NOTES ON COLLABORATION

In collaboration, which is to say, “when things are made-together” the roles of the artist, the artwork and the audience are modified, but in some senses remain very much the same.

The following statement is provocative: “The artist, artwork and audience are traditionally different from one another. Collaboration suggests these roles are reducible to one.” If we are to agree, we might think that collaboration is in some way transgressive to something traditional. That the field of production and consumption set up by collaboration breaks with the ‘traditional’ conception of art. But is this all that happens?

In making-art-together, an artist’s nose can be both firmly pressed against the canvas while the artist is simultaneously standing back looking at the painting. This is time travel.

An artist may be able to be the audience for his work. And an audience can readily become an artwork. We know this from art history. But there is something wrong with this description, if we are to believe that collaboration offers something distinctly different from working alone? Might there also be something wrong with the description of art history?

Collaboration causes mayhem in auction rooms. A painting by Rubens alone has a fixed price. A collaborative work between Rubens and another talented yet unknown Flemish painter (say one of his studio assistants) is cast aside as problematic. Even though the painting has all the beauty of a Rubens, yet is in some sense different. The painting can only be readmitted to the sale when its identity can be more clearly marked. Art historians are brought in to decide how much of this painting is really Rubens. An Auctioneer might ask “what percentage of this is a ‘safe-buy’ and what percentage is a risk?”

The identity of individual artists are blurred in collaboration in the sense of all of the colours on a palette mixing together indiscriminately. Yet collaboration is not a one-way path. When making-together the (metaphorical) artists/colours are both mixed and remain distinct from one another.

When looking at a collaborative work, one is inclined to ask of an artist “which bit did you do?”

Alternatively an audience might divide up a work in an imaginary way and claim “I liked the bits by A, but I’m not so sure about the influence of B, I think it ruins it.”

Semiotic understanding requires art to have a materiality that is transmissible and authored thereby anchored in time and space.

Collaboration offers sanctity in hiding. Those who submit to the pagan faith of togetherness opt to share the riches and to share the blame as if they were sharing blood.

Lets take for example, the Romanesque cathedrals, which remain monuments of anonymity. One should not question the role of the individual when comprehending the whole of these buildings. In this work it is clear that there is evidence of fear and rage in the modern ideological mode of art, which calls for simultaneous desire to be an artist and be alive. The separation of identity and object was understood intuitively and scholastically in the Middle Ages.

Yet, for semiotics anonymity is an anathema. The untitled is welcome it is the floating signifier. But the unsigned, the unuttered, the un-thought clogs the machine of semiotic processing, passing through it like air. Art that has an artist behind it is always safe, always reassuring and managerial. Therefore claims such as “anything that has a signature is not art” disrupt the logic of representation.

Art made from a collaboration always has a signature, a hallmark. There is often the request for collaborative groups to refine a name, one that can be easily remembered. This request is rooted in fear.

Imagine a novel written by 100 authors. This novel, to remain a novel would have to hold on to some of the rules of the novel. It is conceivable that the novel be millions of pages long, yet it is unlikely. It is most likely that this novel be approximately 200 pages long and fit well with other novels on a bookshelf.

The surplus value of a collaborative product, is equivalent to the product made by the individual, there is no difference.

Again, collaboration curves time. An individual artist may be inclined toward blue, yet another likes red, the first may well adopt the view that red is more suitable. A collaboration can have more than one favourite colour at any one time.

Collaborators cannot hold a collaborative passport, is this an issue to do with border control?

There are two types of collaboration: One, which can be worked by the individual and one, which subsumes all individuals. In the case of the latter the individual is dominated by the collaboration, to be repressed, also to believe that he is nothing. In as much, he becomes one with his oppressor.

Collaborators may gasp in ecstasy when they reach a euphoric horizon, coming face to face with this thing called ‘collaboration’. This is a religious description.