TH E COLLABORATIVE TU RN

Selected by Beatrice von Bismarck

This text evolved out of the two-part symposium TAKING THE

MATTER INTO COMMON HANDS, which Johanna Billing, Lars
Nilsson, and myself co-curated at laspis in Stockholm, in the fall of
2005. The title was a conscious play with language-grammatically

incorrect, yet embodying a form of "self-organization." For the

symposium, the aftist Michael Beutler redesigned the project studio,
constructing simple wooden benches in two different heights and
adding brightly colored cushions. They were arranged to create a
multidirectional situation, as opposed to the typical frontal setup.
Following the symposium, the benches were given away to members
of the audience.
The text first appeared in the book Taking the Matter lnto Common
Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices, which
documents the symposium and includes contributions by all
participants. The book was edited by Johanna Billing, Lars Nilsson,
and myself, and designeO Oy Oate. lt was published by Black Dog
Publishing in2OO7.

I77.

THECOLLABOBATIVETUBN

The project studio al

laspis, designed by
Michael Beutler.

Arlists and co-curators

Lars Nilsson and Johanna
Billing in the audience at

the symposium.

178

SELECTED MARIA LIND WRITING

Video conference
with Henriette Heise,
of Copenhagen Free
University.

One of the benches

from the symposium,
which ended up in Pia
Sandstrm's studio.

179

THECOLLABORATIVETURN

THE COLLABORATIVE TURN

The story is well known: in 1999, two Paris-based aftists, Pierre

Huyghe and Philippe Parreno, acquired the rights to a Manga
character from the Japanese agency Kworks for 46,000 yen. Normally,
such characters are sold to anime and videogame companies without
the time to create their own. This character has a name-Annlee-and
a face, and she belongs in the production companies' ample inventory
of peripheral figures. For that reason, she is also one of the cheapest.
With only a name and a two-dimensional face, she is destined to
disappear from any story in which she happens to land. The artists,
however, have other plans. After having redeemed the figure-an
insignificant extra in the popular commercial cultural arena-they
introduce it to a new world, a mixed economy: contemporary art.
Togethe they draw on and establish a network of artists and other
cultural producers, inviting each to fill the empty shell of Annlee
with content, via video or other forms of aft. The pafticipants shape
episodes that can function as independent artworks, together forming
not only a collaborative art project and an exhibition, but a new
order of identity as well. ln the process, a temporary community of
seventeen persons is created.
No Ghost Just a Shell was a project-specific collaboration between a
loose network of friends and colleagues, in which the artists gathered
together around a shared interest-"a sign around which a community
has established itself," as Huyghe has suggested-but also a
phenomenon around which a particular energy has crystallized.l
However, the aim was at the same time to give this "flashing sign"
certain rights. After a grand farewell fireworks display, and equipped
with a casket made from IKEA furniture parts, Annlee was allowed to
pass away after four years. ln conjunction with her demise, Huyghe
and Parreno handed over their rights to Annlee to a newly formed
association in exchange for one euro. This association guaranteed
that the image of Annlee would never appear again in anything other

1. Piere Huyghe, Stefan Kalmf, Phlppe Pareno, Beatrix RrJf, and Hans Ulrich Obrisi, "ConveHtons," in
No Ghost Just a Shell, eds. Piere Huyghe and Philippe
Knig, 2003), 17.

.I81.

THE COLLABORAVE TUBN

Pileno

(Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Wallher

than what was created prior to the transference of rights.2

This
particular collaboration is now over.
No Ghost Just a shet is specific for having invorved
concrete popurar
culture and commercialism, for questioning tn" production
an
reproduction of identity. The project inscribes itserf
in the rogic of the
art market, but confuses it at the same time-it is arguabry
ihe first
example of an extensive coilaborative art project presentei
as a group
exhibition to be bought in its entirety by a museum.3
The project
combines more idearistic notions of sharing with neoriberar
rogics
of networking and outsourcing. rt consciouiry situates
itserf aithe
intersection of the sensibirities of post-'1 96g sociar
movements and
hardcore post-Fordist mechanisms, praying out
the probrematics and
contestations of each.
Its structure ends up like Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari,s rhizomes,
and it certainry shares some of the characteristics of
Michaer Hardt
and Antonio Negri,s understanding of the ,,common.,,
No Ghost
Just a shell's "promiscuous" creation story-its form
and content,
its degree of complexity and contradiction, the
way in which it
simultaneously touches upon the fetish character
and the open
sources of contemporary art-makes it something
of a key project.a
Moreover, No Ghost Just a sheil is probabry one
of the most notabre
collaborative adworks to have emerged over the last
decade.

COLLABORATION NOW AND THEN

No Ghost Just a Shell is only one of many art projects
in which
collaboration is central, and many other collaborative
methods
and projects are frourishing in contemp orary arrtoday.
Notions of
artist groupings, circres, associations, networks,
partnerships, alliances, coalitions, contexts,
"onit"il"tion.,
and teams
are all
buzzing in the air. However, cooperation and coilaboration
in the
context of art is by no means new. On the contrary
its genealogy is
2 ltisalittleunclearexactlywhatthetwointiatorsconsidertobecontributonstothep@jectasawhole
ln
addition to video sequences by Huyghe, Parreno, Liam
Gillick, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, the project
includes the posters of paris-based designers
M/M (which arso function as wa,paper designec especiary
for the videos); videos by Franois curret, pierre
Joseph, ,4ehdi Berhaj Kacem, Frkrit riravanija, [,4erik
ohanian; paintings by Joe scanran, Henri Barande, and
Richard phirj;s; objects by Angela Builoch and
Imke
wagner; music by Anna Lena vaney; a maguine by
Anna Fleury with texts by the fiction writer Kathryn
Davis,
immunology researcher Jean-caude Ameisen, art
historian Paurice pianzota, biologist and philosopher lsrael
Rosenfield' art historian N'4olly Nesbit' art critc Jan veruoert,
curator Hans ulrich obrist, philosopher ,4aurizio
Latato, as well as a contract created by the lawyer Luc Saucier
3 One complete edition is now in the collection of the Van Abbemuseum
in Eindhoven
4 Jan Veruoert, "copyright, Ghosts and commodity Fetishism,,,
in No Ghost Just a shelt, op cir
,1g4_g2

182

SELECTD MARIA LIND WRITING

long and complex, and includes a number of different approaches

to organizing artistic work and aesthetics. lt extends from Rubens

and other baroque artists' hierarchical large-scale studios (which
were lucrative businesses) to surrealist group experiments, from
constructivist theater projects to Fluxus games and Andy Warhol's
pseudo-industrial Factory.s lt has also been argued that collaboration
was crucial in modernism's transition to postmodernism, particularly
since the advent of conceptualism in the late 1960s. During the
following decade, redefinitions of ar1 tended to go hand in hand with
collaborative practices.6

According to the curator Angelika Nollert, the Nazarenes in Rome

were the first group of artists known to work closely together, between
around 1810-1830. She rightly points out that this type of artistic
collaboration was first to develop a conscious strategy when the
guilds disappeared and the notion of the romantic (individual) artist
came to the fore.7 At the same time, it is useful to underline the
obvious, as Brian Holmes does, in suggesting that even the lone artist
in his or her studio is dependent upon contributions from others.s This
is especially true for many mde artists who have managed to rely on
more or less invisible suppod from surrounding women.
This text, however, is about collaboration-cases in which some
form of conscious partnership takes place through interaction,
parlicipation, group activity, or other kinds of intentional exchange
through processes of "working together." lt will look at some
attempted formulations of collaborative practices in contemporary arT
from around the mid-1 990s, as well as recent developments in the
structures and motivations behind collaboration. These collaborations
can occur between people who are often, but not always, artists, as
well as between artists and people from other fields altogether. The
forrner suggests collaboration to have been consistently present in the
aft of the last twenty years, having only entered the mainstream fairly
recently. The latter shows a pronounced affinity with activism and
other ways of gathering together around shared concerns, as well as
a marked interest in alternative ways of producing knowledge.
5. See Ny'arion Piffer Damiani, "Get Together: Kunst als Teamwork" in Get Together: Kunst als Teamwork, exh

cat

(Vienna: Kusthalle Wen, 1999)

Charles Green, The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (\4inneapols:

Universty of Minnesota Press, 2001)

7, Angelka Nolert, "Art ls Life, and Life ls Art," n Collective Creatvty, exh.

cat

(Kassel: Kunsthalle

Fridericianum, 2005)

Bran Holmes, "Artistc Autonomy and the Communicaton Society," Third Text,

no

8 (November 2004): 555

Together with Ren Block, Nollert has argued that these newly
proliferating collaborations of various sorls-between arlists and
adists, artists and curators, artists and others_began around
1990.s They often appear as arternatives to the predominant focus
on the individual so often found in the field of aft, as an instrument
for challenging both arlistic identity and authorship. The various
collaborations also tend to constitute a response to specific-at
times local-situations, and they constanfly run the risk of being
swallowed up and incorporated into the very systems against which
they react. There are also examples of willful immersion, the critic
and curator Gregory sholette claims that groups such as Gelatin and
Dearraindrop satisfy the needs of entertainment culture by separating
the image of collectivist art from its history of political radicalism. The
individualistic art world can thus bond with its antithesis, drawing from
its grooviness.lo.
ln a variety of symposia, conferences, colloquia, exhibitions, and
publications over the last few years, the form and structure of these
collaborative and collective activities have been presented, examined,
and called into question: their short-term and long-term work
routines; how they spread attention across various subjects, methods,
lifestyles, and political orientations; how they hope for some kind of
emancipation; the obstacles they encounter; and, last but not least,
what sort of satisfaction results from working in a group.l1

Ren Block and Angetika Noilert, ,,Collective Creativity,,' in Cotective Creativity,

op

ct

10 Gregory Sholette, "lntroducing lnsouciant Art Collectives, the Latest product

of Enterprise Culture,',

Free Cooperation' a newspaper publshed in conjunction with the 2004

conference with the same title at the
Department of Media Study, SUNy at Bufialo
1 1. Projects and publications such as the following
have
years: lhird Text's "Art and Collaboration" issue from No
,,Diffusion:
Wright, and based on a 2OO3 conference,
Cot
lvlodern, London; "Dispositive Workshop," a series of six

2403-2004: Colloquium on collaborative Practices at the Kunstverein N4nchen in

July 2004, dcumented n
Gesammelte Drucksachen (collected newsletters), published by Revolver Archiv
fr aktuelle Kunst, Frankfurt
prt
2005; "Collaborative Practices
2,,' at Shedhaile in Zrich Aprit 2OOS: and ,,Colective Creativity,,, at the
'n "Taking
Kunsthaile Fridericianum in Kasser, in N,'ray 2005. The symposium
the rvratter into common Hands,,,
which is the starting point for ths publication, took place at laspis in Stockhotm
n September and october
2005. The swedish curturar journar Grnta has made a speciaf issue on "coilective
Art," 2006. Among newmedia events dealing with this issue, the conference "Free Cooperation"
at the Department of Meda Study,
STJNY at Buffalo' in 2004 should be mentoned. Recent publications include
circles: lndividuelle Sozialisation
und Netzwerkarbeit in der zeitgenssischen Kunst, ed christoph Keller (FranKurt:
Revolver Archiv fr aktueile
Kunst,2002) "Circles"wasaseriesofexhibitionsinfveparts,withlecturesheldatZKMinKarlsruhein2000

lf group work in art may be said to be booming at present, it is

impoftant to analyze how these heterogeneous collaborations are
structured and motivated. lt is also necessary to pay attention to
collaborative work and collective actions in society in general, and to
current theories of collaboration within philosophy and social theory.
As there are already a number of formulations around practices since
1990 that could be described loosely as "collaborative practices,"
they should be taken into consideration as well. Ambiguities appear
from the outset. Concepts such as collaboration, cooperation,
collective action, relationality, interaction, and participation are used
and often confused, although each has its own specific connotations.
According to the collaboratively compiled Wikipedia, however,
collaboration may be described as follows:

Collaboration refers abstractly to all processes

wherein people work together-applying both to the
work of individuals as well as larger collectives and
societies. As an intrinsic aspect of human society,
the term is used in many varying contexts such as
science, ad, education, and business.l2
"Collaboration" is, as the above definition suggests, an openended concept, which, in principle, encompasses all the others.
Collaboration becomes an umbrella term for the diverse working
methods that require more than one participant. "Cooperation," on
the other hand, emphasizes the notion of working together towards
mutual benefit. Through its stress on solidarity, the word "collective"
offers an echo of working forms within a socialist system. "Collective
action" refers precisely to acting collectively, while "interaction" can
mean that several people interact with each othe just as a single
individual might interact with an apparatus by pressing a button, for
example. "Padicipation" is more associated with the creation of a
context in which padicipants can take pad in something that someone
else has created, but where there are neveftheless opportunities to
have an impact.
COME TOGETHER, BE TOGETHER, WORK TOGETHER
Current ideas about collaboration in art are interlwined with other
contemporary notions of what it means to "come togethe" "be
together," and "work together." Contrary to a general sense of

and2001 Eachpartfocusedonacircleoranetwork,withmostassociatedwithaparticulartownduringthe
previous decade. "Get Together- Kunst als Team'rork" was an
exhibition at the Kunsthalle wien in 1 ggg. A
catalogue with the same ti|e was published durng the exhibition

184

SELECTED MARIA LIND WRITING

12 See en wikipeda orglwiki/Collaboration

185

THE COLLABORATIVETUFN

change in the notion of community-that it has become less

socially responsible, caring, bonding, and dissolved to a certain
degree-Jean-Luc Nancy claims in The lnoperative Community that
the community is extremely vital, but in ways other than might be
expected.l3 For instance, community is not the basis for the formation
of society or the origin of nations; rathe it is what we find ,,in the
wake of society." Community cannot be created: it is not a product of
religious harmony or utilitarian trumpeting, but should be understood
as a resistance to immanent power. ln addition, according to Nancy,
community should, like existence itself, be defined as a non_
absolute-that is, relational. He also points out that community can
be reduced neither to "society," nor to diverse mystical associations,
which can, for example, lead to fascism. Nationalism is one such
reduction, and, as such, it may also be seen as an expression of
"imagined communities," to borrow Benedict Anderson,s term. ln
contrast to Nancy's philosophical and somewhat idealistic theory,
Anderson's book lmagined communities takes an empirical approach,
tracing the processes leading up to American and European
imperialisms, as well as the form they have taken in anti-imperialist
movements throughout Asia and Africa, with feelings of belonging or
affiliation and methods of repression having been orchestrated in local
languages through the daily press.la
Since the advent of modernism, dreams of collectivism have
undoubtedly been a driving force, but according to Gregory Sholette
and aft historian Blake Stimson, two major new forms of collectivism
are at play in the world today: one based on an lslamist yearning
for an anti-capitalist, absolute, idealized form of collectivity, and the
other struggling to substitute the programmer for the ideologue, who
disappeared with the communitarian ideals of Christianity, lslam,
nationalism, and communism. The latter takes the form of a sort of
minimally regulated DIY form of e-collectivism, attracting ,,techno_

anarchist hacktivism to hippie-capitalist, pseudo-countercultural

imperialism."ls This particular approach argues for the need to
historicize collectivism-and includes the autonomous zones formed
in Seattle and Genoa, as well as the provisional community work of
aftist groups like wochenklausur or Temporary services-in order to
'13 Jean-Luc Nancy' The
lnoperative Community, (London and [.4inneapolis: Universty of Minnesota press,
1991)

14 Benedict Anderson' lmagined Communties: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Natjonalsm (London
and New York: Verso, 1 983 and I 991)

lia_11!"4,'."r""ndcregoryShotette,,,periodisingCoilectivism,"nThirdText.no

186

SELECTED MARIA LIND WFITING

18(november2oo4):

re-imagine and reshape collective action and take charge of social

being in the present. ln this, their roots in radical political thought and
its reverence for solidarity come to the fore.
Hardt and Negri's concept of the "multitude" has been perhaps the
best formulation of how group dynamics have emerged on a macro
level. For Hardt and Negri, the "multitude" replaces concepts such
as "the people" and the less ethnic "population." ln contrast to
"the people," a multitude remains plural and multiple. lt is a set of
singularities in which each social subject maintains its difference. lt
is compared with the individual as a pad of "the people," when the
indlvidual must deny his or her difference in order to form "a people."
Unlike the masses or the mob, a multitude is not fragmented and
disconnected, but consists of active social subjects who can act
together. lndeed, the multitude is a concept that can encompass
all important group parameters-class, gende ethnicity, and
sexual preference-but Hardt and Negri choose to underline class.
This elaboration of the enlightenment ideal of emancipation has
a curious vitalist touch to it, but it is nevertheless there to, in their
understanding, counteract the forces of "empire," the network
power that forms a new sovereignty based on the interactions
between dominant nation-states, supranational institutions, and
major corporations. lnterestingly enough, they distinguish between
"common" on the one hand, and "community" and "public" on
the other. Like the multitude, "common" can include singularities;
the "common" is based on communication between singularities:
it comes from the collaborative social processes that underlie all
production. ln this context, it is worth elevating their observation that,
together with communication, collaboration has become a central
method in the new paradigm of immaterial production over the
last decades.l6
Perhaps the problem is, rather, that there is too much forced
commonality and prescribed collaboration today in the sense of
social unanimity and political consensus-at least in North-West
Europe. The political philosopher Chantal Mouffe suggests that, rather
than consensus, it is the intrinsic conflict in liberal democracy that
should be cultivated instead.lT More difference and disagreement, in
other words, can avoid the risk of "consensus of the centre," which
16

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: The

Penguin Press,2004)

17 Chanlal

!4ouffe, The

Democratic Paradox (London and New York: Verso. 2000)

gives scope to, for instance, right-wing extremists as the only real
alternative in the political arena. Mouffe's "agonistic pluralism,,can be
of use here for not being based on final resolutions, but on an ongoing
exchange marked by conflict. "Agonistic" relationships, similar to
antagonistic relationships, involve struggles with an adversary rather
than with an enemy. An adversary is someone with whom you share
common ground while disagreeing on meanings and implementations
of basic principles-disagreements that simply cannot be resolved
through the deliberation and rational discussion celebrated by',thirdway" politicians and defenders of the "post-political,, alike.

being deemed shallow outside of their own field.le All this follows from
the logic that very few people, if any, can fully cover several fields at
once, and that the results of mixing disciplines therefore become far
too thin. With the exception of the bureaucratic and economically
motivated Wagnerian experiment, the "coming together" of different
subject and genre areas-as subjects and genres-is unusual today.

Although post-political approaches and some attitudes of the socalled "new media critique" community might look similar at first
glance, with both underlining collaboration, their approaches are
in fact very different. The longing for a different society based on
sharing and cooperation, which has been forcefully expressed by
the new media critique community since the mid-19g0s, carries
on some of the pathos of the post-1968 "new social movements,,'
when new means of communication began to be available, and even
inexpensive. lt has been said that movements around open source
and open content have thereby created new production paradigms
that counteract the type of mandatory collaboration and imposed
self-organization that, for example, post-Fordist working conditions
often entail.18 These movements have produced a lively discourse
on, and concrete practice of, various collaborative methods such as
"open space technology," which allows for a mild protocol for

Strategies for collaboration in contemporary art seem to have

a particular relationship to the last decade's political and social
activities. You can even identify a desire for activism within the field
of aft today. Ever since Reclaim the Streets cropped up in London at
the beginning of the 1990s, claiming common ownership of public
space, blocking traffic with festival-like happenings, both individual
and collective actions in urban space have increased. Actions aganst
corporate ownership and various political questions concerning
justice are now a part of larger meetings of the lMF, World Economic
Forum, and G8. The "anti-globalization movement," "movement of
movements," or "global justice movement," as it is also called, and its
criticism of the global political impact of international corporations on
both the environment and employment rights, has given large-scale
cooperative activism a new public visage, mainly through the use of
the media. Who can forget the pictures from Seattle in 1999? Or the
ones from the many cities in the world where mass demonstrations
took place against an impending US invasion of lraq in February
2OO3? With the help of new technology, thousands of people can now
quickly gather together to express their viewpoints. And one cannot
underestimate the extent to which digital technology has contributed
to the boom in cooperation, where "tactical media" blends of new
technology, aft, and activism have given political protest a new face.

self-organization.
It may also be claimed that another contemporary way of ,,coming
together" and "working together," both in the academic and the
aftistic sphere, can be found in interdisciplinarity. As old borders
are transgressed and different disciplines meet in the hopes of
feftilizing each other, the ivory tower appears to become somewhat
less remote, even disappearing altogether when cultural studies
enable popular culture to gnaw at literature, and when contemporary
visual art is subjected to the same close scrutiny as theoretical
studies of historical paintings. However, as soon as this crossdisciplinary development began to be described as ,,post-disciplinary
evil," traditionalists, but also those who took on the challenges of
postmodernism, began to have grave doubts, perhaps for fear of

See Free Cooperation,

i88

op cit

SELECTED .4ARA LIND WRITING

It is as unusual as arranged marriages, in which two people are forced

to marry and as rare as successful blind dates.2o We do, however,
often find temporary collaborations within self-determined activities,
but these do not entail the literal merging of categories.

Another cardinal point to consider in relation to questions around

collaboration concerns the organization of work in presentday society. lmmaterial labo such as various kinds of services,
19 See Games Fights Collaborations; Das Spiel von Grenze und berschreitung, eds Beatrice von Bsmarck.
Diethelm Stoller, and Ulf Wuggenig (Lneburg and Stuttgart: Kunstraum der Universit't Lneburg and Cantz
Velag, 1996); and The Anxiety of lnterdsciplinarity, eds Alex Coles and Alexia Defert (London: BACKless
Books in association with Black Dog Publishing. 1 997)
20 The Wagner experment refers to the en'thusiasm that civil seryants and politicians often have for
interdisciplinary projects planned top down so that they mpose themselves on art and the o'ther disciplines

information, and care, as well as other activities that create relations

and social situations, are crucial to the paradigm of post-Fordist
work. lt may even be claimed that the production of communication,
social relations, and cooperation are constitutive of immaterial labor.
Furthermore, creativity and flexibility are essential for maximizing
profit under these conditions, so the worker/producer must be
prepared to work on shor.t-term contracts. Those who work should
also be innovative and think in unconventional ways, and so
bohemians in general, and artists in particula become important
role models. Howeve in contrast to the ideal of the romantic artist,
you must be able to alternate between being self-motivated and
working independently, and being part of a group and working in a
team. This requires even greater flexibility-and lack of securitythan is typically associated with working a steady job.21 Here, the
idealistic aspect of collaboration, represented by activism, clashes
with the crass demands to raise profitability and efficiency voiced
by private businesses and the state. While the former stands for
self-organization and self-empowerment, the latter is more direcily
instrumental. Many of these aspects may indeed be recognized in
some of the leading examples and understandings of collaborative aft
practices over the last fifteen years.22
RELATIONAL AESTHETICS, NEW GENRE PUBLIC ART,
CONNECTIVE AESTHETICS. KONTEXTKUNST. AND
DIALOGICAL ART
Art and its working methods are certainly not necessarily the direct
result of these social, political, economic, and philosophical
phenomena. Anthropologically speaking, they are pad of the culture
in which these processes operate. Art participates in both the
production and reproduction of these phenomena; art performs,
depicts, and checks these processes. The same thing can be said
to apply with regard to one of the recent decade's most influentialand disputed, not least by the quoted aftists-constructions in
contemporary art: the so-called "relational aesthetics." Although
not discussing collaboration per se, the curator and critic Nicolas
21

Referring to Duchamp's 1954 lecture "The Creative Process,"

Bourriaud acknowledges that interactivity is scarcely a novel idea, but
nevedheless underlines the importance of these ar.tists' production
of inter-personal experiences aimed against the ideology of mass
communication. lt is an art that "is not trying to represent utopias, but
build concrete spaces," and he continues by stating that present-day
art strives to produce situations of exchange, of relational spacetime. lt is the counter-merchandise. Unlike merchandise, it does not
conceal the work process, the use value, or the social relations that
enable its production. Yet it does not reproduce the world that it has
been taught to expect-it tries to invent new worlds, taking human
relations as its material.2a

23 Nlcolas Bourriaud's essayistc and yet relevant discussion on relationa aes'thetics has been widely
disputed, even aggressively so The Los Angeles-based art historian and writer George Baker's "open letter"
See Luc Bo tanski and Eve Chiape lo, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans Gregory Elliott (London and New

York: Verso, 2005)

22

Bourriaud's 1998 book, Esthtique Relationnelle, defines certain

contemporary adworks as "an attempt to create relationships
between people over and above institutionalized relational forms,"
almost as a foundation for collaboration. Relational aesthetics was
widely debated in the mid-1990s in Scandinavia, France, and Holland,
and more recently during a delayed, yet significant reception in
Great Britain and the United States. A journey into recent Western
art history would take us immediately to the work of artists such as
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Jorge Pardo, Carsten Hlle Philippe
Parreno, Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Angela Bulloch, and Maurizio
Cattelan-the core group of artists whose work Bourriaud refers to. ln
his view, this heterogeneous group of artists proposes social methods
of exchange and alternate communication processes in order to
gather individuals and groups together in ways other than those
offered by the ideology of mass communication. They seek to entice
the observer or viewer into the aesthetic experience offered by the
artwork. Bourriaud claims that these artists do not wish to reproduce
or depict the world as we know it, but instead create new situationsmicro utopias-using human relations as their raw material.23

Such topics were brought up in a seminar entitled "New Relation-alilies," curated in collaboratjon with critic

Ninalvlntnann,whichtookplaceatlaspisinStockholmonFebruary25

2006.Theseminardealtwithart

focusing on social relations and employed a critical and theoretical approach to decoding and understanding
ihe types of relations wth viewers produced by works of art What are the relations created between art,
.stitutjons, and the public? What linguistic means of expression are obtainable when trying to fnd adequate
terms for all of these forms of relations?

-90

SELECTED ,4ARIA LIND WRITING

to Nicolas Bourraud sounds like a vendetta: "Despite its myopia in the face of the full range of contemporary
art practices oulside of France, despite its inabillty to develop and carry a theoreiical argument or model,
the misconceptions and ignorance displayed n ths text have only been matched by its popu ariy within
contemporary curatorial circles A full critique of its terms however will have to await another moment, anolher
more specific 'open letter"' Quoted from "Relations and Counter-Relations; An Open Letter to Nicolas
Bourraud," in Contextualize, exh cat (Kunstverein Hamburg,2002)
24 Ncolas Bourriaud "An lnroduction to Relational Aesthetics." in Traffic, exh cal (Bordeaux: CAPC N,4use
d'a contemporain, 1 996), no pagination

191

THECOLLABORATIVETURN

Despite the fact that the notion of relational aesthetics was

originally coined to discuss works by specific artists, it has become
a catchphrase used carelessly to describe any artwork with an
interactive and/or socially related dimension. ln recent years, relational
tendencies, which often depart from the model Bourriaud formulated,
have included interventionist and offsite projects, discursive and
pedagogical models, neo-activist strategies, and increasingly
functionalist approaches (such as arVarchitecture collaborative
groups). Many of these are on the margins outside of the mainstream
art world, as were their predecessors from the 1g80s and 90s.

Undoubtedly, much of the radically heterogeneous art that Bourriaud

refers to involves interaction and participation, sometimes even
direct collaboration between the artist and individuals or groups.
Many of the artists whose work he deals with have also worked
with each other, but collaboration remains one facet among many.
However, closer examination reveals that the aftists to whom
Bourriaud refers have engaged in more or less every type of
interaction and exchange imaginable, making the concept of
relational aesthetics even more open-ended than ,'collaboration',
alone. A significant amount of the criticism that has been leveled
against Bourriaud concerns to what degree the concept of relational
aesthetics implies "good" collaboration, "positive,, interaction, and
participation
-what is the quality of the exchange being stimulated?
For the Canadian art historian Stephen Wright, the art associated
with relational aesthetics is intellectually and aesthetically meager,
foisting services on people who never asked for them and drawing
them into "frivolous interaction." The participants' efforts, however
small, are not reimbursed, and society's class-based power relations
are reproduced.2s Everything connected to relational aesthetics is
therefore dismissed as capricious and exploitative. London-based
critic Claire Bishop's criticism of relational aesthetics in October
magazine stemmed from a more formalist art historical position.
She focused on a few works by Gillick and Tiravanija, contending
that they glossed over the tensions and conflicts that exist in all
relations between people by orchestrating a kind of conviviality. ln her
understanding, they subscribe to what is basically a quasi-democracy
and buy into compromise and consensus.26

::ai26

Wright, "The Delcale Essence of Artistic Coilaborarion,', n Third Text,

Claire Bishop, "Antagonism and Retational Aesthetics,,,Octobec

192

SELECTED MARIA LIND WRITING

no

no

1g (November 2004):

ln contrast, Bishop cites Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn,

claiming that when they collaborate with people from different
economic backgrounds, they retain the inherent tensions and conflicts
between observer, padicipant, and context-challenging the putative
image of the art world as a self-righteous place where social and
political issues from other segments of society are embraced. Her
greatest stumbling block, howeve[ comes in considering how this
art should be judged; for her, it must not on any condition be judged
if the relations produced by the work can be considered exploitative
or disrespectful. And actually, this position is an inversion of Wright's
criticism. Whereas he believes that the works in question are
problematic, even bad, for being exploitative, the problem for Bishop
lies in their containing too little conflict. The aft based on relations
that retain their tensions and difficulties is better than the art that is
assumed to seek agreement and harmony, which she ascribes to the
work of Tiravanija and Gillick. Although their art has rarely, if ever,
referred to these third-way abstractions.
Here, the commonality between Bourriaud, Wright, and Bishop is
striking: they are all equally-perilously-impressionistic in their
descriptions of aftwork and equally sweeping in how they mingle
their understanding of aftworks and artists' practices as a whole. ln
this context, it is also crucial to distinguish between an interpretation
of a work of art and the work itself, a matter often overlooked by all
three. This also reminds one of the importance of experiencing the
project one discusses, or of at least being able to rely on detailed
and trustworthy eyewitness accounts. This sort of interventionist,
cooperative work has proven to be even more difficult to describe-let
alone analyze-than other types of art.

ln this context, the art historian and critic Christian Kravagna's

distinction-with an interest in human interaction-between

four different methods seen in contemporary ad may be useful:
"working with others," interactive activities, collective action, and
parlicipatory practice. According to Kravagna, "working with others"
is favored by "sozio-chics," like Christine and lrene Hohenbchler,
Jens Haaning, and Tiravanija, who devote themselves to building
social and communicative relations tith the public. Here the artists
cynically instrumentalize the public. However, for those with a deeper
knowledge of these bodies of work, it is clear that potentially political
content is often present, but in ambiguous and opaque, albeit precise,

110 (fall 2OO4):51_79

193

THE COLLABORATIVETUFN

ways.27 The interactivity of the work permits one or more reactions

that can influence its appearance without deeply affecting its
structure. The idea behind collective action is, rather, that a group of
people formulate an idea that they can then carry out together. while
Kravagna does not present concrete examples, one can imagine
"push-button art" to be included in interactive aft and that Guerilla
Girls' actions could exemplify "collective action." ,,parlicipatory
practice" presumes a distinction between producer and receive but
the focus is placed on the latte on whom a significant part of the
work's development relies. Adrian piper,s Funk Lessons, in which the
artist arranged and made videos of putatively ethnic dance lessons,
and Clegg & Guttmann's Open Library in Graz and Hamburg, where
a common public library was created in a residential neighborhood,
are described in detail and cited as two examples of participatory
practice.2E Funk Lessons was not the point of departure for an already
existing community; rathe the work itself produced a community that
had not previously existed.

Among the more overlooked conceptualizations of collaborative

practices from recent decades are Suzy Gablik,s ,,connective
aesthetics," Suzanne Lacy's *new genre public art,,, and Grant
Kester's "dialogical art." Outside the German-speaking context, peter
Weibel's so-called "Kontextkunst" has remained unexplored. Lacy,
a founding member of the Feminist Studio Workshop (FSW) at the
Woman's Building in Los Angeles, coined the term ,,new genre public
art" to discuss ar1 that seeks to engage more directly with audiences.
ln a 1995 anthology entifled Mapping the Terrain, Lacy defines it
in this way: "New genre public ar1 calls for an integrative critical
language through which values, ethics, and social responsibility
can be discussed in terms of arI."2e lt is a working model based on
relations between people and on social creativity rather than selfexpression, and it is characlerized by cooperation. lt is community_
based, often relating to marginalized groups; it is socially engaged,
interactive, and aimed at anothe less anonymous public than that of
art institutions. lt is about creative participation in a process. Activities
are primarily pursued far from the established art institutions, in other
27 See Maria Lnd, "The Process of Living in the World of Objects: Notes on the Work of Rirkrit Tiravanija,,,
RlrkritTiravanij:ARetrospectiveflomorrowisAnotherFineDay),ecj FrancescaGrassiandFirkritTravanija
(Zrich: JRP Ringier, 2007),

28

in

19-128

See Chrrstian Kravagna, ,4ooelle partizipatorischer

Prais I Die Kunst des ffenilichen, eds [,4arus Babras

and Achim Knneke (Amsterdam and Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, j 999)
29 suzanne Lacy, Ny'apping rhe Terrain: New Genre pubric Art (seatfle: Bay press, f ggs), 43 Lacy uses the

term to dscuss a number of very different projects

Pper to Las ,4ujeres Muraljstas

194

SELECTED ,4ARIA LIND WRITING

social contexts such as residential neighborhoods or schools. ln this

way, a kind of reverse exclusivity emerges: those who are attracted to
the project have more access to this art than the usual aft public. The
examples in her book function as case studies, and the artists include
Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Judy Chicago, Group Material, Mierle
Laderman Ukeles, and Fred Wilson.
New genre public art emerged at the same time as relational
aesthetics, as did the kindred connective aesthetics developed by
Gablik. Formerly an artist, Gablik is an active critic, theorist, and
teacher. According to her, connective aesthetics locates creativity in a
kind of dialogical structure that is frequently the result of collaboration
between a number of individuals rather than an autonomous
author. Connective aesthetics is the antithesis of modernism and
its "nonrelational, noninteractive, and nonpadicipatory orientation, "
also in its embrace of traditional values such as compassion and
care, seeing and responding to needs.3o Connective aesthetics is
fudhermore listener-centered rather than vision-oriented, and is
therefore claimed to be pad of "a new consciousness of how the self
is being defined and experienced." Psychotherapy and ecological
discussions are sources of inspiration, and notions such as "healing"
crop up often in her writing. Gablik states that connective aesthetics
"makes art into a model for connectedness and healing by opening
up being to its full dimensionality-not just the disembodied eye."
Her examples include Jonathan Borofsky and Gary Glassman's 1986
video documentary, Prisoners; Suzanne Lacy's The Crystal Quilt, from
1987; Mother's Day in Minneapolis, which features 430 older women
discussing their hopes and fears of aging, their accomplishments
and disappointments; and Mierle Laderman Ukele's 1978 Touch
Sanitation, in which the artist shook hands with 8,500 sanitation
workers over a period of eleven months, saying "thank you for
keeping NYC alive" to each and every one of them.

Connective aesthetics and new genre public art have been largely
disregarded, and many feel somewhat suspicious of the didactic,
salutary intentions, not to mention the slightly "new agey" character
claimed by the authors. Yet, they have surely opened up new ways of
thinking about the role and nature of ad with regard to its audiences,
with collaboration at the core. Just as ad that seeks to go beyond the
contemplative, intentional image and object-based art-as relational
aesthetics does-must be seen in the light of the spectacularization,

the US from the 1 97Os to the 1 990s, rangng from Adrian

30 Suzi Gablik, "Connective Aesthetics: Art After lndividualism," ibid , 80

195-

THE COLLABORATIVETURN

commodification, and sales boom of the 19g0s, so should new genre

public art and connective aesthetics also be considered as attempting
a similar break. Howeve Kravagna contends that the latter two suffer
from political deficits, which they then compensate for with pastoral
means, which is to say that they seek ',the good.,' ln his view, this
goes hand in hand with political impotence and the general sense of
being unable to really affect political processes, with voluntary work
and other social interests replacing political influence. But beyond
this, some of Bourriaud's descriptions of relational aesthetics are
better suited to the art that Lacy and Gablik examine than the ar.t
he himself addresses. And a good amount of Bishop's criticisms of
Tiravanija and Gillick can be found in formulations of new genre public
art and connective aesthetics, but in positive terms.
A third concept of relevance here, which came about around the same
time, is that of Kontextkunst (context art). Kontextkunst reached a
wider public in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name,
assembled by the artist and curator peter Weibel as parl of the
'1
993 Graz steirischer Herbst.3r The artists involved are thought to
investigate and question contexts, often through various forms of
collaboration, and are connected along an axis from New york to
Cologne, and include Mark Dion, Andrea Fraser, Clegg & Guttmann,
Rene Green, Genvald Rockenschaub, Thomas Locher, and christian
Philipp Mller. Their critical investigations into how culture is actually
produced often reminds one of the institutional analytical strategies
of the 1960s, and their art tends to be site-specific. Like the artists
associated with relational aesthetics, the approaches of contextual
artists are interdisciplinary, and include such areas as architecture,
music, and mass media. Howeve in contrast to the former,
contextual artists are more historically oriented and their methods are
more academic. Aesthetically, they tend to keep a low profile, with
straightforward delivery of information as a prominent strategy.
Dialogical ad as discussed by art historian Grant Kester in the 2004
book Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in
Modern Art is a more recent treatment of work mainly from the i g90s,
focusing again on the intersection of art and cultural activism, based
on collaborating with diverse audiences and communities. creative
31 seePeterweibel,Kontextkunst-KunstdergoerJahre(corogne:DuMontverrag,1994)

r\4anyofthe

relevant discussions about the work of these artists had, previous to the exhibition
and the cataogue, been
publshed in the journal Texte zur Kunst, and a number of those nvolved
felt that webel and some of the other
curators had hijacked their project See Stefan Germer "Unter Geiern- Kontext-Kunst im Kontext,,,
in Texte zur
Kunst. no 1 I (November 1 995): 83-95

196

SELECTED MARIA LIND WRITING

dialogue and empathetic insight are at the core of the works he refers
to, as are models for successful communication. This art primarily
exists outside the international network of galleries and museums,
curators and collectors. Among his examples are Wochenklausur's
1994 project in Zrich, Shelter for Aid Drug-Addicted Women,
which involved floating dialogues with various women, resulting in a
boarding house, and Suzanne Lacy's 1994 The Roof is On Fire, where
the artist worked with 22O teenagers in Oakland to question racial
stereotypes in a media event to which more than 1,000 local residents
were invited. Like Kravagna and Lacy, Kester also discusses the
work of Stephen Willats and Adrian Piper. This thorough study traces
art's function as communication, from Clive Bell and Roger Fry to
Clement Greenberg and Jean-Franois Lyotard, and makes the crucial
point that they all associate semantic accessibility-for example, in
advertisi n g - with the destructive eff ects of capital ist commod if icati on.
Kester understands dialogical art as an "open space" within
contemporary culture, where certain questions can be asked and
where critical analyses can be articulated. Furthermore, dialogical art
is based on a critical sense of time that considers its own cumulative
effects, acknowledging what happens today as having an effect on
the future.

Most of these interpretations of collaboration-based artistic practices

have been around for a few years, as have the adworks they refer to.
Relational aesthetics, new genre public art, connective aesthetics,
and dialogical ar1 focus on the relation between the work and the
public and on forms of participation. lt seems, however, that "the
social," or "sociality," remains a tricky issue that all of these concepts
maneuver around, although they use very different methods to reach
their public.32 Kontextkunst also takes a view to participation, but
rather than using the social as its backbone, it privileges the political.
Of course, these methods of working continue to exist, but newly,
or somewhat newly developed and updated ways of working under
a notion of "collectivity" have appeared, with groups of people
sharing as wel I as questioning together- authorship.

RECENT MODELS OF COLLABORATION

What do the more recent collaborations look like-those that were
formed or became visible after the mid-1990s? Undoubtedly, there

For a discussion on art as socal space, see Nina l\y'ntmann, Kunst als sozialer Baum (Cologne: Verlag der
Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2002)

32

197

THE COLLABOFATIVETURN

are many forms of artistic coilaboration:

stabre murtipre authorship
duos, such as Bik Van der pol, Marysia Lewandowska
and Nell
cummings, Ergarand-vargarand
lLeit rtggren and carl Michael von
Hausswolff), Clegg & Guttmann; anO taig-er
groups who have worked
together for a long time, such as Radekbommunty
in Moscow,
IRW,N in Ljubrjana, Group Materiar in New york,
criticarArt Ensembre
in the US, and Women Down the pub
in Copenhagen. There are
single-issue groups such as park Fiction
that dissorve after achieving
a specific goar, which for park Fiction
was to prevent a vacant rot
in a deprived area of Hamburg from being
developed. OOa eroiesi,
consisting of three young female artists and
sociologists, *u" o""0
in the rstanbur quarter of Garata for a
number of years. They worked
together there with the rocar inhabitants investigating
and redefining
the use of various types of space. Temporary
services is a coilective
based in Chicago and focuses on temporary
and ephemeral projects
in public space. others have chosen to
organize themselves around
the model of a music group, as Generar rda
and Freie Krasse do.
stilr others, such as Bernadette corporation,
atude to the business
world and branding methods, or to bureaucratic
organs, such as Gala
Committee. Schleuser.net takes the form of
a lobbying organization
for business enterprises speciarizing in undocumented
cross-border
human traffic. some of their activitls resembre
the art activism of
Raqs Media cotectir,,e and Murtipricity.
The ratter two consist of
people coming from various professional
backgrounds_artists,
architects, and sociorogists-who together
nourish a desire to change
society with their work. A backdrop t most
of this is the awareness
that coilaboration entairs contact, confrontation,
deriberation, and
negotiation to a degree surpassing that
of individual work, and that
this produces subjectivity differenfly.
Since 2000, through UKK (Unge Kunstnere
og Kunstformidle fyoung
ad workersl)33 and rKK (rnstitutet 5r konstnrer
och konstfrmedrare
[lnstitute for alists and art workers]),3a Denmark and Sweden

have

seen an increase in poriticized pubric discussions

on curturar
production, and this has created new
speciar interest organizations
for arlists and art mediators. rn this coniext,
the currentry inactive
societt Hirdesheim can seem aroof because
of their devotion to
intensively fictionalizing themselves as
an archaic upper_class

club.
Fictionarizing is a wet-tested method for questioning
authorship, ano
one of the more recent additions to the
art scene
is the curator

33 See www ukk dk

34

See www kk nu

198

SELECIED I\IARIA LIND WRITING

Daniela Johnson, whose name stands for a group of curators and

artists. Reena Spaulings is both the name of a gallery in New York run
by a collective of aftists, and the title of a collectively written novel,
whose main character bears the same name. ln many cases, the
individual members of the groupings pursue their own careers, while
others immerse themselves completely in group work. All, however,
are based on collaboration between specific founders. Some have
systematically collaborated with others, a method they share with
individual artists such as Johanna Billing, Annika Eriksson, Jeremy
Delle Apolonija Su!ter!ic, Santiago Sierra, and Thomas Hirschhorn,
who individually involve groups of people in their projects. However,
these artists work with groups in very different ways.

Billing, Eriksson, Deller, and Hirschhorn, for example, have

approached groups of people who already have something in
common, and the artists then propose a new type of activity, which, to
an extent, produces a new identity that does not always go tidily with
their primary identification. ln their projects, these artists appealto
latent qualities and conflicts, which are tested and then acted out. ln
these cases, it is important to emphasize the differences in the types
of relations established between the artist and those involved: Are the
latter given a role or task by the former or do they develop it together?
ls the "commission" carried out with or without remuneration? ls it
a win-win situation or can one person be said to exploit another?
The question becomes one of whether you even speak at all about
collaboration when the responsibility lies very clearly with one pafty,
as it does in many projects by Billing, Eriksson, Deller, and Suter!i!.
The people involved are not responsible for improving or following
up on the project. They can even leave without a guilty conscience.
Neither are they normally credited as collaborators. As collaborations,
these projects can perhaps be regarded as "weak," or not "fullfledged," for involving varied groups of people. The projects are
parlicipatory, but they generally lack the "healing" impetus of new
genre public art, connective aesthetics, and dialogical art.
While discussing contemporary collaborative practices, one should
not overlook loose groups of aftists who, for a time, live and work
side by side and share attitudes and approaches. Christine Borland,
Douglas Gordon, Nathan Coley, Jacqueline Donachie, Claire Barclay,
Simon Starling, and Ross Sinclair had a situation similar to this in

Glasgow in the 1990s.35 During the same period GianniMotti, Sydney

Stucki, Sylvie Fleury John Armleder, and others did the same in
Geneva.36 These loose groupings or networks are obviously close to
the classic "circle of friends," but their role as breeding grounds for
temporary collaborations should be acknowledged.
It is warranted here to distinguish between ,'single,, and ,,double,,
collaboration. ln the forme the author remains alone and others
contribute towards realizing an idea that is already more or less
formulated. ln the latter, collaboration takes place both in the
formulation of the idea on the parl of the author, but also in the
realization of the work. The idea is developed together with others,
who are awarded the same status as the author, and who also all
participate in the execution of the project. ,,Double,, collaboration is
synonymous with Kravagna's "collective action.,,,,Triple,' collaboration
would then refer to the cases in which the work takes "collaboration,,
as its subject and theme; for instance, in Neil Cummings,s and
Marysia Lewandowska's The Enthusiasts, in which they focused
on postwar Polish film clubs organized in factories. The double
collaborations seem to be the most typical form of present-day
collaboration, emphasizing artists' working conditions.

Another clear division in terms of the varied forms of collaborative

work is that which exists between formal and informal groupings
of authors, between those with a fixed number of members and
a common name, and those without any general plan who gather
like a flock of birds, cropping up in different formations for different
occasions. This is the model used for No Ghost Just a shell. Here lies
the distinction between more improvised and thoroughly structured
work. The former composes a kind of collective authorship and a
search for even the smallest common denominato whereas the latter
is about shared points of departure, shared interests and values,
rather than any kind of official joint ownership-a temporary collective
of originators/creators. The people involved want to stimulate the
greatest possible distinctiveness, but out of something shared, such
as their collective sensibilities and attitudes. Historical forerunners
of this include the artists associated with Fluxus and their many and
varied collaborations, as well as with conceptual art.

Many of today's collaborations in art contexts operate horizontally and

consist of actors from different fields; very often, these collaborations
lie on the border between activist, arlistic, and curatorial activities,
and they tend to be self-organized. Ordinarily, the collaborators
have joined together in order to react to a specific local situation,
such as KMKK in Budapest, DAE in San Sebastian, B+B in London,
and WHW inZagreb.3T Some groups have become incorporated
within institutional contexts-albeit temporarily-as some of the
groups mentioned above have been (in Museum Ludwig, Manifesta
5, and lCA, respectively), while others have even taken over entire
institutions, as was the case with Konst2 (Art2), who took over
Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm in the spring of 2004.38 The various
constituent parls of No Ghost Just a Shell have been shown in a
number of different institutional contexts-the project itself could
hardly be considered without institutional interference. As a single
complete project, it has been shown at the Van Abbemuseum in
Eindhoven, the lnstitute of Visual Culture in Cambridge, and at the
Kunsthalle Zrich.3e According to Hans Ulrich Obrist, it may also
be claimed that the project has even contributed to changes in the
prevailing exhibition paradigm.a0 lt recalls the impodant distinction
between one single, solitary, collaborative project and ongoing
col laborations between authors and/ or others.
The basic models of contemporary collaborative forms in ad can be
easily extended, as there are innumerable variations on the theme,
but this should suffice to show their prevalence and indicate their
heterogeneity. Historically, the motivation to engage in collaborative
practices cerlainly varies: people have joined together to find
new ways of living closer to nature, as with Monte Verita and in
Worpswede during the turn of the last century; or to use various types
of action to wield political influence, like the group Tucuman Arde
in Rosario and the Art Workers' Coalition in New York at the end of
the 1960s. Early on, a crucial difference emerged between wanting
37

lMaria Lind, Katharna Schlieben, and Judith Schwartzbart, eds , Colloquum on Collaborative Practice:
Dispositive Workshop Part 4 (Munich; Kunstverein N,4unich, 2004). Also published in Collected Newsletters

(FrankTurt:RevolverArchivefraktuelleKunst,200S)
in the same publication

38

SeealsotextsbyK,4KK,DAE,andB+B

Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt, "Curatorial and lnstitutional Structures," in Colloquium on Collaboratve Practice;

op cit.
39 DuringmytimeasDrectoroftheKunstvereinN,4nchen,weshowedthefrstfourvideosequencesby
Dispositive Workshop Part 4,

35

See Katrrna Brown, "Trust," and Ross Sinclair, "What's in a Decade," in Circles: lndividuelle Sozlalisation
und Netzwerkarbeit in der Zeitgenssischen Kunst, op cit

36

See Lionel Bovier. "The Circle and Geneva." ibid

2OO SELECTED MARIA LIND WRITING

Phlippe Parreno, Perre Huyghe, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, and Liam Gillick successively for a month at a
tme in the same room, as a part of the exhibiton "Exchange & Transform (Arbeitstitel)" in sprng and summer

2002 See page 349

40

in

this book.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, "How AnnLee Changed lts Spots." in No Ghost Just a Shell,

op

cit

to live and work together commune_style and wishing only

to work
together. ln contemporary art, beyond aftist_couples, the
distinction
between living and working together and only working together
is
clearly exemprified by how the copenhagen-based gioup"
N55 and
superflex have structured their forms of coilaboration, with
the former
at one point living and working together and the ratter being
content
with collaborative work.
The motivation behind today's coilaborations varies radicaily,
armost
in proportion to the number of different modes of working.
A common
explanation for this has been that generosity and sharing provide
an
alternative to contemporary individuarism and the traditind
rore
of the romantic artist as a solitary genius. ln an increasingly

instrumentalized arl world, both commercially and publicly,

self_
determination and a desire to be a more powerfur force in-society
have also been mentioned as important motivations. And
there i
always the fun of working with others and the practicar
advantages of
dividing tasks according to speciarties and preferences.or
rn ceain
cases, the need for infrastructure has brought about coilaboration
around technicar equipment and venues. As Beatrice von
Bismarck
has pointed out, formarized groups of artists can often
be associated
with self-promotion and a desire to achieve success in the
ar.t worrd.
similarly, teamwork, with its orientation towards a rational
division
of labor and maximizing profit, is rinked to economic contexts.
collective activities, on the other hand, are connected to a desire
to withdraw from the exploitation of the art market, to turn
away
from the production of objects and from marketing. wanting
to-be
a stronger force in society is a kindred motivation,
as is a dsire to
create intellectuaily and emotionaily stimurating working
conditions.
A proliferation of new social movements seems to suggest that
collaboration per se is positive, as an intrinsic critique of individuarism
and profit seeking. Then there is the prosaic fact that aftists
often
want to create their own working conditions, and be shaped
by them
at the same time.a2 And it is important to point out that
aftists
and curators today often work under similar economic
conditions;
both can be classed as ,,precarious workers,', that is, their
workini
conditions are unstable and uncertain.a3

Collaboration has become a conscious process among artists, a

working method. Since the middle of the 1990s, the field of art has
expanded and developed affinities with a number of methods inspired
by activism. A kind of "neo-idealism" flourishes in the ads alongside
political "neo-radicalism." This should come as no surprise; when
political principles are completely steered by a capitalist economy,
culture necessarily becomes an arena for ideological debate. Culture
in general, and aft in particula then function as venues where the
political is allowed to be enacted, if sometimes covertly. A situation
then emerges in which the political discussion in the public spaces of
parliamentary democracies turns increasingly to ethics and morality,
and art begins to seek out latent forms of political expression-such
as notions of citizenship-that have either been eroded, utterly
transformed, or long taken for granted. Today, we have reached a
point where culture and art are not only used as instruments in the
political arena, but also constitute a potent force, discernable in the
strong interest in activism we now find in contemporary art.
It is here that the collaborative turn in contemporary ad becomes
most apparent, as it has increasingly been developed as a
way of creating room for its practitioners to maneuver around
instrumentalizing effects of both the art market and publicly financed
art alike. lt is simply easier to develop your own self-determined ways
'1
of working when you are self-organized. lf the art of the 990s was
previously
distinct
marked by a desire to dissolve borders and mingle
fields, the new millennium has revealed a form of "neo-separatism."
We have seen an increase not only in self-definition and a withdrawal
from the commercial market, but also in the distinction between larger
mainstream public institutions and self-organized parallel initiatives'
Whereas the larger mainstream institutions strive to be public-friendly,
and therefore tend to adhere to the principles of entertainment, selforganized initiatives are more investigative, preferring to question
given preconditions. While this division has always existed, in recent
years it has seen more pronounced distinctions. Collaborative
practitioners can indeed be found everywhere within this, as well as
within public and commercial institutions, but a significant number are
clearly more at home as self-organized parallel initiatives. lt is easier
to strategically separate oneself as part of a group than on one's own.
This urge to create space for maneuver-a "collective autonomy," to

41 Judith schwartzbart,

"The socar as a medium, meanng and motvation,, n coroquum

on coilaborative
Practice: Dispostive Workshop part 4, op. cit.
42 Stefan Rmer, "Are the vorcanoes stil Active? About Artst serf-organzaton
at Art schoors,,, ibid.
43- Alex Farquhaon, ,,Notes on Artist and Curator
Groups,,,bid.

202

SELECTED MARIA LIND WRITING

203

THECOLLABOBATIVETURN

borrow a term from Brian Hormes-through strategic separatism,

is
both a means of protection and an act of protest.a.
It has been claimed that the anthroporogy of coilaboration
must
be considered together with Marcer Mauss's cail for gift rerations.
Something as apparently insignificant as a gift is not just an
expression of unserfish generosity, but arso a way of exercising
power through the reciprocal logic of the poflatch.as.
ls collaboration
per se, then, a "good" method? Eve Chiapello claims
that the co_
option of "aftist critique" by neoliberal neo-management theory
while
proving that it has been "successful," has also made
it essentil[
toothless.46 ln a curture of mandatory coffee breaks and consensus,
such as in sweden, which outwardry embraces coilaboration
as part
of its mandate to promote communication and dialogue, rn.ny
oi
the thoughts mentioned above probabry seem very famiriar. positive
values such as loyalty, flexibility, altruism, and solidarity are
baked
into the concept of collaboration, but collaboration can also
stand
for the opposite, for treachery and ethicar instabirity. A coilaborator
can be a traitor, someone seruing the enemy, a person not to be
trusted. The same may be said of cooperative methods. rt is therefore
wofth noting that communication and collaboration can be efficient
smokescreens for their abirity to produce generosity and soridarity.
The crux of understanding when coilaborations work (and when
t-hey
don't) thus lies in specificity, ,in the precision of the ,,here and
now,,,
the consideration of time, context, and other surrounding forces.
But what of the resurts? Does it make any difference whether
diverse
forms of aftistic collaboration lie behind an artwork or any other
kind
of cultural production? ls collaboration an inherently ,,better,'
method,
producing "better" results? The curatorial collective wHW
claims that
the purpose of colraboration ries in producing something that
wourd
othenise not take prace; it has to make possibre that which
wourd
othenvise be impossible.4T.

44. See
2OO4)

Bria

Hormes, "Artistic Autonomy and the communicaton society,"

Third rext, no. .1g (November

45. See Steven Wright, "The Delicate Esence of Artistc Collaboraton,,,

ibid.
46' Eve chapello, "Evorution and co-optaton: The 'Artist
critque' of i/anagement and captarism,,' ibd
47 What, How & for whom, "New ouflnes of the po$bre," n coilectve
crtvty (Kser:
Fridericanum, 2OOS).

204.

SELECTED MARIA LIND WRITING

Kunsthaile