collective practices

In the last 10 years or so collaborative art practices have moved in to the mainstream of cultural production, and collaboration is now largely taken for granted as one of the numerous ways that artists can choose to operate. Despite this, artistic collaboration still raises some interesting and crucial questions about the nature of authorship, authenticity and the artists’ relationships to their works & audiences that inevitably disrupts the persistent and popular image of the artist as a ‘heroic’ solitary figure. While some collaborations have come from a reaction against political and cultural regimes, there are numerous other artists who have chosen to work together as a positive choice for collaboration. Common to most if not all collaborative practices though, is an implicit critique of the idea of the artist as a figure that stands outside of society engaged in an internal singular dialogue.

Mark Dunhill & Tamiko O'Brien 2005

http://www.theoryflux.com/ (interesting online collaboration)

The idea of the solitary genius and the relationship of this idea with capitalism is something that has been critiqued, questioned and undermined by artists and theorists (at least since Duchamp ‘collaborated’ with Leonardo or later when Rauschenberg painstakingly erased De Kooning’s drawing.)

examples of collaboration include

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Henry Miller and Anais Nin, Marie and Pierre Curie, Martha Graham and Erick Hawkins, and Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz; the productive partnerships of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Albert Einstein and Marcel Grossmann, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein, and Freeman Dyson and Richard Feynman; the familial collaborations of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Hubert and Stuart Dreyfus, and Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson and Mary Catherine Bateson; and the larger ensembles of The Guarneri String Quartet, Lee Strasburg, Harold Clurman and The Group Theater, and such feminist groups as The Stone Center and the authors of Women's Ways of Knowing.

CREATIVE COLLABORATION

Vera John-Steiner