Collaboration as Symptom, Charles Green

Artists appear in their art, voluntarily placing themselves center stage in self-portraits but also at the margins of all their other works, constructing themselves through brush marks, in signature style, by individual preferences, and through repeated motifs — in short, from the intersection of subjectivity with medium. As a basic tenet of connoisseurship, this seems obvious, but there are degrees of self-conscious intention that complicate this process, especially during the latter half of the twentieth century, for many artists have thought carefully about the way they code themselves into their art, manipulating the way they appear. This is not to suggest that artists are narcissistic, or that they are necessarily even interested in the politics of identity; rather, artists have always conceded and exploited the inevitability of implicit self-representation. Artists are thieves in the attic: They far from innocently try out different, sometimes almost forgotten identities in the chaotically organized attic of history, rummaging in dusty, dark rooms where variations of authorial identity are stored away from view. This runs counter to the conventional idea of the lonely artist passively waiting for inspiration’s light bulb to be turned on. Such a cliched figure is deeply embedded in media representations of artists, in market valuations based on authenticity and originality, and in so much public discourse that it is generally perceived as “normal.” If this is normal, then the deliberate, careful construction of authorial alternatives described in my book must be aberrant. Artistic collaboration is a special and obvious case of the manipulation of the figure of the artist, for at the very least collaboration involves a deliberately chosen alteration of artistic identity from individual to composite subjectivity. One expects new understandings of artistic authorship to appear in artistic collaborations, understandings that may or may not be consistent with the artists’ solo productions before they take up collaborative projects.
I propose that collaboration was a crucial element in the transition from modernist to postmodern art and that a trajectory consisting of a series of artistic collaborations emerges clearly from late 1960s conceptualism onward. The proliferation of teamwork in post-1960s art challenged not only the terms by which artistic identity was conventionally conceived but also the “frame” — the discursive boundary between the “inside” and the “outside” of a work of art. I would argue that artistic collaboration in the late 1960s and during the 1970s occupies a special position: Redefinitions of art and of artistic collaboration intersected at this time.
Just what, though, were the stakes in these different methods of collaboration? Who benefited, who got marginalized, who was eventually obliterated from the historical record? If, as I think, these teams re-created themselves as embodiments of textual mimicry, then we need to pay close attention to both artistic text and context. I will answer these questions through a very selective history of artistic collaborations after 1968emdash;specifically, those collaborations that involved unorthodox models of authorship-in a series of case studies. I focus on artistic collaborations in international art that came to notice in the 1970s, locating them within the evolution of conceptualism: conceptual art, Earth art, systems art, land art, body art, and many other stylistic labels. Because of this narrow focus, however, I have not written about many teams whom I admire greatly, including Group Material and Komar and Melamid.</td>