Artspace MackayIt’s impossible to address the issue of collaboration in the creation of artists’ books without acknowledging collaborative trends more broadly in the arts practice of the Twentieth Century.
(My colleagues have spoken specifically about certain examples of collaboration through their own practice and made certain observations from within their experience of working with another artist, poet or craftsperson. Their territory; the heritage of artist and printer/or artist and binder, is well covered.)
My paper will look at collaboration in the Twentieth Century, particularly as it emerged in the late 1960’s. I’ll examine the intent underlying these collaborations and I’ll ask whether the same intent is evident in collaborative artists’ books. I’ll do this by presenting some of my own collaborative works, (and perhaps by looking at the conclusions drawn by my fellow panellists), and by drawing on some literature from the field.
The image you see on the screen is from a performance of a collaborative book Eye to Eye Hand to Hand that Marko Koludrovic and I made in 1993.
Our A4 book, was an invitation to collaborate, to join the game, to cut up the pages and release a set of playing cards and to enclose them in a box also to be released with the assistance of a pair of scissors, from the front page of our book. Our book was one of a set enclosed in the collaborative portfolio/book, Place in Context, a project supported by the VACB, exploring aspects of living and working on the North Coast of NSW.
We took intimate, close-up photographs of the faces and the hands of a number of artists and we inserted these underneath the standard playing card face, more or less at random but with a wry awareness of matching our colleagues with the characters of the cards. When we had matched hands and faces to the card suits, we took a red and a black texta and began a word game, a dialogue between the two of us, to place a single word onto each card.
I will return later to speak of our intent in making this collaborative work.
Cynthia McCabe writing in the introduction to her 1984 text Artistic Collaboration in the Twentieth Century describes collaboration as a vital component of the avant-garde and identifies this is as the reason for the paucity of literature on collaborative practice and the subsequent marginalised position occupied by collaborative works in art history. In 1984 collaborative work was not getting a lot of press; was not making its way into the established canon.
This however belies a very significant amount of collaborative activity throughout the Twentieth Century, including for example works by the Dadaists and the Surrealists, principal among which were the Exquisite Corpse work. These were described by Andre Breton as being conceived in a radical attempt to ‘send the mind’s critical mechanism away on vacation, fully releasing its metaphorical potentialities’ (Andre Breton, ‘The Exquisite Corpse, Harper & Row 19720 p.288). The intent of these work practices was generally to challenge accepted conventions and to engage with the subconscious as a mechanism for making art.
Since the late 1960’s, a number of artists in Europe and America have challenged the notion of the lone, isolated, inspired genius artist and embarked on a sustained period of collaborative practice that has altered the terms of artistic identity. Charles Green in his 2001 book The third hand; collaboration in art from conceptualism to postmodernism observes that the shared authorship which was a product of collaboration was a strategy to convince the audience of new understandings of art and identity. He writes ‘There was a transition from the conception of artistic identity (what an artist is/was) from one where the artist was the creator of autonomous art objects (that could be appreciated, purchased, identified etc) to a conception of the ‘artist’ as a figure emerging from different production methods, not as a the creator of art objects unified by his/her signature style. The artist figure was a tool, and (was) neither truth nor a presence encoded at the core of the artist work’ (p. 189)
Collaboration was a strategy to break the nexus between the artist and their production. In the space that was opened up (following the expulsion of the artist), art could return to the realm of ideas, of social action etc.
Green uses a number of examples to illustrate his argument that collaborative practices were attempts to negate identity and to severe the authorial connection. The clearest example is the work of Art & Language,(a group consisting intermittently of Ian Burn, Mel Ramsden, Joseph Kosuth, Charles Harrison and Michael Baldwin). But there are many examples of collaboration where art was an idea, not the product of an individual;
Gilbert & George
Marina Abramovic and Ulay
The Boyle family
the Starn twins
the Wilson sisters
Group Irwin
Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Komar & Melamid
Some of these collaborative ventures replaced the role of the artist with a corporate identity, others like Abramovic and Ulay were sustained attempts to fuse the identity of two artists into a third hand. Others were an attempt to move from an ego-based to a community -based function.
The critical question of whether these collaborative groups successfully severed the authorial connection or not remains a moot point for my presentation today. It is sufficient to record that this was their intent.
Robert Hobbs, who contributed a chapter to the McCabe book, introduces an example of collaboration pertinent to this forum. He refers to an incident where artists David Salle and Julian Schnabel did what artists often do; they exchanged a work, swapped a painting with a friend. Upon receipt of the work from Salle, Schnabel reversed the sequence of the panels in the diptych and painted a portrait of Salle over one panel, (using Salle’s open linear style of markmaking). Hobbs describes the resultant work as ‘a dialogue between artists’. He writes ‘With collaborative art we can no longer assume that we are having an aesthetic meditation on the distilled sensibility of one person.’ (p85)
Robert Hobbs notes in conclusion that collaboration is so open-ended and all pervasive that it is often not consciously recognised. He uses the term collaboration to describe the exchange critics have with artists, artists have with other artists, artists have with viewers, and all of us have with history. Hobbs moves collaboration from a position of marginality to one of being the conduit through which culture develops.
I want to turn my attention now to the intent of my own collaborative endeavours and to conclude with some remarks about the sort of collaborations that books appear to encourage.
Place in Context was a collaborative book where each artist could have been considered as contributing a chapter. Marko and I in our chapter Eye to Eye, Hand to Hand, had wanted to reflect the relationships and connections between artists working together (in this case in the Visual Arts department at Southern Cross University), as a way of acknowledging the influences and exchange of ideas between us and to reflect on the fact that the work which was emerging from that place was as much about the influence of people as about a response to a particular site or place
While playing with that pack of cards, the players held in their hands, new configurations of influence, and new textual compositions. Each hand of cards could be read as writing a new page in our book.
In terms of authorship of the project, it was impossible by the end of the project to remember who created which card, whose word finished each card. Our hands, our faces are in there along with those of our friends. To return to Green; the project did subjugate authorship to idea. (but I must add that the project is remembered by all who participated as belonging to Marko and I, simply because we had the audacity to use ‘newsagent’ lime green cardboard as a background colour to some of our pages. )
The next project I wanted to show you is part of a 2001 collaboration with Stephen Spurrier, who is building a reputation as one of Australia’s most significant collaborative book artists (certainly as measured in terms of the number of collaborators with which he has worked, and possibly in terms of the number of collaborative books he has produced).
One of the books we made was: Vegetable poem #1(love). This tiny intimate book measures 7cm x 5 cm.
let me read it to you:
Vegetable Poem #1(Love) was constructed as a dialogue between Stephen and I. We sent bits and pieces back and forth before we settled on the images, rhythm & the format. This collaborative book is a dialogue – but this doesn’t truly do it justice. It was as much a sparring match, a running joke, a play with the form of the book.
Many of the collaborative books that I have observed are a dialogue (as Hobbs suggests), and sure it doesn’t matter in the end whose lines are who, it is in fact the articulation of an idea (as Green suggests). I contend though that the book structure – its temporal nature, its presence in time, its ability to roll out ideas, to track and trace their development, and to present them as dialogue, as chat, as very human exchange is one of the reasons that the book is so well suited to collaborative practice. I suggest that it is this very human wish to engage in conversation, to make an utterance and receive a response that is the intent of more collaborative book artists, than any primary wish to make ourselves disappear.
