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No artistic collaboration is ever either a natural
or linear progression towards a higher state of aesthetic perfection.
A collaboration can seem to take you backwards even when you are
meant to be progressing at double speed. Learning to collaborate
is often perceived as a contradiction. It is assumed to be as natural
as breathing. However, submitting to the needs of others, presenting
your own within a shared space, and then allowing the dialogue to
shape the outcome can test the limits of an individual's faith and
maturity. To develop ideas in an open environment is to risk seeing
them in a naked and unformed manner, it may reveal their greatest
potential but also expose their deepest flaws. This gesture requires
unequivocal trust in your partners. There must be a confidence that
the process of revelation is not betrayed in ways that would harm
the other.
Collaboration presupposes mutual understanding, shared languages,
common goals and the ability to negotiate across differences. These
qualities and skills are not common, nor are they often presented
as part of the identity of the artist. The mythical images of the
artist are mostly as solitary figures, rebelling against social
rules and pushing the boundaries of institutions. However, the myth
of the artist as an outsider is a destructive self-image. It fosters
contempt for the complex ways in which the artist is entangled with
others. Consider this ironic manifesto by Carlos Capelan:
WE ARE DEPENDENT
Fifth Proclamation of the PCLA (r)
The PCLA (r) upholds that the museum, that the institutions, that
the museums, that the museums devoted or dedicated to Contemporary
Art (not valid)
The PCLA (r) is compelled by the circumstances to pronounce on contemporary
art museums and the narcissist identitary politics projected on
the activity of contemporary art. In this respect, the Post Colonial
Liberation Army (rematerializaci-n (r) upholds:
1: that no institution devoted to contemporary art is fit to define
what art is, or what makes one thing more contemporary than another;
2: that, under an appearance of theoretical porosity, these institutions
are governed by solid pragmatic principles;
3: that if these institutions have today difficulties in managing
aesthetics, they are, on the other hand, highly qualified to manage
other kinds of categories;
4: that my avant-garde is bigger than yours;
5: that the museums are institutions devoted to the praxis of autist
self-portrait;
6: that the artists do not exist;
7: that neither does art, only its praxis;
8: that the National State ethnifies: the Family of Man, Modernism
and Postmodernity, the notion of the Contemporary, Geography, Flora
and Fauna, the ownership of the Picassos, the Alterity that justifies
and upholds its Autist Self-portrait and Creative Freedom;
9: that globalization is not round like a globe; that the perception
of the 'multicultural' is more effective when done from the Renaissance
central perspective; that it is not certain that the mere economic
inversion would allow access to the mainstream of contemporary culture;
that this is not a text; that any object exposed in a vitrine acquires
the peculiarity of catching our attention for a moment; that our
attention is fragmentary;
10: that the new underwear design market does not have as its object
the expansion of either the notion or the function of art;
11: that the flows of capital, information, technology, products
and people characterizing the so-called globalization process, release
forces which, in themselves, have no a priori ethic intention, wherefore
concepts as ethnification, plurality, inclusion, exclusion, innovation,
repetition, accumulation or fascination may play roles both progressive
and conservative depending on subjective conditions in specific
contexts;
12: that even though art is part of the symbolic production of our
times, its products function as both quantitative and qualitative
categories;
13: that alterity is another of the resources for renovation of
the avant-garde of the New Global Middle Class;
14: France, one point; la Sude, un point; le Portugal, um ponto;
Deutschland, ein und fnfzig; etc...
15: that multiculturality and globalization are not enough for New
Zealand, Australia, South Africa and the River Plate to communicate
horizontally;
16: that in contemporary society the notion of social groups with
common interests transcends the limits traditionally defined by
national state; that as capital tends to draw transnational strategies,
and as contemporary art's system of education, production and distribution
grows more international, postmodern youngsters and adults also
are disposed and ready to defend their museums, galleries, grants,
critics, pencils, round tables, passepartouts, rulers, draughtman's
squares, digital videos, watercolours, genome maps, erasers, collections,
easels, postduchampian traditions and their favourite curators against
all not immersed in the precise space of the contemporary;
17: that it is false that the notion of contemporaneity in art fulfils
a homogenizing function in contradiction with the plural vocation
of the present;
18: that all those excluded from social representation in the institutions
devoted to contemporary art do not necessarily stay in the same
hotel (it is not evident either that all those excluded aspire to
harmony between body and soul);
19: that revisionism is a political condition of history; so is
seduction;
20: that p-p-p-possibly nothing of the aforesaid f-f-f-faithfully
expresses the desires and aspirations of the excluded, the excluders,
the devoted or the enemies of the mainstream of art, nor any other
issue or p-p-p-position of people or groups related to culture produced
in our days;
21: that it is false, of absolute falsity, what it is said that
there is not one system of contemporary cultural production but
several, and that it is impossible to uphold the affirmation that:
'there is no generic contemporary culture but a superstitious desire
of the same, fragmented into a thousand different praxis and three
thousand activities of diverse urgency which the PCLA (r) neither
attends to nor understands properly', and before which the PCLA
(r) wonders with the same wonderment a child wonders before the
wonder of each day with the same wonderment a child wonders before
the wonder of each day with the same wonderment a child wonders
before the wonder of each day with the same wonderment.
For a better understanding of whom we are, wherefrom we come, what
we want and where we go!
For a transparent contemporary art and with future!
For a just representation of diversity!
This compelling list of denunciations is also an alluring invitation
for re-commencement. Every time Capelan announces the limit of a
concept or the insufficiency of one model he is also invoking the
question of sufficiency and need to take a step in another direction.
There is no ultimate end. Each declaration of opposition is another
form of entanglement with the opponent. Creativity never occurs
in a social vacuum. All forms of artistic practice are structured
like a language. The proliferation in forms of practice has also
extended the need to multiply our codes of reference and our dexterity
in cultural translation. Learning to recognise and respond in the
various languages expressed in any group activity is an essential
task for collaboration. These qualities can only be achieved with
familiarity, good will and an extended period of exchange. The time
to develop a collective experience and the personal confidence to
express inner needs are crucial elements in any collaborative process.
Collaboration can either lead to a new hybrid work, in which the
conjunction enhances or cancels the sum of its contributors. Collaboration
can create a new third way of seeing the connection between things
or it can deepen the rift between. To see a bridge may be as useful
as to witness the gulf, either way the difference of others needs
to be recognised. Following from here is the challenge of living
with and leading towards new spheres of connection, the search for
new media which contain both positions and perspectives, and a form
which enables the integrity of the individual as well the space
that comes from being in a collective to grow.
The compromises of being together should not necessarily lead to
being in a static state or even in a diminished form. As artists
give and take from each other, putting something into a space, or
even hold back a bit of their own work, it is hoped that a new balance
can be achieved. In the order that is constituted out of this balance
there is not just a novel presentation of material but also the
space in which deeper reflections can occur. It can inspire the
re-evaluation of the conceptual reach of your own work.
The transformation in the working process and the unique mode of
presentation can in effect question the foundations upon which work
is made and suggest new directions for developing ideas. It can
make explicit the ways in which art extracts something that is raw
and undefined as well as draws from a field that is mapped and staked.
Art, like all new ideas, builds from the vocabulary that exists
within a language, as well as extending the boundaries of meaning.
Ideas, unlike information, always arrive incomplete and tentative.
They need to be grounded within a context but they also have the
scope to either reveal a new view or present an alternative strategy
for viewing. A collaborative process can heighten and intensify
the exchange of ideas and sharpen the contact points of differing
perspectives. Translation is the activity that is most in demand
during collaboration. Learning each other's language and developing
ways of embracing the difference is the task that confronts the
individual and the group.
Collaboration may be as challenging as it is promising. It may threaten
to reveal the limitation of a world view as much as it offers to
extend and complement it. As one begins to work in the context of
others and share a space whose boundaries are not entirely determined
by an individual ego and whose contents do not entirely reflect
a single vision, then it becomes necessary to acknowledge and appreciate
the needs of others and the value of participating in shared statements.
No artistic practice is ever formed in isolation, however, there
is often the fantasy of developing a unique identity. Modern art
shares some of the most pathetic dreams of modernity: the construction
of the shameless individual. Autonomous, transcendent, omnipotent
and omniscient - the artist as Master in an age when everyone else
is a slave to conditional love and institutionalized freedom. Such
fantasies are either punctured by the process of collaboration or
provide the walls that block any exchange from becoming collaborative.
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