A Collaborative Essay about Collaboration.

Asa James Griffits & James Blackburn

MA – Fine Art (European Practice) Kingston University
July 2011

In this essay we will explore the notion of collaboration. In writing a collaborative essay about collaboration, we are experimenting with how to write as an artist duo. We will gather, collect and quote from the relevant areas of discussion about collaboration. In this essay we won’t look at or compare other artists collaborations directly, but rather we will consider some current theories of collaboration within social theory and philosophy in relation to our own practice, all in a channel skipping, headline reading, skimming, reading as you would listen to music -­‐ type way.

Collaboration is a currently important topic, “collaborative models of creativity…are reconfiguring visual art.” (Roth, 2005) “Groups of artists, circles, associations, networks, constellations, partnerships, alliances, coalitions, contexts and teamwork are all notions buzzing in the air of the art world.” (Lind, 2007) In addition, as we have worked together as Griffits & Blackburn during our Bachelors degree and during our Masters degree, it is also a personally and professionally relevant issue for us to examine.

What is collaboration?

Collaboration can be a dirty word; simply meaning ‘working together’ it can also have darker connotations. Think collaborators in a regime or plot and traitors in cooperation with an enemy. Maybe for this reason “‘teamwork’, ‘network’, ‘collective’, ‘collaboration’ and ‘cooperation’ are terms that the protagonists of the art system dislike using to describe their working structures.” (Schlieben, 2007) For Matthias Weiss for example, “mutuality” is favoured instead of “collaboration” (Lovink & Scholz, 2007)

Collaboration is often used to describe a kind of working, or a kind of art that involves more than one person, a single artist ‘collaborating’ with fellow artists in a group show or coming together for a particular project. Sometimes it can be used to describe a single artist ‘collaborating’ with a cast or crew or anyone else involved in a work – even Santiago Serra’s human tattoo canvases are referred to as collaborators in his work. Whatever the status of the collaborator to the author, the resulting work might be called collaborative. It might even be said that any and every artist works in collaboration, with his contemporaries, with the whole cannon of art history, with the institution or with the viewer.

As Griffits & Blackburn we have been working together or collaborating as a mutuality, multiple, artist duo, dyad, doubleton, couple -­‐ or call it what you will, since 2002. During our theory lectures this year we have been questioning what

it actually means to work in collaboration, what issues it raises, and why we have chosen to make work in this way.

The third stream

We have often described our practice as something which happens, which otherwise would not happen. Firstly, we find that the impulse to actually make work is stronger when two people are involved, and secondly, in coming together a kind of third force or third person is created from the fusion of the two.

Michael Farrell has written about collaborative groups, and the impulsive dynamics within them,

While working alone a member may be tempted to try something new, something even forbidden by authorities in the field; but alone, the person does not follow through on the impulse. When the impulse is validated by other members of a [collaborative] circle, the conflicted member is more likely to act… the members may say and do things together that they would never have done alone. (Farrell, 2003)

Simon O’Sullivan also touched on this impulsive phenomenon referring to Spinoza and Foucault’s writing about ‘the joyful encounter’ he says

For the joyful encounter – the result of two or more bodies meeting that essentially agree with one another – has, for Spinoza, the concomitant effect of increasing the capacity to act in the world (O’Sullivan, 2004)

The third force that is then created, has been given many names: The third hand, a third person, or as Deleuze and Guattari call it, the third stream.

[We] didn’t collaborate like two different people. We were more like two streams coming together to make ‘a’ third stream, which I suppose was us. One of the questions about ‘philosophy,’ after all, has always been what to make of the philos. (Deleuze, 1995)

Our own practice, and many artist duo’s in fact, is an experiment in what happens when two streams conjoin, when two personalities come together and have a good relationship, a joyful encounter. How is friendship therefore linked with the idea of collaboration?

The question of friendship is intimately linked to that of collaboration… Collaboration is about affinity and affect; in concerns the creation of something new from the conjugation or co-­‐mingling of diverse singularities… This elucidates the impersonal quality of collaboration; the way in which its conjoining does not so much birth a pedigreed product as unleash a flow of becoming that transform its antecedents… How to think this third steam, this coming-­‐together that results from affiliation, not filiations? In terms of philos, the figure of the friend or lover… But what is this philos? Perhaps it signifies an

affinity, a competent intimacy by which the friend aligns with and brings out the potential of its beloved. If so, then the friend or lover introduces an inassimilable alterity into the ostensibly cold purity of intellectual thought” (Curley & Shirley, 2006)

Farrell also highlights the importance of a forming a close friendship. He speaks of collaborative moments that require ultimate trust between the friends,

In these moments, new ideas seem to emerge from the dialogue without ‘belonging’ to either of the pair, and afterward they may not be able to say who had the ideas first…. In an escalating set of exchanges, the collaborative pair develop a set of norms that facilitates trust, openness and exchange…Once these norms are in place, the stage is set for merging cognitive processes.” (Farrell, 2003)

The cognitive merging that is reached from this level of trust and familiarity, then promotes an increase in productivity,

Psychologists have found that familiarity increases productivity and decision making effectiveness…. [The familiar] share a common language and a common set of unspoken understandings. Psychologists call these shared understandings tacit knowledge. (Sawyer, 2007)

This merging of cognitive processes could be likened to sexual reproduction, in that, rather than one idea simply replacing another, two ideas or lineages of thinking can combine to give birth to a completely new one, that idea can again breed to create something new. This merging of cognitive processes Deleuze and Guattari label ‘pensee a deux,’ which Charles J. Stivale translates as ““two fold thought”: thinking, reflection accomplished between “two” individuals, yet something more than a mere duality.” (Stivale, 1998)

Deleuze and Guattari also speak about friendship, or the figure of the ‘Friend’ in their work, ‘What is Philosophy’?

Speaking about the ‘Friend’ as a “conceptual personae” …affirming and yet questioning the signification of “Friend” among the Greeks. These authors apparently understood this concept as a presence that is intrinsic to thought, a condition of possibility of thought itself, a living category, a transcendental lived reality…Taken as concept the “Friend” maintains both the “two-­‐ness” of the relationship and the multiplicity of concepts that it produces, under guises too numerous to enumerate (lover, claimant, rival….) The “Friend” ….is ever present in Deleuze and Guattari’s collaboration. (Stivale, 1998)

Authorship, Subjectivity, the Lone Genius and the Scene.

This third identity that is present in collaborative work presents a way of challenging ideas about artistic identity and authorship in muddying the idea of a

heroic artist figure, the genius, the author. Some want to believe the myth, they lap up stories about the tortured ‘Van Gogh’ figure working alone in some divine avenue of creation, and it’s a much more tellable story than the story of a wealthy, well connected artist who relies on a group of well educated and well connected friends.

Delacroix regularly met France’s literary, political, scientific, social and musical elite, informally exchanging views with them on topics of mutual interest…. but it does raise the question about where Delacroix’s work originated. (Roth, 2005)

And so it also questions whether it could be called collaborative work and whether everything therefore is collaborative. The illuminating ideas that went on to make up The Enlightenment were fuelled by networks of thinkers meeting in coffee houses like the Grand Café in Oxford.

The work of Van Gogh, Renoir and Monet also emerged from closely connected groups of painters and intellectuals. Even the normally considered solo act of writing has its origins in collaboration. We are familiar with sets of creative writers when we think about it, like the ‘Bloomsbury Set’ or Tolkien and C.S. Lewis’ ‘The Inklings’. Even T.S. Elliot’s The Wasteland was so heavily edited by Ezra Pound, that really it should be known as a collaborative work. “The moment of creation involves not only a human being and material stuff, but also other human beings, not necessarily present at the time.” (Roth, 2005) It’s not just in

the arts that this collaborative back-­‐story has been replaced with the lone genius; we can say that any ‘heroes’ of thinking should be considered in this context. Freud would not have been worshipped in the same way if it were not for his scientific collaborations and close network of researchers and colleagues that underpinned his writings. Einstein too worked closely with a number of other mathematicians and scientists, most notably Marcel Grossman. Charles Darwin was in constant written contact with the Welsh scientist Alfred Russell Wallace, and the list goes on. Would any of the above have been able to make their discoveries without this intimate collaboration?

New things have always emerged out of ‘collective scene’ Events, and these are usually the product of apparently unpropitious circumstances. An example of this is perhaps London’s YBA scene of the early 90s that in many ways was the product of an economic crisis, where career stakes were low. The best of this art was not made for any existing curatorial context but was made out of the ‘coming community’ that was the scene Event itself. (Garnett, 2007)

There are many examples of a ‘scene’, where something is happening, something is ‘moving’. There is an intensive energy that can be tapped into, Paris 1910, Zurich 1917, Berlin 1920 and San Francisco 1967. There is a ‘Geist’ of the city that is rendered through the art and music produced. This work then cannot be said to come from one individual person, it is pre-­‐individual, pre personal.

In fact, researchers have discovered that the mind itself is filled with a kind of internal collaboration, that even the insights that emerge when you’re completely alone can be traced back to previous collaborations…. We are drawn to the image of the lone genius whose mystical moment of insight changes the world. But the lone genius is a myth. (Sawyer, 2007)

There is also the schizophrenic multi-­‐voiced, or dialogic nature of how internal thought might work. Bakhtin, in writing about the polyphonic voices that live in the characters of Dostoyevsky’s novels “do a kind of justice to life itself” (Bakhtin, 1984), maybe like the character Golyadkin in Dostoyevsky’s novella “the double” we are all endlessly arguing with ourselves in our own mind, to one degree or another.

If we are all in essence more than one voice in the first place, then fundementally flawed are all those,

…who think that the way to understand human behaviour is to base literal propositions on studies of individuals as isolated countable units. If I am fundamentally constituted as polyphonic, then everything that any scientist, of whatever persuasion, might say about ‘me,’ in isolation from the many voices that constitute me and with which I speak, will be essentially faulty. (Booth, 1984)

The balancing and stabilizing of all these elements in a personality is known as Individuation. The individual must be produced from all these elementary

potentials. This means that the individual is never final, it is always morphing. The concept of collective individuation was suggested and developed by Gilbert Simondon, who had a great influence on the thinking of Gilles Deleuze. Simondon proposes that this individuation can also happen on a group level, to a collective – in this way a group can be just as much an ‘Individual’ as is a single person is. This is where a kind of personality of a city ‘scene’ a ‘buzz’ a ‘vibe’ might develop in a similar way to an individual personality or mood.

So the mind, even in an artist working alone, is forming its own internal collaboration, of its own ideas and of other ideas from meetings, situations, conversations and memories then stitching those into brand new ideas. Working in collaboration with another person increases the capacity for new, unexpected and unpredictable clashes and sparks and therefore the production of new ideas.

This runs counter to the conventional idea of the lonely artist passively waiting for inspiration’s light bulb to be turned on. Such a clichéd figure is deeply embedded in media representations of artists, in market valuations based on authenticity and originality, and in so much public discourse that is generally perceived as “normal” (Green, 2001)

How ever out dated, and incorrect, the idea of the artist as touched by something special and different to everyone else is, however absurd it sounds, and however religious (in that an artist was supposed to be chosen by God to be some kind of divine messenger of aesthetic, form and beauty), the myth is persistent and

indeed almost as persistent as the idea of God himself. We still often hear someone comment something like ‘he has a God given talent’. The artist has also been worshipped at times in holding or seeing some ‘truth’. Simon Critchley has a new book coming out about this kind of faith. He was interviewed for Frieze magazine by Dan Fox regarding art having an ‘uneasy godlessness with a religious memory’, he said,

I think we are prisoners of Romanticism. It goes back to that moment in the late 18th century when, for whatever complex reasons, there’s a shift from religion being able to hold questions of meaning to the aesthetic. The book of God becomes the book of the human being and Romanticism attempts to write a secular Bible. We still expect the artist to be that titanic figure who is divinely inspired and who satisfies our yearning for meaning. Again, why I’m interested in things such as collaboration and collective praxis is because it’s a way of disappointing that expectation. It’s a way of saying there won’t be an artist, there’ll be a plurality of people working in related ways. (Critchley, 2011)

It is good to get away from the idea of a lone genius, someone with divine inspiration; it would be an uncomfortable cross to bear.

Within this [collaborative] context the artists neither claim to possess a superior knowledge that they will deliver to the public, nor do they aim to extract the raw information from the local context and then develop this into an aesthetic form with global purchase. (Papastergiadis, 2008)

It’s difficult to get away from questions of authorship, even if an artist wants to, perhaps impossible. Artists inevitably appear in their art, and need to be aware about the way they appear and how they manipulate this identity. Collaboration is as Charles Green says,

“A special and obvious case of the manipulation of the figure of the artist, for at the very least collaboration involves a deliberately chosen alteration of artistic identity from individual to composite subjectivity. One expects new understandings of artistic authorship to appear in artistic collaborations” (Green, 2001)

Some collaborations have purposely sought to construct artworks as if there is just one single artist or a single author.

Fictionalising is a well-­‐tested method for questioning authorship and one of the more recent additions to the art scene is the curator Daniela Johnson, behind whom a group of curators and artists is concealed, Reena Spauling is both the name of a gallery in New York, run by a collective of artists and the title of a collectively-­‐written novel whose main character bears the same name…A backdrop to most of this is the awareness that collaboration entails contact, confrontation, deliberation and negotiation to a degree, which goes beyond individual work, and that this produces subjectivity differently. (Lind, 2007)

If the buying public still want a heroic solitary figure, a special and unique individual then we can invent one. An on-­‐going project of Griffits & Blackburn is the imaginary artist Turner Thorpe for whom we are constructing a body of, perhaps, more saleable work as a commercial experiment. It goes the other way too, as some artists have given themselves a collaborative name when they are one single person (like Bob and Roberta Smith for example) in order to appear attractive to an art world keen on collaboration and to stir and blur the questions of authorship again.

Relational aesthetics

On of the most hotly debated texts in recent years is Bourriaud’s ‘Relational Aesthetics’. Claire Bishop, Anthony Downey and Stewart Martin are among some of the critics who have fuelled the debate that has raged in Artforum and other art publications. In examining collaborative practice and discussing collaboration and questions of authorship, it is necessary to consider Relational Aesthetics. In fact Anthony Downey calls collaboration the sine qua non of relational art practices. (Downey, 2007)

Relational Aesthetics is a theory of judging and describing artworks on the basis of inter-­‐human relationships, which they exhibit, manufacture, prompt or represent, and in so, noting a turn in art practice toward the inter-­‐human sphere. For Bourriaud, art is a form of social exchange. “What [the artist] produces, first and foremost, is relations between people and the world, by way of aesthetic objects.” (Bourriaud, 2002) Bourriaud mostly looks at art in the 1990’s, and

projects his theory to describe an avant-­‐garde apparently replacing a utopianism of the historical avant-­‐guard. He champions artists whose art functions as experimental in the creation of new social connections and artists who propose “as artworks: a/moments of sociability b/objects producing sociability.” He says, “the liveliest factor that is played out on the chessboard of art has to do with interactive, user-­‐friendly and relational concepts.” (Bourriaud, 2002) Most of the collaborative nature of the artworks he highlights is in a kind of collaboration with the public, or the viewer rather than an artist duo or group. Mackenna & Janssen describe how this actually might work in practice,

…in many cases the ‘social context’ or ‘situation’ can be seen to have replaced the studio as site of process…. “spectator participation” is defined as one of the primary characteristics of current art practice…. [The artists] are interested in the aspect of human inter-­‐relations and employ everyday objects and familiar procedures to encourage interactions (relational), whilst incorporating the participants voices into the work (littoral) but they still remain the editors and directors of the process. (Mackenna & Janssen, 2003)

As a collaborative partnership we share many of the traits of ‘relational’ practices. For Bourriaud Relational Aesthetics is bound up with “spectator participation” or the audience. We consider our own practice to begin from a relational aspect, that exists between ourselves initially, rather than directly with a ‘collaborative audience’.

We value openness, and our work often invites the viewer to desire to become part of our conversation, to ‘get’ it, to be part of our ‘group’.

Bourriaud has been an effective advocate for the contemporary tendency to emphasise process, performativity, openness, social contexts, transitivity and the production of dialogue over the closure of traditional modernist objecthood, visuality and hyper-­‐ individualism. (RCRC, 2007)

We use social situations, conversations and encounters as impulsive starting points for our work. The work can exist in a performative way, fleetingly as a throwaway comment in a motorway service station or on the bus, and only reaches a wider audience via documentary evidence.

It is worth noting that there is not much to actually ‘look’ at in relational art practices, the transitive value of the work being largely placed on the relational interplay, communications and social formations that stem from interaction with the work. (Downey, 2007)

While we find other similarities to RA in our practice, in the sense that art can be the indefinable or the intangible, that conversation or a ‘becoming’ can be part of a practice, it could be argued that by employing something as intangible as

conversation as our medium of choice, we are also nodding toward and possibly revisiting the reduced and dematerialised territory of conceptual art.

Bourriaud widens the definition of relational aesthetics, outlining that these artists are responding to an undercurrent of wide social changes of the conditions and conception of art. He claims that the new relational models are principled responses to the avant-­‐guard concerns of real social misery and alienation, but he acknowledges that the artists he writes about are not concerned with changing the system of social relations, that is, capitalism. It would be one thing if he claimed that RA was no more than the production of modest alleviative gestures, reflecting post-­‐Fordist practices and promoting community et cetera, but he goes further positioning RA as the heir to the avant-­‐ guard, challenging their doctrines. He tries to characterise this kind of art practice as learning to inhabit the world in a better way, but there is no doubt that RA is a form of artistic interpretation of the world that cannot overcome the system of capitalism, and so ultimately RA cannot do what it sets out to do, in replacing the avant-­‐guard.

At most, relational art attempts to model the bandaging of social damage and to patiently re-­‐stitch the social fabric. Through little services rendered, the artists fill in the cracks in the social bond… Undoubtedly, the avant-­‐garde tradition continues to be transformed by its own process of self-­‐critique. But it does not give up the radical, macro-­‐historical aim of a real world beyond capitalist relations. (RCRC, 2007)

We have not been working with avant-­‐guard ideals, whether historical or from a RA perspective. Our more recent work like “Lets just put tape on our heads” (2011) is more performance based, with its roots in conceptual art, even mirroring process art, with the aesthetic ‘art object’ as almost a by-­‐product of the performance.

Claire Bishop has concerns about the output of Relational art practice.

The quality of the relationships in “relational aesthetics” are never examined or called into question. When Bourriaud argues that “encounters are more important than the individuals who compose them,” I sense that this question is (for him) unnecessary; all relations that permit “dialogue” are automatically assumed to be democratic and therefore good. But what does “democracy” really mean in this context? If relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why?” (Bishop, 2004)

If every artist produces relations in some way or another, by being involved in an aspect of interactivity, exchange or participation, then the idea of relational aesthetics becomes so wide, and diluted as to be near pointless, after all looking at a painting is ‘relational’.

Rhizome and Multiplicity

“Multiplicity is arguably Deleuze’s most important concept…it is in the most basic sense a complex structure that does not reference a prior unity” (Roffe 2005) Deleuze uses his idea of multiplicity to hang a lot of his other concepts on.

He develops a notion that any given situation, or anything, is composed of different multiplicities, that form a kind of patchwork ensemble – that patchwork itself is also a multiplicity. Multiplicities are not however parts of a greater whole.

Deleuze and Guattari are discussed prominently throughout Relational Aesthetics. A key concept they speak about is that of the Rhizome. Unlike a traditional tree structure, where a large branch splits into smaller branches, which split into smaller branches still, the Rhizome is literally a mass of roots, all crossing and shooting off in different directions. In this sense a Rhizome is like a network, a “structure that is constantly in process; an indigenous relational form that originates from the ground upwards and repeatedly follows ever-­‐more sinuous channels of development. (Downey, 2007) This intersecting, inter-­‐ connected, growing structure is difficult to map, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “Unlike the graphic arts, drawing or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entranceways and exits and its own lines of flight.” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987)

In Dialogues II, Deleuze talks about conversations, for him conversation is about becomings and these becomings form “orientations, directions, entries and exits.” (Deleuze, 2006) Conversations are an outline of a becoming. Deleuze has concerns about the rhizomatic potential of the question-­‐answer nature of some conversation itself, but favours a coming together of multiplicities, where becomings are not attributable to one individual or another. In this sense and for

us conversation initially serves a valuable purpose, as a breeding ground for the formation of ideas related to our practice as lines respond to each other like the subterranean roots of the rhizome. For us conversation acts as a becoming, an edge of chaos, a place where new multiplicities are created.

Creative functions are completely different, non conformist usages of the rhizome and not the tree type, which proceeded by intersections, crossings of lines, points of encounter in the middle: there is no subject, but instead collective assemblages of enunciation: there are no specificities but instead populations, music-­‐writing-­‐sciences-­‐ audio-­‐visual, with their relays, their echoes, their working interactions. What a musician does in one place will be useful to a writer somewhere else, a scientist makes completely different regimes move, a painter is caused to jump by a percussion: these are not encounters between domains, for each domain is already made up of such domains in itself. There are only intermezzos, intermezzi as sources of creation. This is what a conversation is, and not the talk or the performed debate of specialists among themselves, not even an inter-­‐disciplinarity, which would be ordered in a common project. (Deleuze, 2006)

This crossing of domains, the influences from every corner, again question authorship and the solo figure of the artist and suggest every artist has an integral collaborative aspect to their work.

Collaborative practice as becoming

In this kind of collaborative art practice, the practice itself becomes the artwork. We have been trying to define or name our art practice this year. It seems impossible to pin down for long enough to come up with a little profile type sound-­‐byte that explains where we are, and to enable us to plan where we are going. If we are in a Rhizome, maybe this is why it is so difficult to map, and therefore locate ourselves and so plan a route. How is an art practice located in this Rhizome?

Collaboration is thus essentially unintentional; it cannot be planned or anticipated. When you work with people and depend on their collaboration, you can never plan. You have to feel out what is happening, all kinds of directions, and see what really works (Artforum, 2011)

Sawyer echoes a similar thought in regard to innovation within a group “innovation can’t be planned, it can’t be predicted; it has to be allowed to emerge.” (Sawyer, 2007)

It is evident that we shouldn’t be too concerned about where we are headed, it’s the going there that is important. “What matters on a path, what matters on a line, is always the middle, not the beginning or the end. We are always in the middle of a path, in the middle of something… the question “What are you

becoming?” is particularly stupid. For as someone becomes, what he is becoming changes as much as he does himself.” (Deleuze, 2006)

Deleuze likens an art practice, a constant journey along the Rhizome, ‘a becoming’, to music.

Is it by chance that music only knows lines and not points? It is not possible to produce a point in music. It’s nothing but becomings without future or past. Music is anti-­‐memory. It is full of becomings: animal becoming, child becoming, molecular becoming… It’s like a fixed line, a way of making us perceive all that is there in the image. Absolute speed, which makes us perceive every thing at the same time, can be characteristic of slowness or even immobility. (Deleuze, 2006)

So what are these becomings, what does it mean to become or to be becoming? Becoming is one of the key concepts of Deleuzian writing, and is worthy of a similar length essay in its own right. For him, there is no true identity, and in repeating something it can never be the same, there can only be copies so there can only be difference. Reality is constantly changing, constantly in a state of flux, it cannot be captured in a snapshot and so is a ‘becoming’ rather than a ‘being’. Becoming is a non-­‐linear and dynamic process of change, a changing of nature as a multiplicity expands its connections.

To become is never to imitate, nor “to do like”, nor to confirm to a model. Whether it’s [of] justice or of truth. There is no terminus from which you set out, none which you arrive or which you ought to arrive at, nor are there two terms which are exchanged…. But the embryo, evolution, are not good things. Becoming does not happen in that way. In becoming there is no past, nor future – not even present, there is no history. In becoming it is rather, a matter of involuting: it’s neither regression nor progression. To become is to become more and more restrained, more and more simple, more and more deserted and for that very reason populated. This is what’s difficult to explain: to what extent should one involute. To involute is to have an increasingly economical, restrained step. It is also true for clothes: elegance as the opposite of the overdressed where too much is put on, where something more is always added which will spoil everything. (English elegance against Italian overdressedness.) The same is true of cooking. (Deleuze, 2006)

A minor art practice within an expanded art practice?

Deleuze describes all becomings as becoming ‘minor’. Simon O’Sullivan furthers the thought of becoming as a ‘becoming minor’ in an art practice.

A minor practice must then be understood as always in process, as always becoming – as generating new forms through manipulation of those already in place…. A minor art will involve the production of collaborations, of collectives. (O’Sullivan, 2005)

O’Sullivan is describing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the minor, in relation to contemporary art practice. He goes on to say that a minor practice

…names a form of cultural production from within a dominant culture, a kind of becoming a stranger in ones own tongue…. but a minor art must do more than this. It must also involve invention and creation. It is also this that gives the stuttering and stammering of a minor practice such an inspirational; we might even say hopeful tenor. Put simply, a minor art is involved in the production of new subjectivities as well as in turning away from those already in place…. A minor art is prophetic in this sense: it summons its audience forth. (O’Sullivan, 2005)

So a minor practice is intimately linked with subjectivity, but goes further by creating subjectivities that don’t yet exist, this is part of becoming. O’Sullivan continues:

This then is minor arts future call. It might well speak to an already constituted audience (no doubt a small one) but at the same time it speaks from a future place in order to draw forth from its audience a subjectivity still to come (a subjectivity in progress as it were). This is why often, with art practice, as with jokes, it is a question of getting it – that is to say not necessarily of understanding (what is there to understand anyway) but of being in a certain mode so that the practice works (something is activated by it)…. this is why a successful artwork has the character of an event that always arrives too soon. It is also why so many attempts to interpret art are reductive, clumsy, and redundant. Art outruns any imperative discourse on it, and a minor art in particular (including

sometimes an art scene) always moves at a different speed to those discourses or disciplines that attempt to track it. (O’Sullivan, 2005)

O’Sullivan’s writings describe an expanded art practice too, is this in contradiction to the minor art practice? “The [expanded] practice as the production of different kinds of subjectivities -­‐ and thus of different kinds of actions -­‐ from within the collaboration.” (O’Sullivan, 2005) He describes what is meant by an expanded art practice in a stuttering manifesto-­‐like document called Four Moments/Movements toward an Expanded art practice where he speaks about most of the points we have covered so far in the essay, he says there,

Collaboration. Thinking art practice, an expanded art practice, as a multiplicity – as always more than one but as always, and also, n-­‐l (no leaders, no generals.) An expanded art practice as rhizomatic involving heterogeneity and connectivity composed solely of relations of movement and rest, of slowness and speed. An art practice as precisely a collectivity, and alliance – not based on identity (the identity of the artist, the identity of certain ‘politics’) but on affinity and strategy. An art practice as always a work in progress, the building of an assemblage whose dimension changes as its composition alters – whose outline shifts and shimmers as it moves between milieus, another name for this collaborative process might be friendship (O’Sullivan, 2005)

So an expanded practice is a constantly morphing work in progress, an experimental friendship that moves along the rhizome. O’Sullivan then covers the Joyful Encounters this friendship might produce

This ethics necessarily involves a politics -­‐ inasmuch as affects (for example joy, produced by two compatible bodies conjoining, or sadness, the opposite) lead to an increase or decrease in a body’s potential to act in the world. Ethics is the name for the art of organising specifically joyful, i.e. productive, encounters. Another name for this is experimentation (i.e. an expanded art practice). (O’Sullivan, 2005)

And finally he touches again, as with the minor practice, on the expanded practice’s future call;

As such an expanded practice in its practice becomes a machine for creativity, a machine for the production of new archives, new kinds of thought, and new kinds of action. An expanded practice in this sense is both, and at the same time, a critique of the present and a call to the future. (O’Sullivan, 2005)

Flow, Improvisation, Play

So how are new kinds of thought and action, how is this expanded practice, best promoted and fostered? We return to the concept of collaborative friendship again. “Friendship is a shortcut to play…. it gives us a sense of trust and it allows us then to take the kind of creative risks we need to.” (Brown, 2008)

Playfulness helps us get to better creative ideas, in that it helps us explore possibilities and to change intended purposes, to reclassify objects, to rethink, to interact, to experiment. Play prompts us to improvise. I’m talking about a serious kind of play, (that’s not to say it is without humour), a play that is aware of what it’s doing, a play that acts as a rehearsal for the next time we play.

The highest performers are those who engage in deliberate practice – as they’re doing a task, they’re constantly thinking about how they could be doing it better, and looking for lessons they can use next time. The key is to treat every activity as a rehearsal for next time. (Sawyer, 2007)

Improvisation is crucial to an ever-­‐changing art practice as work in progress, to a becoming. In a way, planning here is also important. As contradictory as it may sound we need to plan to not plan. We mean we plan to improvise, plan to play. We need to set up the conditions for successful creative and improvisational production. We have to be in the zone. We have to be in the flow, part of the scene.

“To foster improvised innovation, the conditions for group flow must be created” (Sawyer, 2007) This group flow is what Sawyer likens to a Basketball team, that all know exactly where one another is or a tight Jazz group that are able to improvise as if they were scripted. He calls the tendency for people to look at improvisation as planned or even scripted, as ‘Script Think’.

Problems with collaboration

So are there any other problems to be explored or developed, with collaboration as a way of working? We have been fortunate that we were allowed to work in collaboration during our Bachelors and Masters degrees, not all schools might allow this; and indeed most of the literature and prospectuses available online for art courses in higher education focus on a the development of the self or the individual, with maybe a collaborative module thrown in for good measure.

For collaboration to become a viable mode of operation, there first of all has to be a prevalent conception of art that allows for collaborative practice…. if you believe that art is 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…. such a conception of art needs to be common within art schools…they tend to assume one collaborator has all the ideas while the other one just comes along for the ride, and [they]always want to find out which one is which. (Barnett, n.d.)

So if we were to change the system, we should look to make,

…an art school [that] doesn’t primarily teach art but creates the preconditions for creative work and by extension, for collaboration and social engagement, [and so] concentrate more on the preconditions for collaboration, motivation and methods, than on analysing the resulting art projects. (Billing et al., 2007)

But it will take time, not everyone is able to study in such a collaborative way as we have been able,

Still, only the most enlightened universities allow for collaborative MFAs. And the culture of sharing is not well aligned with the corporatisation of the academy. Faculty are still denied tenure because they put their aces on the collaboration card. (Lovink & Scholz, 2007)

As an aside, there are numerous issues with the way art or the arts is taught in primary and secondary school too, we might all be better communicators and collaborators, and have better and more creative ideas, if from an early age art and collaboration was taught with the same enthusiasm, and on the same esteemed footing with maths and the sciences (rather than as an ornamental addition). If the ability to work in groups and communicate was as encouraged and praised as much as individual academic achievement is, we would be better preparing children for an ever more networked world. We are still preparing them for a Victorian industrial world that doesn’t exist anymore, and we need to widen our focus from the individual. (Robinson, 2006) We have already learned that the idea of the lone genius is a myth, what matters in a society is not how clever the individuals are, in fact it’s almost irrelevant, but rather what matters is how well people are communicating their ideas, cooperating and collaborating.

While we are on the thought, perhaps the broadcast model of teaching in university and school is also becoming out-­‐dated and we should start to look at ways to encourage a more collaborative, networked model for learning in general across all subject areas? (Tapscott & Williams, 2010)

Another issue that is mentioned with regard to collaborative art practice is that “while the prominence of collaborative artistic practice is now unmistakable, the status of its aesthetic value and its social effects are very much in dispute” (Roth, 2005) Is this just because as Downey said earlier, “it is worth noting that there is not much to actually ‘look’ at in relational art practices” (Downey, 2007) or because of the arguments surrounding whether this relational aspect is an aesthetic in itself and if so what value that holds?

The document often features as the thing to ‘show’ in our work.

While the projects are usually documented, the status of the documentary text or image also blurs the conventional distinction between a purely aesthetic art object, and a factual document… However, these collaborative social practices and even their attendant documentary forms provoke serious methodological questions for art criticism. (Papastergiadis, 2008)

Anthony Downey mentions the difficulty that criticism may have in this way

The fact of collaborative and participative-­‐based practices in contemporary art has certainly become more notable of late, and with this other more immediate concerns have emerged too, not least the sense that contemporary critical discourses are struggling to both criticise and, indeed, support such practices. (Downey, 2009)

For Rene Gabri, while it is important to experiment with how we work together collaboration can’t be an end in itself, there has to be something more.

One obvious problem [is that] collaboration is often celebrated as if it was an end in itself. In this case collaboration is seen as some kind of objective in itself. So I feel I am standing at a crossroads. On the one hand I recognise the importance of our experiments with working, sharing, being with others, the necessity of these investigations into new modes of cooperation and collectivity, on the other, I find them to be insufficient when presented as ends. (Gabri, 2007)

Simon Critchley perhaps shares some of these sentiments,

What sense can we make of collaboration as an artistic practice? Part of it is an almost mystical idea of the group, what Sartre called the ‘group-­‐in-­‐fusion’. I’m looking at a number of artists associated with what has been branded ‘relational aesthetics’, as well as the idea that collaboration – anonymity – is sustained by a faith that something will come about through those processes. Artistically and politically, the avant-­‐garde has always been concerned with figuring ideas of the group based around a kind of faith. (Critchley, 2011)

So you can’t escape some sort of faith or belief that what you are doing has a point. Then of course there is no guarantee that specifically collaborative work is intrinsically better than other types either.

Is collaboration a ‘better’ method which produces ‘better’ results? ….The motivation to collaborate is that it has to result in something that would otherwise not take place, it simply has to make possible that which is otherwise impossible… collaboration can be just as efficient as smoke screens as they might be methods that generate generosity and solidarity. The crux lies in specificities, in the precision of the ‘there and then’, the consideration of time, context and other forces in order to elaborate on when collaborations work and when they don’t. The grey zones where it ‘sort of works’ or ‘half-­‐doesn’t work’, are large, and yet collaborative methods are ever more often opted for. (Lind, 2007)

Where to then In Conclusion?

So collaboration is not without its own inherent issues, and certainly raises some difficult questions for artists and the critics tracking the art world. These problems alone are reason enough for us to decide to collaborate or work together, but also as we have discussed there are advantages to collaboration in creative thinking. We have a faith that collaboration allows us an opportunity to go beyond our own knowledge and participate in new avenues and indeed cul-­‐ de-­‐sacs of work.

For us then maybe where it sort of works or half doesn’t work is more interesting anyway, and that is surely a part of impulse, or improvisation, work in progress and the rhizome. We are aiming to make interesting mistakes. If you are not prepared to be wrong, you can never come up with anything original. The improvisational nature of the practice means that there will be many dead ends, perhaps more misses than hits, but the misses are not failures necessarily, and the hits might just be phenomenal. “There can be no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond”. (Bishop, 2006)

We will continue to channel flick and record where art theory and criticism might cross over with our practice, searching out emerging areas of theory. We will continue to make experiments in working together, and to examine the friendship. We will delight in dismantling the myth of the lone genius and in looking for the Geist, and revel in the polyphonic nature of us as individuals, and as a pair. Our work will naturally continue to question subjectivity, but we must be aware that collaboration cannot be enough on its own. We will continue along the lines of the Rhizome, we will continue to become. We will continue to improvise and to play.

For a work to be successful it has to stop the conversation, and open a new one. The conversation needs to catch up. It needs to be open to dialogue and discussion, and for this it needs interaction, and collaboration. In our practice there will always be at least one witness that something new has occurred.

Recent artistic collaborations also seem to articulate an aesthetic that values exchange and flow and this, I think, is the dimension that is genuinely new…neither the formal qualities of the material or the conceptual ambitions of its organisation seem as important as the dynamics of the particular relationships it mediates, whether these are between the artists and the work, work and viewers, or all of the above…. Collaboration means that the practice can be more ambitious, complex, diverse, [and] possibly even more stable than would be possible for an artist working alone. (Roth, 2005)

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