At Geert's invitation I'm posting something potentially interesting
for people on this list: a conference at the Tate Modern in London,
this Saturday, about collaboration in contemporary art practices.
Program below.
Actually this conference looks like half a collaboration, and half a
traditional panel affair where individuals are invited to give their
disparate views on a topic. The two afternoon sessions include a
group of friends and rather consistent collaborators: François Deck,
Bureau d'Etudes, Stephen Wright and myself.
The first in the list is a conceptual artist who works with questions
are fabricated and debated in groups which he essentially moderates,
or catalyzes or stimulates or however you want to call it. Absolutely
fascinating and enjoyable social practice, always outside of museums,
with no pseudo-objects being created, just pure intersubjective
experimentation. The second, Bureau d'études, is an artist-couple
engaging in widespread collaborations, not only for the design and
production of their well-known maps but also in a collective
distribution project which is attempting to provide an alternative
economy for publications and videos, in a situation in France where
mega-distributors have only just recently destroyed more independent
bookstores. The third person, Stephen Wright, is a critic-curator who
has been particularly interested in "diffuse creativity," or the ways
that creative practices seep through all of society, in the areas
where immaterial work shades over into free time, and in the attempts
by full-time artists to set up exchanges with, shall we say, more
part-time ones. As for myself, in the last years I have consistently
been involved in collaborative projects (like those of Bureau
d'Etdues) that take some kind of imaginary figures or symbolic
experiments into the midst of political movements, and I have written
quite a bit about such projects, in their conflictual relations to
the turbocapitalist economy.
To the four of us who know each other and actively collaborate one
can add the French sociologist Eve Chiapello, who along with a fellow
named Luc Boltanski has written extremely perceptive things about the
way that the "artistic critique" of alienation (particularly the
alienation of industrial labor and passive consumption) has gradually
been absorbed, since the 1980s, by what she calls "neomanagement" (a
precise way of talking about "cooptation"). Her work has been
fundamental reading for all four (or rather, five) of us; and we
have, of course, spoken all this over and worked on a kind of rough
strategy for what we're going to say....
Probably what we share with most of the other people in this
conference is a "dissolving" idea of art, and a search to maintain
the intensities of art outside the concentrated forms of objects,
with their (dubious) institutional framings.
To provide a little more insight I'm going to launch into an extended
rap on all things that preoccupy me and the other friends here in
France, but that comes in the next post.
Below the schedule and some synopses of talks.
see you in London!
BrianDiffusion: Collaborative Practice in Contemporary Art
Saturday 25 October
10.00-11.00. Starr Auditorium Foyer, level 2
Tea and coffee
11.00-13.00. Starr Auditorium, level 2
John Roberts (UK)
Jochen Gerz (Germany)
Charles Green (Australia)
13.00-14.00
Lunch break (Sandwiches provided for speakers in the Seminar Room on level 2)
14.00.16.30
Brian Holmes (France)
Jennifer Allora (US) and Guillermo Calzadilla (Cuba)
Eve Chiapello (France)
Bureau d'études (France)
16.30-17.00.
Tea and coffee
17.00-19.00
Stephen Wright (France)
François Deck (France)
Matthew Cornford and David Cross (UK)

-->> And here are a few round-ups of what we might talk about:Diffusion: Collaborative Practice in Contemporary Art
SynopsesFrançois Deck. Reciprocal Expertise
My presentation will focus on reciprocal transfers between art and
other practices. Though such transfers are generally thought of in
terms of skills or competencies, they will be discussed here in terms
of decision-making styles. In terms, that is, of what I have referred
to in another text as an aesthetics of decision making.
I will first discuss the bifurcation in my artistic activity in the
early 1990s. The project entitled espace discret (discrete space)
sought to apprehend conversation itself as a plastic and malleable
space, which enabled me to formulate the notion of reciprocal
expertise - a term I have chosen as the title for my talk. The
process entitled ]banques de questions & + si[ shifted the working
situation toward debate. The initiative known as banque de questions
des États du Devenir was one of the first experimental applications
of this shift. I will then touch on some of the basic principles of
the protocols of deliberation. The discussion of the process entitled
valeurs de l'art raised the issue of collaboration with an
institutional art space. And in a final example, I will discuss how a
group of non specialists put together a sort of elaborate party game,
whose underpinnings and validity stemmed from the field of urban
planning.
Eve Chiapello,
The 'artist critique' of management and capitalism, evolution and recuperation
'Artist critique' implies viewing modern society (and positioning
one's self therein) according to guidelines that draw their
inspiration from those values that have converged over the past two
centuries into a peculiar but dominant conception of the artist. It
is a synthesis of many critiques that were first made of the new
industrial, capitalist and bourgeois society during the 19th century,
mainly by artists perpetuating the romantic revolution in the name of
liberty and individual fulfilment, and as part of the search for a
"life of truth" (deemed to be at loggerheads with the ambient
materialism). Although artists expressed this critique the best, they
were not the only ones to do so, nor did every artist participate in
this movement.
My presentation will be focused to an analysis of what can be
interpreted as a crisis of the "artist critique". Different aspects
of that crisis will be analysed. One of them is the adoption by
neo-management of practices that are similar to the ones found in the
worlds of art. In many respects, one can say that new management
practices are the results of a listening to the complaints that
emanate from artist critique. Thus, artist critique has been co-opted
by its adversary and has lost much of poignancy precisely because it
has been successful.Cornford & Cross
In many art schools, galleries and magazines, there remains a
tendency to view the work of art as an object, and the purpose of
being an artist as producing such objects for cultural and economic
consumption, while in universities and art schools the focus is
increasingly on 'deliverable research outcomes'. Our collaborative
practice is apparently focussed on producing objects and images, yet
this focus belies the range of interactions which make up the greater
part of our work. We propose to speak not only about our own
collaboration, but our work with others, so our presentation will
focus on two site-specific installations: 'Utopia - wishful thinking'
(1999), and the work in progress towards 'The Abolition of Work'.Charles Green. Group Soul: Who Owns an Artist Fusion
The subject matter of this paper is the ownership of collaborative
images and collaborative actions, rather than their production. This
review of art's autonomy takes a different direction to that of other
writers, for we will ask where collaborative subjectivity is based,
if it is something more than the psyche mapped by psychoanalysis,
located in the subject's mental archive. The significance of this
paper in relation to the conference theme is my delineation of the
extra-individual artistic field generated by the incorporation of
others and "Others" within cross-cultural or cross-artist fusions
(such as that represented in the early 1980s by Marina Abramovic and
Ulay's work with Australian Aboriginal painter Charlie Tararu
Tjungurrayi or more recently by Australian postmodern appropriation
painter Imants Tillers working with Western Desert painter Michael
Nelson Tjakamarra).
This paper is, then, a reflection on the collective ownership of a
collaborative work of art, noting the contemporary relevance of
traditional Aboriginal understandings of intellectual and spiritual
copyright. In other words, I will argue that the overarching field of
world memory that artist collaborations inevitably foreground-in
which post-studio artist collaborations are a special, symptomatic
case-is governed by a set of rules, of which we will sketch in two.
These rules transcend and override the now-hackneyed discourse of
postmodern appropriation and its associated postcolonial protocols of
speaking positions. The conclusion we will draw is that we should
carefully analyse the psychic field of art rather than exclusively
pay attention to the social and political dimensions of collaborative
practice.
Jochen Gerz plans to speak about his public work, about early
examples from the sixties and seventies and more recent experiences
with the public in finished and unfinished works. At the end he will
speak more in detail about current projects in England and Ireland
who are dealing with the history and memory "here", in the place of
the conference. He wants to address collaboration mainly in order to
describe and explore the changing role of the viewer in his works.John Roberts
Collaboration in art is more than 'sharing ideas' or the employment
of the labour of others to sustain the signature style of the artist.
It addresses fundamental questions about authorship, autonomy, value
and as such the cultural form of art. Indeed, it is the question of
how collaboration in art might challenge the traditional, studio
relations of art's production that has underwritten the politics of
collaboration from the early Soviet avant-garde (in particular Boris
Arvatov), to the post-object practices of the sixties and the
'relational', 'diffuse' and 'recombinant' aesthetics of today. In
what ways might an art of collaboration transform how art appears in
the world? In this paper I will discuss collaboration in 20th century
art as a reflection of the continuing problem of art's cultural form.Brian Holmes. Artistic autonomy - and communication society
Artists seem to collaborate for two opposed reasons: either to build
momentum for an entry into the museum economy, or to create
structures of production and distribution outside it. The second
case, which is what interests me, would appear to make the entire
post-modernist critique of the work's autonomy obsolete, as the whole
issue has become the autonomy of the _artists_. But what the exit
from the white cube confronts us with is a generalized (and usually
commercialized) communication society, where Internet supplies the
paradigm of all distribution possibilities and the museum is, not
anathema, but simply another option. The difficulty is now that of
constituting the group's autonomy through both the working process
and its products, and then of traversing the communicational screens
to achieve the kinds of relations that one seeks with other groups or
institutions. Such questions are inherently political: they concern
the formations, projects and relays whereby people attempt to shape a
wider society, and also the feedback effects that this attempt at
social engagement will have. And all of that bears direct relations
to many political experiments now underway, particularly where the
drop-outs of the white cube meet the counterglobalization movements.
In the paper and in the discussion for this event, I'd like to try
coming to grips with these problems via the radical-democratic
philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis, who defines autonomy as the
attempt of the individual or social self (autos) to create its own
law (nomos). Are such political concerns necessary for the very
effectiveness of the new forms of artistic activity, in the face of
all the traps and detours set by the communication society?