Collaboration and Originality, Dr Nancy Roth

Most of us live in families, work and play in teams, form clubs and join societies with abandon. We collaborate. Many kinds of artists, too, work in groups as a matter of course, e.g. musicians, actors, dancers, filmmakers, architects. In fact it is almost exclusively in the visual arts that collaboration has recently—since the late 1960s—arisen as an issue. It may seem as though the discussion marks the overdue demise of an obsolete model of creativity that is most deeply entrenched in the visual arts. For although the notion of a self-sufficient genius, creating from his (or her) own inner resources, is by no means exclusive to visual art, the painter-in-the-studio may well remain that model’s most familiar representation. In any case, I very much doubt whether the idea of individual creativity is being replaced by models of collaboration and interactivity any more than, say, print is being replaced by digital electronic communication. Digital technology is affecting everything about print, from who publishes to what and how much is published to how it all looks and who buys it and who reads it. In analogous fashion, collaborative models of creativity, in part because they seem implicit in these same technologies, are reconfiguring visual art. Rather than being replaced, however, the old model remains recognizable, operable as a kind of palimpsest, below the surface of a quite different aesthetic.

In a recent anthology of writing about drawing, John Wood raised a question about whether a drawing could draw itself, whether it would be possible to think of ourselves being sketched by a drawing in an act of self-creation, or autopoesis that no longer recognizes a firm distinction between the drawer, the drawn, and the viewer. Drawing, as arguably the oldest, most immediate and intimate creative activity, is no doubt the best possible place to begin articulating such a framework. But the discussion moves to other media as well—language, for example, and music. It sketches us, the readers, as participants in a universe of constant creation, a dynamic interaction in which the origin of something new can’t be traced to a single person, and perhaps can’t be located in any one time and place at all.