by Jon Lackman | 27 April 2009 | Books, Contemporary
Collaboration, among artists as well as between artists and audiences, has interested numerous artists and art historians in recent years.
In the February 2006 Artforum article, “Social Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Claire Bishop wrote:
Artists are increasingly judged by their working process—the degree to which they supply good or bad models of collaboration … 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. While I am broadly sympathetic to that ambition, I would argue that it is also crucial to discuss, analyze, and compare such work critically as art.
This occasioned a long response in the following issue from Grant Kester. In 2007, Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette edited the volume Collectivism after Modernism: the art of social imagination after 1945. In their preface, they describe their book as the continuation of a project that began with a 2004 letter to Artforum by Sholette, who upbraided certain contemporary proponents of collaboration for attempting to “revamp the political rebelliousness of group artistic practice.”
Last October, the Guggenheim mounted the widely-reviewed exhibition theanyspacewhatever, a “a collaborative venture among ten artists … tempering the authority of a singular artistic vision.”
And Holly Crawford has recently edited a book Artistic bedfellows: histories, theories and conversations in collaborative art practices, which includes articles by scholars as well as short texts by artists (and an interview with Bishop). It concludes with emails from the four-person Austrian collaborative Gelitin:
We met on a bus which was going on the only highway we then had in Austria. At a gasstop where all we kids went for a piss, we locked ourself into a toilet and did our first performance “fake sex.” We played a long time and the bus left without us. Since then we have been together.
The “Transpedagogy” panel at MoMA next week seems relevant as it includes both Bishop and Kester: http://moma.org/visit/calendar/events/1724