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(Excerpt) Charles Green
Collaboration is a metatag. Collaboration is not so much a mode of production as it is a key trajectory in art since the later 1960s to the present. There are three broad types of collaborative authorship, within which shared authorship is a strategy to convince the audience of new understandings of art and identity, as opposed to collaborations or collectives in which a conventional idea of art made in the studio is preserved. From the late 1960s to now, there has been a transition from a conception of artistic identity and work in which artists were the creators of autonomous art objects to a conception of the “artist” as a figure emerging from different production methods, not as the creator of art objects unified by signature style. This figure is a tool, and neither a truth nor a presence encoded at the core of the artists’ works. What links 1970s collaborations to art made now, and are the 1970s discontinuous with contemporary art? How and why did artists such as Marina Abramovic and Ulay arrive at such a different conception of self and identity from their post-modern colleagues of the 1980s, even though their works evolve away from insistent intentionality towards unconstrained reading? Although collaborative artists were involved in a complex relativization and reformation of the self, necessitating a process of negation, they did not simply set meaning adrift. All, in different ways, appealed to a ground beneath cultural signification that was not based on an appeal to the fetish of personal artistic subjectivity. In other words, we can trace an alternate genealogy for the familiar themes that informed post-modern art as it emerged as a style in the 1980s. But I would definitely not find, unlike recent revisionist histories of conceptual art such as Global Conceptualism: Point of Origin or Tony Godfrey’s Conceptual Art, that there is any explanatory value in emphasizing any orderly transition from 1970s conceptualisms into post-modern art at all. But the same motifs, identities and working methods that we can locate in the 1970s in artistic collaborations re-emerge in the mid to late 1990s amongst younger artists as different as Jane and Louise Wilson, Group Irwin, the Danish ecological activist group Superflex, and many others. The list is immense, and the movement outside discursive boundaries, beyond stable artist/artwork divisions, into new forms of non-polemical action should register as immediately familiar. In the early conceptual art of Joseph
Kosuth, Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden-all of whom were to later become,
for a while, members of Art & Language-an involvement in artistic
collaboration was integral to their work, and collaboration was
inscribed in their art. Underneath this, an interrogation of the
inscribed figure of the artist alters our sense of that conceptual
art’s significance. Distantiation of self was a constant. It
is indicated by the artists’ negative relationship to the qualities
of poetry and painting, which were signs for the individual subjective
personality that they rejected both in their writing and also in
collective work.
The use of others to realize his works was critical in Joseph Kosuth’s transition from tautological propositions to discursive juxtapositions of text in extra-artistic contexts made with the assistance of others. The discursive “permeability” of extra-artistic situations, in the form of employees’ and agents’ decisions on his behalf and, later, in his appropriated authors’ considerable authority and iconic status, enabled Kosuth to “defeat” painting and thus the constraints of individual signature and expressivity. The gulf between his late-1960s investigations and the mid-1970s networks of text, though, is immense and profoundly connected with his early works’ opacity--its resistance to the reader’s identification. His text-based architectural installations, from the Text/Context series on, are metonymic in relation to their archives but not primarily indexical, for though we never see the texts in his work as by “Kosuth,” even if they are “Kosuth’s,” we read the texts, even his cancelled texts, and inevitably then submit to narrative identification. In his early works, Kosuth wished to create an anti-visual art of propositions but found, I think, that the result was insufficiently capable of producing mental visualization or memorization. The stripping back of art to an indexical function had eliminated the very tools the mind uses to retain memories--iconic and metonymic forms. In a sense, he was forced to take advantage of the retinal, in the form of real architectural spaces, to allow reading its fuller operational potential, even though the artist in his own essays both admits and elides the considerable difference between his earlier and later work. Ian Burn and Mel Ramsden wrote “works” that sought to occupy a zone between art and theory. The extra-artistic framework of these works--conspiracy, factional manoeuvring and collective authorship--was far from insignificant, for it enabled the displacement of a simple idea of the “self.” Their bureaucratic methods were not just dysfunctional by-products of the artists’ personalities or their historical hyper-awareness; corporate impersonality created the aura of expert critical authority and modernity fitting to artists whose relation to conventional studio practice was increasingly attenuated, and who found that this persona was a highly effective tool in the policing of the artists’ massive investments in intentionality. Without a fixed model of production and often with the figure of the individual artist ambiguously cloaked in conspiratorial, efficient, intimidatingly literate collective identities, conceptual art offered a critical mobility within which the terms of identity--whether geographical or authorial--changed from work to work according to context and carefully-plotted opportunity. In Kosuth’s later works, words were subsumed by their location in a chain of architectural forms and regional languages, as opposed to their position in a tautology. Architectural forms were redefined according to chains of text like a pictorial composition. This was also to be the dynamic of Ian Burn’s later landscapes.
By the mid-1970s, another type of artistic collaboration had become clear: collaborations based on families or couples who worked like anthropological or archaeological research teams, with an emphatically articulated, even rhetorical sense of historical perspective and memory, but behind a cloak of stylistic semi-anonymity. Memory can be distinguished from mental illumination; this is the difference that Kosuth and, later, the Boyle Family, Anne and Patrick Poirier and Helen and Newton Mayer Harrison, encountered in a movement from syllogisms towards landscapes of memory--away from the indexical and away from individuated, certifiable indexical marks, towards art without signature style. These teams presage the post-modern rejection of modernism’s frequent rupture from tradition and history; they were obsessed with the subject’s identification with history and memory, and they reconstituted a fictional figure of the artist. The Boyle Family firmly rejected the tag of romanticism, insisting on their precision and their disbelief in the utility of individualist, traditionally expressive artistic identities. Anne and Patrick Poirier saw memory not as an allegorical stage--as might have been expected, given that their vast model cities were of Antique provenance--but as a symbolic landscape of icons arranged for mnemonic effect but withholding the disclosure that archaeological retrieval offers. The Poiriers’ invented city, Ouranopolis (1995), is an enormous, hovering space-ship with elaborate port-holes looking through multiple viewpoints at Ouranopolis-the Heavenly City, a city of the Classical period surviving as a village to the present day and constructed at the gateway to the holy Mount Athos peninsula by one of Alexander the Great’s heirs. The Harrisons, in particular, did not see the contemporary subject’s memory as necessarily fragmented: the activity of reading, as they saw it, is fragmented but also ethical. Collaborative and collective work was also ethical; reading, therefore, is like artistic collaboration, because putting yourself into another’s shoes implies taking a long-term, ethical perspective.
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