Contemporary Debates
in Visual Culture
Contemporary
Collaborative Arts Practices
presentation by
Alix Brodeur
Christine Huntsman
Heather Matthew
Rebecca Moon
Miriam Salomon
Kaye Wearne
Collaborative Arts Practice
Since the 1990’s there has been resurgent
interest and participation in collaborative art practice as it became
incorporated into the mainstream. There is, however, a long and complex history
of collaboration ranging from the hierarchical large scale studios of the
Renaissance, through Surrealist Group experiments, Fluxus games and Andy
Warhols pseudo industrial factory.
Groups may be fixed and formal, or they
may be loose informal networks of friends living and working side by side.
Motivation varies from the ability to share tasks according to skills,
promotional and economic benefits, to the fun and joy derived from working with
others.
But visual artists have also laboured
under the idea of the artist as an heroic solitary figure whose ‘voice’ or
personality is expressed through their art to give it authenticity. This
authenticity ties in with the issue of authority or “authorship” which has
remained central to the debate about art as a saleable commodity. These notions
of the individual, academic or gallery based artist were challenged during the
1960s by collectivist, anti-establishment, collaborative arts movements such as
Fluxus.
Fluxus had its roots in Dadaism but grew
out of the musical performances of composer John Cage during the 1950s and
moved into the visual arts during the 1960s with artists such as George
Maciunas, (text and ‘boxed’ art), Allan Kaprow (Happenings) and Joseph Beuys
(sculpture). Perhaps its most famously linked artist is Yoko Ono who
collaborated with John Lennon in 1969 staged the famous “Bed In’.
This was a time of massive social and
cultural upheaval when the very ideology of class, race, gender, and authority
were being challenged and disseminated through the mass media and counter
culture movement. From the Paris riots of 1968 through to the antiwar
demonstrations in America and Europe of the 1970s, art became bound with
politics, art was seen as an instrument for social change, art embraced the
Marxist idea of the collective.
This idea of non-individual
‘collectivity’, through collaborating arts practice instead of saleable
individual art in a gallery undermined the whole market value approach to art.
A new ideology was beginning to take shape and be espoused by thinkers of the
time.
Art was now becoming embedded in
‘context’ and ‘culture’, the artist inheriting a foundation and history,
creating a “ language of decipherable metaphors whose purpose is to explore
aspects of contemporary society’. With such ideology in place collaboration could
be recognised as a legitimate arts process or arts practise, creating ‘art’ in
isolation no longer applied.
Collaboration duos like Gilbert and
George who challenged notions of art in the 1960s with their “Singing
Sculpture”, went on to become ‘mainstream’ artists in the 1980s when they won
the UK Turner Prize. The whole notion of authorship was explored by
collaborative duos like Christo and Jeanne Claude who after thirty years of
working together as Christo then decided to use both their first names as a
form of ‘authorship’. Other
collaborations like the 1980s group Guerilla Girls formed teams whose members
remained anonymous.
The problems around authorship became
particularly important in art schools where allocating marks was dependent upon
individual students’ work. Collaboration as a serious arts practice was
therefore not actively encouraged by art schools. A famous example of this was
UK artists Jane and Louise Wilson, identical twins born in 1967, who attended
art college at separate locations, one in Newcastle the other in Dundee. They
produced a collaborative artwork for their final degree show and submitted the
same work to their respective art colleges.
Their relationship as twins is not played
out as their collaborative practice, although reviewers have noted each will
refer to “my work” or express what “I hope to achieve with the work”, whilst in
the presence of the other sister.
So they work as a seamless duo without apparent delineation of separate
roles, therefore blurring the notion of the single identifiable author.
Jane and Louise Wilson’s work takes the
form of multi media video installations filmed on location and frequently at
sites associated with oppressive institutional power. Many of the sites are
examples of modernist architecture and utopian design, or sites associated with
cold war politics. They are filmed in their now desolate and ruined state,
devoid of those invested with the power to instill fear, yet the installations
are still capable of provoking collective anxiety. Here the work of Michel
Foucault on notions of power and hierarchy and how this affects behaviour when
in particular spaces is particularly influential. They are about making the
familiar unfamiliar by evoking a sense of the uncanny.
This sensibility leads the audience to
question modernity’s ideology of progress, and optimism for a better future
through scientific and industrial development. Stasi City and Gamma (1999) are
a paired installation, with Stasi City filmed at the now abandoned Stasi
headquarters in the former East Germany and Gamma at abandoned nuclear missile
silos at Greenham Common near London. In both, the camera shows quiet empty
rooms and spaces that were once sites of fear and interrogation, now conveying
a sense of human folly. The sisters appear ghostlike and dressed in uniform,
gliding through the space silently. It is not without humour, as one of the
sisters is seen passing over the space in a flying harness.
This interest in architectural spaces
extends from the film content into the design of the multi screen installation.
Through the kinetic placement of screens the viewer moves through and activates
the installation space. The casting of their shadow onto the screens enhances
the sense of being actively involved in interpretation and the process of
making meaning. This is evident in the work “A free and anonymous monument”
(2004) filmed on location around Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the U.K. The work is
based on a now derilect public monument (The Apollo Pavilion) designed by the
artist Victor Pasmore as a sculptural centerpiece for a utopian style housing development
on the edge of the city. The images also include sites of industrial ruination
in the area and contrasts these with recent laboratories associated with the
digital age. Fragmentation occurs
as images move from sites of industrial demise to the quiet and seeming
invisibility of our digital age. There are 13 screens installed to mirror the
design of the original Apollo Pavilion, giving the viewer a sense of being
immersed in the location, surrounded by memory and association.
Occupying public space physically and in
large numbers as a collaborative arts practice is another alternative to
gallery based art exposure.
When discussing contemprary collaborative art, it is
important to recognize flash mobbing and culture jamming as two, if not
obvious, legitimate practices.
Culture jamming could be defined as a disruption of our
society’s norms and cultural standards as a way of gaining perspective as to
why we “do what we do”. This is a common practice in social movements
currently, usually directing attention and questioning towards consumerism and
politics. One example is Critical Mass, an event held typically on the last
Friday of every month in over 300 cities globally, where citizens (usually
hundreds) cycle the streets. Some say this leaderless event is to draw
attention to global warming, some say it is a way of cyclists reclaiming the
streets.
Flash mobbing on the other hand, has become popular as a
large group of people who assemble in a public area, usually perform some sort
of action, then leave suddenly. In London, in 2006, the “silent disco” was
staged where at a set time in the Underground, everyone with portable music
devices began dancing. Similiarly, in the New York subway, “No Pants Day” has
become an annual event where, everyone participating, just as it sounds, rides
the train in jackets and scarves, but no pants. Worldwide Pillow Fight Days are
also gaining popularity.
These sorts of events are worthy of recognition when
discussing collaborative art. They are usually ambiguous in nature without
leaders or formal organization. Some might say they have no “point” which is
exactly their “point”. They challenge the archetypal roles of artist and
audience, by using the participants as the artists themselves.
New media and
advanced communication is now integral to collaborative arts practices and the
internet has enabled groups of artists to collaborate on projects all around
the world. Some international collaborative art projects operate as a mixture
of unselected mail art works which are then collected and combined under the
‘facilitating authorship’ of a single artist.
An example of this collaborative project
was the postcard art Book About Death which originated as an internet call out
open to anyone who submitted a postcard on the theme of death to Paris based
artist Matthew Rose. Each participant was required to send 500 copies of their
postcard to be included in an exhibition at the Emily Harvey Gallery in New
York. The idea was that the 500 artists who responded to the call provided
their work for free to contribute to an unbound’ Book about Death .
Visitors to the exhibition were then
encouraged to collect one of each of the postcards to create their own unbound
book about death, resulting in huge crowds at the opening night. Some artists
who collected the entire range of postcards then exhibited the exhibition in
other galleries in New York and further exhibitions have taken place in Brazil,
Wales, Belgium, Croatia and Sarajevo with a proposal to exhibit in China under
consideration.
As organiser Matthew Rose says:
What is compelling for
me is that artists have taken on this project as a mission of their own and
given it in each turn in their own country a beautiful and personal shape. (1a)
In some ways this collaborative arts project
referenced the ‘out of gallery’ ethos of the original Fluxus movement, Emily
Harvey herself was a supporter of Fluxus in the 1960s.
The concept that collaborative art could
operate as a force for social change and allow marginalised voices to be heard
outside of the traditional gallery selection processes and restraints is one
which is seriously pursued by other collaborative arts groups.
One such group is Los Carpinteros , a
Cuban art collective formed in 1991, based in La Habana and working and showing
internationally. Initially a trio of
classmates from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA) formed by Alexandre
Arrechea (b.1970), Marco Antonio Castillo Valdés, (b.1971) and Dagoberto
RodrÃguez Sanchez (b.1969) it became a duo since Arrechea’s 2004 departure.
Their work is part of the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Guggenheim Museum, New
York, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina SofÃa, Madrid amongst others.
Their name,
which means Carpenters, pays homage to and deliberately inserts them into to
the tradition of guilds of artisans, and tobacco and sugar cane workers while
referring to their decision to renounce the bourgeois notion of individual
authorship. It was also a way to protect themselves from unwanted attention
from the authorities at a time when mass migration of artists had made the
remaining ones highly vulnerable.
‘We
did not want our work censored. So we disguised it. We cloaked it in a mantle of
manuality and manufacture’1
They are, in
fact highly accomplished woodworkers who make sculpture and installations in a
variety of media often related to architecture and furniture but also cloth, as
in their tent city and rubber on their serial sculpture of rubber sandals.
Their work humorously explores the relation between architecture and design and
between art and craft. Their drawings are often a point of departure for works
in other media and act as mock architectural drafts that are later mirrored in
their three dimensional work. Charles Merewether points out that this process
of ‘going back to the drawing board’ and planning every detail in advance is
one that has long been embraced by socialist thinkers. 2 They have
referred to their drawings as ‘messages we send to each other’.
Los
Carpinteros have chosen -and often talked about- a form of subtle protest and
socio political commentary. Their man size wooden grenade, ironically titled
‘Jewelery Box’ and their ‘Bread Box’ shaped like a missile could be read as
pacifist monuments while playing with the postmodern question of relationship
between object and text. Their installation called library 1, 2 and 3 is a
series of wall mounted measuring tapes containing sections of banned books, an
obvious comment on censorship and possibly a dangerous one for Cuban artists to
make. Their position is unusual, as Jorge Reynoso Polenz has pointed out 3,
in that there is a clear interest by Cuba in promoting Los Carpinteros -a
highly successful exportable product- which gives them a certain margin to
express themselves freely and importantly, the freedom to travel.
They are
currently working on their first long term US public commission, a large-scale
site-specific interactive installation titled Free Basket for 100 Acres for the
Virginia B. Fairbanks Art and Nature Park opening in June as part of the
Indianapolis Museum of Art. The drawings for this work -which draws on the form
of a basketball court- are computer generated and look very different from
earlier ones, which used the palette of antique frescos. Conceptually however
this new work continues to explore their long held interest in juxtaposing the
practical and the imaginary.
Another major benefit of working
collaboratively is the opportunity to pool resources as well as skills and
ideas. Economic considerations can be a major hurdle for individual artists and
working collaboratively often gives artists the opportunity to create large
scale works.
This is particularly evident in the work
of contemporary Healy and Cordeiro who bring a range of individual skills and
sensibilities to create major installations which focus on contemporary issues
like consumer consumption and its associated problems.
Claire Healy and Sean Cordeiro are two
Australian born artists who began collaborating on works in 2002 during the
final years of studying their masters in fine arts at the university of
NSW.
They work with ideas of home, permanency and collection, and
develop sculptural works in a variety of media. Through their works they raise socio-political issues such
as capitalism, globalization and consumption.
Their installations contain the everyday
consumables and debris of modern life.
Healy and Cordiero explore creation and consumption, questioning the
layers that disguise the simple economics that underscore our increasingly
complex lives. An example of this found in their huge garbage ball, the garbage
coming from an abandoned studio, they were to use. This illustrates the
contradiction between material affluence and the uncertain income of artists in
western society.
These two artists look closely at using
resource sustainability, acquiring as little as possible and use material found
on site without adding more objects to the mass of stuff. They also up-cycle garbage to art forms
and in so doing make the material and immaterial value of the raw material
visible.
In their “The Cordial Home Project”
exhibition, they were looking at the average suburban home and the emotional
and monetary values we put on them. They took apart a house, with the help of a
team of 40 people, and stacked all the material into the exhibition room. This house was the only house that the
artists could afford and the artists were looking at the fact that they
represent a generation of Australian citizens who will no longer be able to own
their own home. They are also looking at the amount of rubbish that is left
behind when a person moves house.
Their site specific investigations of certain places are also
investigations into the perception of the way things shift. Healy and Cordeiro’s “Flat Pack” installation in the “There is a Life After the Trailer
Park” exhibition in Berlin showed 4 meticulous stacks, all being exactly the
same dimensions. The fragments for
these stacks had come from an abandoned trailer that a woman had lived in for
40 years. The trailer had never
been moved in this time. There is
a marked difference to Healy and Cordeiro’s lifestyle, constantly on the move,
flying from country. In this
exhibition they are investigating an outmoded form of mobility, represented by
the trailer, and adjusting it to current forms of travel. Instead of the trailer being towed by a
vehicle it has been taken apart, packed up, and flown to a different site.
At the Contemporary Art Biennale, (Lyon,
France), Healy and Cordeiro used a Lego block model of a certain region in
China, known as China’s “area 51”.
This region was discovered by Google Earth in 2006 and appears to be an
exact replica of the 157,500 km sq of the Chinese province Aksai Chin. It
borders in India and Pakistan and connects Tibet with a road that the Chinese
built in 1962. The artists are just considering this little mystery and by
making a portable replica of the existing model they are bringing it to the
attention of the world.
Healy and Cordeiro’s exhibition showing a
bizarre block of 105,774 VHS video cassettes arranged inside a church, mulls
over the human condition of the meaning of life and death. The combined running time of the
cassettes is enough to record the lifetime of the average person, being 66.1
years. “Life Span” is the physical representation of what may flash before ones
eyes in the moments before death. The installation takes over the small church
and substitutes film for religious doctrine as a vehicle for finding
tranquillity and spiritual fulfilment.
The stack of outdated media becomes a metaphor for society’s
manufactured packaging of experience and emotion and for the ultimate
transience of life. Claire Healy has acknowledged that to send garbage half way
round the world for exhibition is ecological nonsense, but concludes that it is
what the art world demands. –
And what the world demands also is to
participate in the experience of art, whether that be going to blockbuster art
exhibitions or being part of the flash mobbing phenomena, the mail art
phenomena, or just teaming up with friends to create art outside of gallery
spaces.
That artists who collaborate with each
other for shared inspiration, economy and the fun of working together on a shared
vision now exhibit in major art biennales is a testament to how well they work
together and how art as a collaborative process is very much in demand.
NOTES
a Matthew Rose A Book About Death: The Project Rolls On -
Some News
April 8, 2010 http://www.facebook.com/groups
1- Dagoberto Rodriguez in an interview
with Rosa Lowinger The Object as Protagonist, published in Sculpture Magazine, Dec. 1999
2- Merewether, Charles. Los
Carpinteros in Vitamin D: New
Perspectives in Drawing London, UK:
Phaidon Press Limited, 2005
3- Reynoso
Pohlenz, Jorge. Los Carpinteros: Utopian model makers published in Afterall, Issue 9 Spring/Summer 2004
2011 Quetzalcoatl Gallery, Seattle, WA / November 10 – December 10
Villa Torri & Biblioteca Comunale, Vimodrone, Italy / May 8-19
