Body’, Performance Research, 1
(20), pp. 1-19.

Zhijie, Qiu http://www.qiuzhijie.com

Zhijie, Qiu (2006) ‘Interview’ in Curtis, Philip; Hualin, Gu; Johnson, Petra; Warr,
Tracey; Yeates, Liam; Yongjie, Cao (2006) Artist Links UK-China Research
Project, unpublished report for the British Council China.

 

Passing Presence

The following essay on artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey was published in Ackroyd, Heather & Harvey, Dan eds. (2002) Afterlife. London: Beaconsfield / Arts Admin, np. A few copies of the book still available from http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/artists/ah and http://www.beaconsfield.ltd.uk

Warr, Tracey (2002) ‘Passing Presence’.

For the last ten years Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey have been using grass as a living photographic medium. Conventional photography captures a present moment and in an instant turns it into the past. Photography sets up, in effect, not a perception of the being-there of an object… but a perception of its having-been-there.1 Ackroyd and Harvey’s photography, on the other hand, is without closure.

Exploiting the light-sensitivity of young growing grass, they imprint photographic images on to grass grown vertically, so that the image is on the length of the blade, rather than dispersed over the tips. As the grass grows, the image becomes sharper. The further away you stand from the image, the higher the resolution – the more distinct it is. But time is, of course, embedded in the fragility of these chlorophyll apparitions. We know that the image will fade, the grass will yellow and die. The gradual disappearance of the image from vision, memory, life, is implicit in what we are looking at. Ackroyd and Harvey are giving photography a performative charge. As Peggy Phelan has pointed out, performance is about disappearance rather than preservation. Performance plunges momentarily into visibility in a maniacally charged present and disappears into memory.2 Ackroyd and Harvey’s work is a potent evocation of presence and presentness. It briefly delays the passing present but eventually both medium and representation mimic their subject and fade away.

Alongside their photographic work with grass, Ackroyd and Harvey have also been making architectural and spatial interventions with grass. The Other Side, made in Italy in 1990, was the first of a series of architectural interventions altering and engulfing structures with grass. In this work they grew the grass up the interior walls of a vaulted room. Grass House, 1991, in Hull, was a derelict house covered with a green skin. Their environment, The Undertaking, 1992, was made underneath The National Theatre of the Palais du Chaillot in Paris. where a labyrinth of tunnels leads to the city’s ancient catacombs and cemeteries. Here, they lined the walls, floors and ceilings of passages and stairways with grass, evoking both the claustrophobia of the open turf-lined grave and a sense of life renewing and springing up again. Footsteps worn in the grassy stairwells bore witness to time and memory.
In Theaterhaus Gessnerallee, Zurich, 1993, grass was grown over the entire exterior fayade of a building, emphasising the outlines of its classical proportions through the blanket of grass. In The Divide (Wellington, New Zealand, 1996) they split and separated a derelict building and grassed the vertiginous walls of the narrow divide. Like Gordon Matta-Clark’s severed buildings or Rachel Whiteread’s House, Ackroyd and Harvey bring these buildings into the consciousness of the viewer in the form of ghosts – their pasts temporally remote. But they are also given new life becoming verdant abstract sculptures.

In 1996, Ackroyd and Harvey collaborated with Pierre d’Avoine Architects on the Host interventions in Venice. The fact that the city is relentlessly undermined year by year by its canals, prompted them to create and exhibit lumps of plaster – pummelled under a dripping tap for ten days or holed like cheese in a stream for four days – which displayed the effects of water over time. In their work nature becomes a performer. And this performance by nature is even more pronounced in Ackroyd and Harvey’s photographic grass work. It began as an accidental discovery in their first architectural intervention. Having left a ladder leaning against the growing grass wall, they found that its image had been imprinted. They began to explore the capacity of grass to record either simple shadows or complex photographic images. The haunting presence of the emergent organic image was and still is quite revelationary to us.3

In 1997, with support from a Wellcome Trust Sci-Art Award and subsequently a NESTA grant, Ackroyd and Harvey started working with scientists at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research in Aberystwyth to explore the possibility of preserving the image longer. Professor Howard Thomas and Dr Helen Ougham were working on a stay-green grass, studying leaf aging and developing techniques for controlling the enzyme that degrades chlorophyll as a leaf dies. During the course of their collaboration with the artists they have advanced hyperspectral imaging which allows them to study minute colour changes in grass and a prototype stay-green grass seed which is growing in trials at the moment. In 1998 Ackroyd and Harvey made Mother and Child using staygreen grass and then dried it for exhibition in Santa Barbara, California. This process lasts longer than their earlier grass photography but still fades eventually, maintaining the concern with transience and presentness in their work.

These grass photographs recall the strange magic of early images made by photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot. He placed an object on paper sensitised with silver salts and then placed both in the sun. When the object was removed, the exposed paper retained the silhouette of the object. The frustration of capturing and then losing the image as it faded led him to seek ways to fix the image. In the 1920′s Man Ray adopted a similar technique with his Rayographs or Photograms and in 1950, Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil made Blueprints in which Weil’s nude body was placed directly onto light sensitive paper.4

Every photograph is the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface. .. the physical transposition of an object from the continuum of reality into the fixed condition of the art-image by a moment of isolation, or selection.5

In the fixed photograph there is a predatory, acquisitive instinct at work – an appropriation, a commodification, a stealing of souls. The fixed photographic image evinces a desire to hold on to things, an attachment to visibility. The camera has been theorised as a tomb, the photograph as a form of death. Things in process become images of frozen moments, artefacts of the past.

Ackroyd and Harvey have developed a deviant form of photography, without closure. Their works briefly stabilise the elusive and transient, and then let it fade away. Instead of the impression of having been there, in their grass photography we experience presence as fleeting present. Imprinting the human image on the living medium of grass they succeed in conjuring presence and presentness, in a celebration of the living moment. At the same time, reminding us of the inevitability of grass, image and subject fading away.
Ackroyd and Harvey’s grass photography makes literal the idea that pervades Thomas Hardy’s writing that Nature is both a mute witness and an inexorable contributor to the tragedy of human transience. And verdant Nature rolls on, recycling, regenerating while we must imagine a world eventually without us in it. Confrontation with our own mortality emphasises the intensity and vitality of the present lived moment. Ackroyd and Harvey’s choice of subjects is celebratory rather than morbid – the lined faces of the elderly who have lived long, a family picnic, mother and child. In Sunbathers, 2000, exhibited at Exit Art, New York, both subject and medium are soaking up light. In their imprints of the human face and body on grass Ackroyd and Harvey collide the surface of the material with the subject, mutability with the indexical.

Lush, green grass, saturated with light and water, is a symbol of life, fertility, abundance. The vegetable resurrection myths of the Green Man, Osiris and Balder celebrate the regenerating cycle of life. Plant photosynthesis gives us life by producing oxygen, but grass grows lushly too on our graves. The association of the human body with grass reduces us to temporary coagulations of matter and consciousness, a mere flow of flesh through food chains6 Like the skull, grass is a momento mori – all flesh is grass7 – an image of the inevitable corruption and decay of all living matter.

Ackroyd and Harvey’s use of grass as a photographic medium is an indexical practice, rather than a representational methodology. In their grass works there is a continued physical relationship with the subject. Physical traces – stains, footprints, body casts, shadows have all been identified as indexes rather than symbols.8 In Marcel Duchamp’s ten foot wide painting Tu m’ (You/Me), 1918, cast shadows of his readymades, including the bicycle wheel and the hatrack, were projected onto the surface of the canvas. In other indexical works, Piero Manzoni marked his inky thumbprint on eggs (To Devour Art, 1960). Bruce Gilchrist’s enlarged thumbprint was tattooed on his own arm (Transmutations, 1996) and relayed to an audience both as visual performance and as the sound of his pain, through the use of a galvanic skin resistance meter. In her essay, ‘Notes on the Index: Part 2’ Rosalind Krauss describes a performance by dancer Deborah Hay in which she did not dance but instead delivered a monologue to the audience, insisting that she was there. In their performance, Nightsea Crossing (1981-86), Marina Abramovic and Ulay sat in immobile silence, over a total of 90 days, making the same mute point. These are all indexical documents of presence, to which can be added Ackroyd and Harvey’s grass photography where presence and presentness is momentarily slowed.

For their new work, Afterlife, at Beaconsfield, Ackroyd and Harvey have captured their human subjects on a nearby zebra crossing in Vauxhall. The portraits of these passers-by are imprinted larger than life onto screens of growing grass but are not just pictures of other people in an unusual medium. Looking at these green images striding through the gallery and life, we see our own reflections caught briefly in the act of passing on.

Notes

1. Roland Barthes, Rhetorique de /’image, Communications, no. 4, 1964, p 47.
2. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Routledge, London, 1993, p 147.
3. Heather Ackroyd, Dan Harvey & Professor Howard Thomas, ‘The Ephemeral in Focus’, Royal Society Lecture delivered at Creating Sparks, Victoria & Albert Museum, 17 September 2000.
4. Helen Molesworth, ‘Before Bed’, October, 63, Winter 1993, pp 69-82.
5. Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Part 1’ in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1985, pp 203-06.
6. Manuel DeLanda, ‘Nonorganic Life’ in Jonathan Crary & Sanford Kwinter, eds. Incorporations, Zone, New York, 1992, p 149.
7. The Bible, Isaiah ch 40: vv 6-8.
8. See Georges Didi-Huberman, The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain), trans. Thomas Repensek, October 29, Summer 1984 and Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Part 1 and Notes on the Index: Part 2’ in The Originality of the Avant-Garde, ibid, pp 196-219.

 

Online publications

Here’s a selection of my writing that you can find on-line:

2007. Book Review: Broadhurst, Susan & Machon, Josephine eds. (2006) Performance and Technology: Practices of Virtual Embodiment and Interactivity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. In Body, Space & Technology Journal, 7 (1).

http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/non_ie.html

2006. ‘Consensual Art: Cyril Lepetit’, Wharf, Caen: Centre d’Art Contemporain de Basse-Normandie.

http://www.international-exhibitionist.org

2001. ‘Interview with Carolee Schneemann’, MAKE online,

http://www.make-magazine.org.uk.

2000. ‘The Informe Body’, Body, Space and Technology, 1 (1).

http://people.brunel.ac.uk/bst/non_ie.html

2005 Navigate, Baltic Contemporary Arts Centre, Gateshead, UK. Archived on-line at

http://www.archive.balticmill.com

2004 OtherWorlds, Baltic Contemporary Arts Centre, Gateshead, UK. Panel Chair. Other speakers included Peggy Phelan. Archived on-line at

http://www.archive.balticmill.com

 

Conversations on Collaboration

The following is an extract from an article that will be published shortly in the Doubt Guardian. The full article includes interviews I carried out in November 2007 with Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey and with Phelim McDermott from Improbable.

See

http://www.artsadmin.co.uk/artists/ah

for information on Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey’s projects and

http://www.improbable.co.uk

for Improbable.

Out of Control: Conversations on Collaboration

Tracey Warr

In the 21st century artistic collaboration has moved from being an aberration to being as commonplace as the individual artist. What are the reasons for this phenomenon?

Collaboration has a long history in the visual arts stretching back to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and beyond. At the beginning of the 20th century artists and writers groups were numerous. Dada, Die Brucke, Blue Rider, Futurists, Vorticists, the Surrealists, Bauhaus, Gutai, Fluxus, The Inklings, the New Realists, the Lettrists, the Situationists International and many more groups and collaborations contested the notion of the lone, individual, genius artist and the commodification of the signature artist by the market. They explored a composite subjectivity and took iconoclastic stances against entrenched and defunct positions. They challenged the canon of art history.

More recent collaborations are numerous and have included Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Gilbert and George and the Christos. The current burgeoning of collaboration has been reflected in a range of exhibitions, events and publications including Artistic Collaboration in the Twentieth Century at the Smithsonian Institute in 1984, Team Spirit in 1991, Art Lovers in 2002, a consideration of group practice in Documenta XI in 2003, the Diffusion symposium at Tate Modern in 2003 and Collective Creativity at the Kunsthalle Friedericanium in Kassel in 2005.

There are many different types of collaboration with different dynamics within them. The psychologists Damon and Phelps developed a distinction between co-operation and collaboration, where the latter had a more fully realised equality in roles and responsibilities. Sometimes a collaboration is a merger of two or more hands into one, and sometimes it is deliberately manipulating the concept of a signature style itself. Sometimes it is a dyadic exchange. Sometimes collaborations are pseudo-kinship groups reflecting family dynamics. Sometimes they are conversational circles of peers sharing values and goals. Sometimes they are radial networks centred on a single person. A number of critics including Irit Rogoff have pointed out that the market and the historical canon can adapt to absorb the group as the author too. Paul O’Neil asks, ‘Is the collective just another marketable brand in disguise?’ Some collaborations, such as Platform or Critical Art Ensemble, are intersections of artistic and activist practice. Some collaborations persist and some have a shelf-life or fizzle out.

Shifts in arts practice to an expanded practice that includes large-scale, site-specific and interdisciplinary work, and the range of skills required to realise that work, is one of the factors driving collaboration. My own work with artist duo, London Fieldworks, has reflected this. Each of their projects has involved an expanded network of other collaborations with writers, composers, computer programmers, stunt kite flyers, scientists, mountaineers and musicians. They draw on multiple perspectives to approach large themes. Their work also raises the issue of ‘collaboration’ with sites and with communities. As early as 1957 Marcel Duchamp was discussing making meaning as a collaboration between artist, audience and posterity in his seminal text, ‘The Creative Act’. In this text, Duchamp also described the way in which artists generate artworks as a collaboration with context, as opposed to innate self-expressing genius.

Interdisciplinary collaborations often encounter the problem that there is a mutually inexpert and uninformed understanding of the other’s work in play. The understanding across disciplines is often a blunt instrument. Like speaking a second language, there is a conversation going on with a paucity of vocabulary. However sometimes that very paucity can invoke a more direct, more poetic exchange, free of jargon and ingrained assumptions.

Doubt Guardian’s enquiry into collaboration began in York with a meeting of artists and promoters discussing their experiences. This meeting included Kit Monkman and Tom Wexler from KMA. I then interviewed Phelim McDermott from Improbable, one of the most significant long-term collaborations in theatre, and Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, one of the most significant artist duos. In the following conversations they discuss collaboration as an art making mode and as an urgent subject matter reflecting how we are organised in society today.

Collaboration in the 1970s was ideological as well as pragmatic and many contemporary collaborations are also ideological. The Collaboration Arts website set up in 2005 by Mark Dunhill and Tamiko O’Brien locates contemporary art collaborations in an historical context stretching back to the establishment of the Kibbutz Movement in 1909 and the establishment of the Co-operative Movement in 1771. Contemporary collaborative groups such as Superflex are ostensibly addressing radical modes of social organisation.

The Russian artist duo Komar and Melamid asked what is art? Using a market research process they produced the person in the street’s favourite painting and their least favourite painting. What visual art is and can be has shifted substantially. For example, in this year’s Munster Skulptur Projekt in Germany, Maria Pask established a self-sufficient food growing and living site and a spirituality research centre in a city park. She then invited a series of art and environmental groups to inhabit the space and maintain it for the next groups coming in over a six month period. Gediminas and Nomeda Urbonas’ ProTest Lab project where they squatted Vilnius’ last large cinema space to save it from indiscriminate developers and to facilitate a space of protest for other people is another example of artists’ practice asking questions about how society is organised – how we relate to each other and the environment.

The problems with collaboration include conflicts over authorship, ownership, competition and rivalry – differential success and recognition, money, editorial control. The advantages of collaboration include the ability to create your own critical research space, your own work context, your own sounding board and your own momentum, rather than having to be passively dependent on someone outside to give that to you. A collaboration can be a self-contained ‘reflexive artistic entity’ (Rogoff). Collaboration needn’t mean the absorption and loss of individual eccentricities and idiosyncracies. For many practitioners the advantages of collaboration are clearly outweighing the potential disadvantages.

Academia with its need to identify and quantify and its notion of original contributions to knowledge lags behind the critiques of authorship and origin established in collaborative practice. Rather than moving knowledge on are we moving knowledge around and making knowledge moving? Instead of a singular authoritative position there is an increasing recognition of intersubjectivity and interdependence. Artists’ collaborations are more than simply method. They are also subject. They enact a radical interconnectedness.

…

Collaborations: A Selected Bibliography

(1999) Afterimage vol. 27 no. 3 (November/December) special issue on artistic partnerships.

(1993) Art Journal 52, no. 4 (winter), special issue on collaborations between artists and writers.

(2007) Beaux Arts Magazine no. 272 (February) special issue on artistic partnerships.

(2004) Third Text vol. 18, issue 6, special issue on collaboration.

Ades, Dawn ed. (1984) Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, London: Hayward Gallery.
Billing, Johanna; Lind, Maria & Nilsson, Lars (2007) Taking the Matter into Common Hands, London: Black Dog.

Bradley, Will; Hannula, Mika; Ricupero, Cristina & Superflex (2006) Self-Organisation/Counter-Economic Strategies, Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Chadwick, Whitney & de Courtivron, Isabelle de Courtivron eds (1993) Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership, London: Thames and Hudson.

Charles, Green (2001) The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

Collaboration Arts http://www.collabarts.org.uk

Critical Art Ensemble (1998) ‘Observations on Collective Cultural Action’, The Art Journal, 57:2 (Summer), pp. 73-85.

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