The Collaborator

I have been thinking about my favourite artistic collaborations…

Christo & Jeanne-Claude
particularly Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin (1971-1995)

Politics aside, Jeanne-Claude and Christo’s claim that “All our work is about freedom” is also interesting to consider in relation to the act of collaboration itself… perhaps artistic freedom cannot be found in solo work; however counterintuitive that might sound? By its very nature, (artistic) freedom needs to be expansive, it needs a language and what’s the point of a language if only one person speaks it? http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/wr.shtml

Michael Rosen & Quentin Blake
The Sad Book (Walker Books, 2004)

Probably the most perfect visual collaboration I can think of. http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/sadbook.html

Werner Herzog (director) & Klaus Kinski (actor)
particularly Wojzeck (1979) and Fitzcarraldo (1982)

What happens when you can’t stand the person you are collaborating with, but you know that what you create together is amazing? At what point does the collaboration stop being worth the anger and the stress? I can’t even begin to imagine how I would undertake a collaboration with someone I don’t get along with; but then I have never had the misfortune to be either an actor or director – neither side of that power relationship appeals to me.

Leopold & Rudolph Blaschka
particularly Glass Flowers (1887-1936)

This father and son produced beautiful, intricate and surprisingly life-like glass models of invertebrates and flowers. The romantic in me is drawn to the fact that the secret of their craft died with them – an appropriate analogy for the unique nature of collaboration. For an overview of their work see http://designmuseum.org/design/leopold-rudolf-blaschka.

Gilbert & George
particularly The Nature of Our Looking, video sculpture (1970)

I don’t know if they are lovers, but I have always assumed that Gilbert and George are partners in every way. Do they not get sick of each other? We will never know; they allow us to see them, but not know them – they really are sculptural in that sense and the mystery is appealing. I would really like to undertake an artistic collaboration with my partner (a painter), but every time we try, it doesn’t work. Our working methods are just too different. Whereas I “see” a finished piece in my mind’s eye and then try to make it reality, my partner’s paintings come about in a more fluid, wending kind of way. We’ve recently started talking again about how we might work together and have come up with a possible solution, perhaps because of the subject matter of his recent work: “My recent paintings are populated by groups of individuals coming together to grasp at some kind of understanding of their surroundings.”

Rineke Dijkstra
The Buzzclub, Liverpool, UK/Mysteryworld, Zaandam, NL (1996-7)

Not a collaboration in the sense of creative practitioners working together to create a finished piece, but this is still collaborative work – impossible without the teenagers who agreed to participate. Perhaps I secretly like this because it reminds me of the now long gone together/alone feeling of clubbing? Maybe my current interest in collaboration allows me to find that together/alone feeling in a different way?

As I am currently gearing up for exhibiting the collaboration I have been working on with composer Ailis ni Riain (http://ailis.info) in September, I’m having a small pause for thought about how it all began.

Ailis originally got in touch with me after seeing the work in a solo show I had at Southwell Artspace, Nottinghamshire (now sadly closed thanks to the recession’s bite). The show – called “Flashback” – brought together 14 altered book works; I had sculpted the books into the shape of fires. My aim with these works was to draw a parallel between the way that knowledge is disappearing thanks to books being outmoded by the internet and the knowledge that has disappeared due to the various book burnings that have occurred throughout history. As is often the case when you are so focussed on what you want to say with your work, you forget that other people will inevitably have their own unique take on it. So, I was taken aback when Ailis contacted me to say that when she saw my pieces, she “heard music” and would I like to collaborate? After finding out a bit more about her and her work, I had to say a chuckling yes to that – I am one of the least musical people I know – as I was intrigued to find out what it would be like to work with a composer.

Ailis had recently completed her “Lighthouse Lullaby” project (www.bigartmob.com/view/4857/singing-lighthouse) and was keen to site more music in public spaces. She had spotted a place she liked the look of in city centre Manchester – a closed off part of Victoria train station – and we began to discuss potential ideas. By a massive stroke of luck I had recently acquired an almost complete set of UK Ordnance Survey maps (circa 1970s), as I had rescued them from being thrown away at my local library. Because our project was shaping up to have a travel/journeys/train theme, the maps seemed to be a good starting point. Looking back now from a nearing-project-completion standpoint, they seem an appropriate symbol of the long road we’ve travelled in order to reach this point…

In late January, I was contacted by a local gallery officer who asked me if I would be interested in creating a text based show. The plan was for me to design an exhibition based on the work of local writers who had written responses to artworks in the gallery’s permanent collection: my role would be to “translate” their work into a visual form, keeping some sort of textual element in each. There were thirteen texts in all and they were a mixture of short stories, poems and essays.

I agreed to the project even after discovering that my timeframe was very short. Due to a gallery programming mishap, I had just two weeks to acquaint myself with the texts, produce ideas, create the translations and design the space. Although I knew it would be stressful, I was actually looking forward to the challenge, as my own work usually takes so long to make (my latest piece, “Sit Gena Rowlands”, has taken well over a year to finish) and so a short, sharp shock was appealing.

As both time and budget were tight I had to look for simple, effective ways of getting across the essence of each piece of writing. This was relatively easy with the texts which were descriptive, but far more difficult when the works were not obviously visual and more contemplative in nature. I was wary that a show full of text pieces had the potential to look quite flat, so although there was a digital projection and a couple of large prints, the show also contained texts-as-objects: huge balloons, bunches of keys, sloganned t-shirts, lazertranned bricks, a beautiful old typewriter, a word game frozen in time and a whispered, looped sound piece.

The project was an example of “indirect collaboration” as mentioned in an earlier post – although I wasn’t working with any of the writers face to face, I had to consider them and their ideas before my own. I didn’t want the work to look like mine, I wanted it to seem as though each piece of writing had somehow disguised itself as another art form. I wanted each “translation” to seem almost natural, so that when each writer was confronted with the visualisation of their writing, they might be surprised, but not feel misunderstood or maligned. The sense of obligation weighed down on me more than it has during other projects; perhaps this was partly due to the stress of the short timescale, but it was mainly down to the fact that I was having to try and argue against myself on the writers’ behalf, which stopped me from creating lazy responses, but which was also a very strange (though rewarding) way of working.

“I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself king of infinite space…”

Shakespeare (Hamlet)

I love manifestos. They are a very useful tool for collaboration – in fact, Tenneson and Dale write one for each piece of work we make. As far as this collaboration is concerned, the manifesto has a practical purpose, as it forces us to consolidate our ideas in a coherent fashion, and, as we don’t necessarily meet on a regular basis, it becomes a useful marker of where we want to get to. The act of writing down what our project will be in a pre-determined format makes sure that we consider the work from every angle. (I had an MA tutor who was very fond of telling me that “Writing is thinking” and I’ve added that rule to my many others.) T&D’s manifesto writing purposely matches the pre-determined nature of the work we make, “We do not impose the order, the order is imposed on us” is what we have concluded and so we have made many manifestos (and subsequent artworks) about the rules at large that bind us. We have chosen to fight rules sarcastically… with rules.

When working in a solo capacity, rules don’t necessarily need to be stated, or perhaps even considered, as they will inherently be part of your own working method. It might well go without saying that you will always make sculpture because that is what you made a decision to do a long time ago and that is now your area of expertise BUT because collaboration opens up distinctly new possibilities, your usual unquestioned focus (which seems natural) might need shifting, or even re-thinking altogether.

Although it seems counter-intuitive, what fascinates me about making rules is that they force you to become more creative. What is even better about this when specifically applied to the creation of artworks is that, unlike other creative fields, such as design, you don’t have the pressure of finding the useful, correct or sensible solution. When Cherry and I grind together our chosen ingredients of politics, minimalism and signage, we have no-one to answer to other than ourselves and so we are therefore free to do what we please, safe in the knowledge that our manifesto backs it all up. The manifestos are a point of departure and not restrictive – were we to have no rules at all, we would most likely be paralysed by possibility and stop working altogether.

Tenneson and Dale originally wanted to try working together because we both shared an interest in text as art… I was making artist’s books at the time and Cherry was making signs: the use of language in her work aimed to undermine the authority of the institutional signage she appropriated; whereas I was obsessed with re-arranging existing texts to make new ones.

In late 2004, we met up several times and talked about text works that we liked, such as Bruce Nauman’s neons; Jenny Holzer’s t-shirts and posters; Joseph Kosuth’s Whitney Museum exhibition and a whole load of Fluxus bits and bobs; but the more we talked about text and how to use it in a collaborative way, the more stuck we became. We both had such definite views on how it should be used that we couldn’t compromise at all.

We had also decided that it was important to have a goal to work towards and so we were aiming to put together a joint proposal for the 3^rd “Crosby Homes Art Prize” which was coming up in Manchester. So, we had the will to work together and a deadline to work towards, but the initial spark of an idea had gone out.

It became clear that the idea of using text would have to be abandoned and then, as often happens, at the point of giving up an idea you have stubbornly clung onto, better ideas start to emerge. We looked again at our individual working practices; despite being ostensibly text driven, they were really very different: Cherry worked by reacting to site, whereas I usually started with an amorphous idea.

In the end, what started the ball rolling was a silly bit of word-play. We talked again about our work: Cherry’s signs were orders; I liked putting things in order, and one of us – I can’t remember who – said “ORDER ORDER!” mimicking what you can often hear being grumbled in broadcasts from the Houses of Parliament.

One of the most addictive things about being an artist is having the opportunity to make useful links between things which no other cultural practice would ever encourage. From the idea of Order, came the idea of Parliament and being visual artists we naturally went on to discuss the colours of the political parties and how the three primary colours are so pleasing to the eye. From there it was a simple enough leap to Ellsworth Kelly’s paintings and Minimalism in general (which we discovered we both loved, but had not thought to mention previously) and from there it was onto the red, yellow and blue signs that bark orders to us in every public space. We had our starting point. We would make works under the general heading ORDER ORDER and visually explore the links we had found between Parliament (the epitome of order); the Minimalist movement (ordered, pure art) and the various forms of public information signage (the physical manifestation of order). It wasn’t the idea of text we should have focussed on at all, but language, and from there we began to make our own.

P.S. We got down to the interview stage of the Crosby Homes Prize, which felt fantastic, even though we didn’t win. Other than the fact that this opportunity gave a kick-start to a practice which is still going strong five years on, the other thing that I particularly remember from that interview was that the panellists (including Enrico Lunghi, who was really encouraging) told us that from our proposal they had assumed we were men… but then that’s what collaborations are all about: surprises.