You have to stop being what you were when you start paying attention to the work it takes to maintain your clear distinctions – B.C. Smith
To my still much missed grandma, the term “collaborator” would have meant something very different to the sense in which I use it.
When I think of her, I see myself looking up at a tiny lady waving at me from the umpteenth floor window of a communist grey block of flats in a small Polish town. My gran – my “babcia” – was one of the small but brave millions caught up in World War II. To her generation, a “collaborator” was a very bad person indeed.
I am happy to see this sense of the word fading and even happier to extol its positive aspects; but still, the murkier account of its meaning lingers…
Why is this bothering me now? It’s because of the current social climate: life feels particularly difficult at the minute, so we are all desperate to protect our own interests – it’s hard to think about other people when you’re worried about yourself. What if the work dries up? How will the rent get paid? What if things get worse?
Counter-intuitive though it might seem, in this currently precarious situation we should be more aware than ever of how our actions and connections affect others. This is as true for the legions of jobbing artists, who will increasingly come to rely on – and answer to – private sector funding, as it is further up the power chain for the problematic collaboration that is the governmental coalition.
When it comes to collaboration, there has to be a balance between getting what you want out of it AND not letting the side down – otherwise you might as well go off and build yourself a bubble to live in.
Thank you Dan Thompson – I am incredibly flattered… I read your comments and now feel guilty that last week’s post was, in essence, a press release. What can I say? I was excited about the big opening! Whilst I’m on the thank yous, extra big ones to everyone at Metal last Wednesday.
Opening on the 180th Anniversary of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, inside the buildings of the oldest existing passenger railway station still in use, “Dream Machine” will celebrate the first journey taken between two cities through a series of large-scale works which reflect on time, routine, repetition, direction and discipline; qualities that all inform the artistic process.
A reflection of the beat and rhythm of train traffic and influenced by the idea that the rail industry’s timetabling created a need for a uniform measure of time throughout the UK, the work will show how the journey itself can be a source for artistic inspiration.
It’s nearly show time! On Wednesday I went to Metal to install “Down”. By the time I arrived, it was already a hive of activity: Phil was busy finishing his sculptural structures; Tom was up miles of scaffolding sorting the lighting for his thousands of paintings and Richard was completing his installation upstairs – the work in the show is pretty diverse, but it all comes together amazingly well. The unusual layout and the history of Edge Hill’s building is a massive bonus – it’s not a typically sterile gallery space at all, it feels special.
I love the giddy but purposeful atmosphere of a space just before a show. It’s a shame that Ailis (the composer I have collaborated with on “Down”) wasn’t there to see it all coming together in the final stages (though she had an excellent excuse – she was away at yet another premiere of her work… I thought I worked hard till I met Ailis http://ailis.info/).
When I asked Ailis if she had a score for the music she’s made to accompany “Down”, I think she thought it wouldn’t be of interest to anyone else, but it’s definitely worth seeing… it’s a small peek into the way her mind works – a bit like having a chance to look through an artist’s sketchbook. Given how few people actually hand write scores anymore, it’s also quite unusual.
Dream Machine is showing between 15/09/2010 – 23/10/2010
Metal, Edge Hill Station, Tunnel Road, Liverpool L7 6ND
http://www.metalculture.com/liverpool/
After being in a photographic studio over the weekend watching “Sit Gena Rowlands” being expertly photographed by Donna Kempson (thanks Donna!), it struck me that one of the best things about being an artist is having imagination, which makes it impossible to be lonely or bored. I don’t get tired of looking at people or objects and trying to see the world from these alternative perspectives. What would it be like to be you? Or you? Or it? How would I feel if I was a book, a chair, a map, a rope?
Because my solo work is always indebted to people I admire (whether they are artists or not), I don’t even really see it as “solo” work: it’s a linked set of practices, a chain which starts with other people’s words, actions and deeds and stretches out across time and space in order to be translated into a different form by a different person. There isn’t another way of making work which makes sense to me.
As I’ve been thinking about collaboration in general for quite a while now, I want to call the aforementioned chain-like process “indirect collaboration”, but it might be more accurate to call it “tradition”… which makes it all the more curious that when it comes to presenting ourselves as artists “in our own right”, the more instantly recognisable the individual artist brand, the longer the chain of people behind it.
I have only ever had one really bad collaborative experience…
Project participants were put into pairs. It was organised so that artists who didn’t know each other were put together and given a week in which to work towards a joint project.
I was given the name of the artist I would be paired up with before we met and I did a bit of research with the aim of arriving with several ways in which we might work together – our practices were very different, which made it all the more exciting.
After a couple of days it looked like the other artist wasn’t really into it. This person was a fairly new graduate, full of enthusiasm for making work, but unfortunately, only for making their own work. Finally, after a long day of awkward conversation and even more awkward silence, this person admitted that they had only agreed to the project so that they could utilise the big space we were working in and that “I just want to get on with my own work”. It was incredibly disappointing, so I gave up. It takes a lot for me to give up, but there just wasn’t any point… sometimes it’s best to walk away – you can’t force something that’s not there.
I was reminded of that bad collaboration this past week when I watched an example of a “new” advertising genre, the “promercial”. Amongst advertisers, it has been hailed as a fresh, 21st century type of collaboration, though it turned out to be a bland advert much like any other. The premise is that the video for Faithless’ new song has been created with Fiat, so rather than the odd bit of product placement, the star of their music video is the car. Apart from the sad state of desperation that this represents, what upsets me about it is the wasted collaborative opportunity – the ad seems to serve little purpose except to mislead the viewing public that today’s creative people have neither virtuosity nor scruples. It struck me as a small reflection of the government’s “Big Society” plan which is about to swallow us all whole: a society in which there is no room for creativity, imagination, vision or, unlike other circumstances, the opportunity to walk away.
