“It’s not a negation, it’s a celebration”
– Robert Rauschenberg discusses his “Erased de Kooning Drawing” (1953)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGRNQER16Do
When it comes to making collaborative artwork, the more successful the compromise, the less you can tell it is there – that’s a bit of an odd concept to apply to something that is created in order to be looked at, but there is it nevertheless. What I mean to say is I hope a Tenneson and Dale piece never gets mistaken for a solo work by either Cherry or myself, or that you can tell who did what. (I even quite enjoy it when we meet people and they don’t know which one of us is which.) Good compromise is invisible.
Conversely, poor compromise is as glaring as a photoshopped sunset. The worst visual compromises almost always seem to stem from subordination to technique… A few years ago, Tenneson and Dale were deliberately linking each exhibition we had to the previous one by changing/updating and reworking existing work, so that originals didn’t remain so for long. This was an interesting idea and worked OK for a while until it seemed to take over. We kept shoe-horning our ideas into dead and deader ends in order to keep this technique going, which, as we eventually realised, was self-defeating. Inevitably, the work looked overworked. Bad compromise blocks out everything: the compromise obscures the work.
