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.
