An introduction for art students to working in collaboration.

1. COLLABORATION

2. Why collaboration?
• Artists have always collaborated, whether as part of a studio,
with another artist, with teams of other professionals
(galleries, technicians, architects, dancers, curators,
engineers, town planners...) the general public, specific
communities or as groups.
• If you have not explored a range of practical approaches to
collaborative practices you wont be able to assess how your
work can benefit from working with others.
• You need to develop a theoretical/contextual understanding
of collaboration, so that you can develop informed opinions
as to its role within both historical and contemporary fine art
practice.

3. Most historical art production is centred on collaborative practice.
Masters with students
Commissioners with producers
Architects with artists

4. DAMIAN HIRST for the Love of God, 2007, made of platinum, diamonds, and human teeth.
Who did this?
The skull is covered with 8,601 flawless diamonds - three times the number on the crown
the Queen wears on state occasions

5. Who polished Damien’s diamonds?
An autopoietic network
Artist
Workers
Fabricators
Gallery owner Critic Collector
Diamond miners
Artist’s mum
Idea
Presentation
Reception
Money Value
Survival
Researchers
Technicians
Family network
Education

6. Collaboration can be both
Hidden & Visible
Acknowledged and unacknowledged
So much depends on the idea of the artist.
Lonely genius facing the world with an
Existentialist dilemma
or
Engaged social participant working within a
particular area of communication

7. Collaboration With Communities

8. Graham Fagan
Where the Heart Is
Roston Road Project, 2002
• A collaboration with a community living in a Glasgow housing estate.
• Issues: Background research, time taken to understand the role that an
artist could play within the community, establishing what the community
values are, the development of a joint agreement.
• See: http://www.anewpath.org.uk/existing-artworks/5/details
Final artwork consists of
the development and
growing of a new rose
hybrid that is named the
Royton Rose.
This rose to be planted at
strategic points within the
community.

9. WochenKlausur
Medical Care for Homeless People, Vienna, 1993
• WochenKlausur are a Vienna based collective that develop and realise
proposals for improving socio-political problems.
• See: http://www.wochenklausur.at/kunst.php?lang=en
• Upon receiving an invitation from the Vienna Secession, the group
decided instead of putting on an exhibition, to carry out a project to
improve the situation of homeless people.
• The artwork became a specially constructed van, plus medical support .

10. Artist Collectives

11. Fluxus
A box of matches with label
Ben Vautier, 1966.
Fluxus—a name taken from a Latin word meaning "to flow"—is an international network of artists, composers and
designers noted for blending different artistic media and disciplines in the 1960s.
Fluxus encouraged a do it yourself aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity. Like Dada before it, Fluxus included a
strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor
of an artist-centered creative practice.
Fluxus-oriented artists continue to meet in cities around the world to collaborate and communicate in "real-time" and physical
spaces.

12. CoLab
• "We [Collaborative Projects] are functioning as a group of artists with
complementary resources and skills providing a solid ground for
collaborative work directed to the needs of the community-at-large.
Specifically we are involved in programs facilitating development,
production, and distribution of collaborative works."
Several artists now
known for their work as
individuals cut their
teeth with CoLab and
developed a confidence
in engaging with
audiences from their
experiences of working
directly with the public
and as part of a group.
Check out the
individual work of:
Jenny Holzer
Tom Otterness
Kiki Smith

14. Tim Rollins + K.O.S.
A conceptual artist and art teacher, who began working with learning disabled, often emotionally handicapped students in the early
1980s, Tim Rollins kept working with them and now the group is called Tim Rollins + K.O.S. (Kids of Survival). Typically they make
works based on classical literature such as the Bible, Prometheus Bound, The Red Badge of Courage, Alice in Wonderland and
Moby Dick.
The interesting issue with Rollins and KOS is that they were able to bridge the gap between community arts practices and what you
could call ‘high art’. The work being shown in major galleries and art museums, rather than being ‘relegated’ to community venues.

15. Recent Local Examples
Jan Williams and Chris Teasdale
Woolgatherer

16. Black Dogs

17. Leeds 13

18. Artist and other professions
When a boyfriend broke-up with her by email, French artist Sophie Calle asked 107
women to read the letter and to analyse it according to their professional interest. It was
set to music, re-ordered by a crossword-setter, performed by an actress, and probed by
a forensic psychiatrist, amongst others. The resulting artwork called Take care of
yourself (after the boyfriend’s parting words) filled the French Pavilion at the Venice
Biennale.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jun/16/artnews.art

19. ARTIST & ARTIST ARTIST

20. The power of people
• One of the main problems that faces an artist
is that of having to make all decisions in
isolation.
• Working with someone else gives you a critical
friend as well as broadens the skill base
available.
• The key issue is trust.
• “It was rather like a pair of climbers roped together”.
Braque on his Cubist collaborations with Picasso

21. CutUp The pair rip down
billboard ads, cut them into
roughly even rectangles and
collage them together to form
artworks which they then
paste back onto billboard
spaces.

22. Gilbert & George
Seed

23. Tim Noble and Sue Webster Dirty White Trash (With Gulls), 1998
pieces are made from piles of rubbish collected from London streets. A light is projected against the pile, and the shadow on
the wall creates an entirely different image, typically one of the couple themselves: this is not at all apparent from looking
directly at the pile.

24. Bernd and Hilla Becher
Bernd and Hilla Becher were a German photographer team and a married couple, best- known for their
collection of industrial building images examining the similarities and differences in structure and
appearance.

25. Langlands & Bell Maisons de Force 1991
Based in London. Langlands & Bell have been collaborating since 1978, and exhibiting internationally since the early 1980's
They explore the web of relationships linking people and architecture, and the coded systems of circulation and exchange which
surround us

26. Collaboration Strategies

27. Strategy 1
INSTRUCTIONAL PROCEDURES
Works that contain written instructions call into effect the
role translation has on an artwork .The notion of
interpretation as an artistic principle is analogous to
musical scores which…
…like an opera or symphony, go through countless
realisations as they are carried out and interpreted by others.
Procedural instructions exists in a static condition like a
musical score, everything is there but the sound. The
essential nature of this activity is imprecise and can be
located somewhere between permutation and negotiation
within a field of tension described by repetition and difference.
Meaning is multiplied as the various interpretations of the
texts accumulate, as no two interpretations of the same
instructions are ever identical.

29. Strategy 2
• Define a space within which to play.
• Agree on separate starting points and then
gradually blend/merge/synthesise your two
(three/four etc) approaches until a new form
is arrived at.

30. Strategy 3
• Define a space to work in, this could be a
sheet of paper, a canvas, a room, the street
etc.
• One artist makes a set of responses based on
their own way of working leaving spaces for
the other artist/s to work in.
• The second artist works in the spaces left by
the first one.
• Continue until a conclusion is reached.

31. Other strategies
• There is a handout available on eStudio
designed to help you think through how you
develop creative strategies.
• Every one of the approaches given can be
applied to collaborative working.
• Above all this module is designed to ask you a
fundamental question about how you work as
an artist and who else might need to become
part of your own art world.