Co-operating Then and Now, David Barrett

In 1996, in the middle of the boom in new British art (just after ‘Brilliant!’ at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, but before ‘Sensation’ at the Royal Academy) the curator of the Southampton City Art Gallery, Godfrey Worsdale, felt that the time was right to put together an exhibition called ‘Co-operators’. This group exhibition highlighted the recent trend among the younger generation of British artists to work in pairs. The artists included in the exhibition were Henry Bond and Liam Gillick, Ramsay Bird, Hope, Andrea and Philippe, Jane and Louise Wilson, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Alan Kane and Jeremy Deller, Langlands and Bell, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin, and Critical Decor.

In his introduction to the exhibition catalogue, Worsdale claimed that the current levels of collaborative working were unheard of since the 1960s. He felt that this was partly due to an increase, in the late 1980s, of artists making work that was explicitly concerned with the cultural situation that it was produced within. Because the British attitude towards contemporary art was, at best, dismissive and, more frequently, openly hostile, this new generation of artists produced artworks that embodied a highly combative attitude. Worsdale suggested that this situation could well have encouraged artists to collaborate ‘as an act of resilience’. Of course, the attitude of society towards new art began to change at that time, partly due to the success of this new generation of artists, and Worsdale went on to suggest that the confidence that then flowed through the artistic community during the 1990s boom also allowed collaboration to continue, despite the changed circumstances. Instead of working collaboratively as an act of resilience, now, he argued, artists were confident enough to choose collaboration as just another way of working among many others, a kind of pseudo-medium: video, sculpture, performance, installation, collaboration, etc.

It is interesting to note that Worsdale also highlighted differences between the earlier and later collaborative practices; in the 1960s, he argued, collaboration was an attempt to deny the expression of the individual - celebrating unified ideas rather than individual expression - whereas contemporary collaborators seemed to actively encourage differences between the individual artist-collaborators to feed into the final work.