Let's Get Together- Write Up

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by Rocca Gutteridge, 21 Sep 2011

An Artachat discussion with:
Angus Farquhar (Creative Director, NVA)
Peter McCaughey (Artist, Lecturer and Director at Wave)
Blane Johnson (Former RGU student)
Deborah Beeson (The Mother’s Art Movement)

Last Thursday’s Artachat, the first in three devised in collaboration with Robert Gordon University, focused it’s attention around the theme of collaboration in Contemporary Art and asked the following three questions to a fully engaged audience at the Scott Sutherland School of Architecture in Aberdeen.

Why do we collaborate and with who?
What types of collaboration do we pursue?
How do we know when collaborations do and don’t work?

The following transcript is a series of Twitter style short notes composed by independent curator Dane Sutherland for Artachat. A podcast of the event can be heard here: http://snd.sc/p6t3F4

and thank you as ever to Stephen McGarry for his excellent photo documentation.

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Opening Presentation- Angus Farquhar (Director, NVA):

I can see two main reasons for working collaboratively:

I’m primarily publicly funded, so already I define this as a collaboration.

I don’t make objects for galleries.

Collaboration brings groups of people together in positive circumstances.

In a wider field, it is necessary to collaborate with funders, statutory bodies and the public.

If you’re making public art, there is a responsibility and importance to explore the effect of the work on people who have not asked for the work – these people have different interests from those of the artist.

A challenge in my work is that often my collaborators are disengaged with my artistic interests.

Some projects I have been involved with illustrate the idea of resistance – people who don’t initially want something to happen. What happens when an artist goes into this situation?

The artist must learn the language and work with the system of the public domain, otherwise there is a loss of control. These are often life skills to be learned, not just artistic skills.

To work collaboratively and meaningfully, a building of trust is required, which can only be done through time – years, not days or weeks.

An artist I worked with in Skye had a meaningful message but a limited mode of expression. We provided the challenge, and were challenged, to develop the work in this situation.

There is an iceberg principle at work – what holds the peak up, is a mass of relations underneath.

With planning authorities, comes a burden of suspicion with regards art. Again, building relationships is required.

We live in a deeply controlled, and risk-assessed society – there are demands of best practice to prove the value of the works and of working creatively.

An example of our (NVA) collaboration with the public was the re-enactment of the White Bike Plan project for Glasgow International in 2010, where we released 50 white bikes into the streets for the public to use during the festival.

21 bikes were returned, while some of the remaining 29 have been spotted in places as far as New York and Germany. This was noted through a further, unmediated, collaboration via social media platforms – it seemed to become a truly democratic project.

It caught the imagination of the popular press, and not just the artworld, producing an impact on the wider world.

We had no problem with a re-appropriation of the bikes, whether by junkies of the press. We knew that the original scheme failed, but not the idea.

We were implementing a trusting, positive statement.

Looking for an opportunity to change and affect policies – democracy is fluid.

Trying to produce art that looks for a pro-active, rather than a reactive response, which challenges current views of the world.

The project was a beautifully human experience, with the collaborative capacity to be collectively good for the individual.

Inconversation- Peter McCaughey (Director at WAVE and artist lecturer at Glasgow School of Art):

In the past I have been a rotten collaborator – I have come from a fine art educated tradition, where I have acted as a maverick, formed and working in a vacuum.

Being formed in this environment produces isolation and a disconnection from a culture.

Part of the reason I wasn’t very good was the tendency for those of us educated in a particular way to consider ourselves the most important part of a process. This means I could be difficult to work with, a control-freak.

I do have to remind myself, however: don’t totalise – this method does have spirit. With this mode there is a truth to yourself, and not giving a damn about others.

An act of creativity would be to extend this practice out, and ask how the art works, and who it speaks to.

I mapping the diversity of experience in this room – even to harness an nth of the experience here, would be incredible.

Ideas are not just conceived in isolation, but in relation to contemporary times, geographies, politics etc

I am reminded of Liam Gillick’s words: ‘compromise is the most interesting place’

Often we measure the value of what we achieve by how much we exert total control over making something, to the extent that allowing any outside influence seems disingenuous.

Control = incredible attention to detail.

How to we broker compromise?

Investment in ideology leads to failure.

In being beholden to an idea, we fail to realise how ideas function in the world.

Angus Farquhar:

Production of relationships is a key part of the work.

Validation of experience and the process = success, and is as important as a final product.

Peter McCaughey:

How do we build different systems of values? A challenge for those working in institutions with normative values of the object?

A lattice of support can be created through trust, criticality, and being stuck with people, which leads to becoming close with people.

Artists are most interesting when they are placed at other ‘tables,’ where they can have a great impact – the people in this network can affect one another – and also, artists can sit at many tables.

You never make art just for yourself – there is a case for inter-subjectivity in art and in everyday life.

What are we going to do about the parts of the world that don’t care about our valued parts of the world?
- Are we going to try to understand how we impact upon these things, to allow them to make an impact upon the world?
- I mean that our work should have a degree of functionality.

Deborah Beeson (Artist and head of Mothers Art Movement):

My experience of collaboration is deeply rooted within local schools – I am an artist and a mum, with a family and so cannot travel etc.

Here. I engage with the kids by creating an artistic environment for them.

My methodology incorporates a compromise in my personal practice, though I also ask the kids (and teachers) to compromise, that they do research etc.

By doing this they learn how to look at art and make the installations themselves – it is completely their work.

This process has a life of its own, where project can take on new directions, allowing a growth in practice for all involved.

It encourages people to think in a different way.

Audience (Craig Barrowman, Stray Dog Art):

An important concept for me in that respect is that of play – playing games can solidify relationships etc.

Deborah Beeson:

In our lives there is a lack of emphasis on ‘play’ and I encourage the kids to play – it helps them pick up more ideas.

Unfortunately, an element of ‘play’ is lost in the rigid timetable, which gets worse throughout school – this is a division of learning.

Sally Thomson (Grampian Hospital Arts Trust):

A creative practice which involves collaboration and even playing has had a humanizing effect in my area of work – many professionals have found it key to viewing people as people again, rather than as patients, as part of their job.

Peter McCaughey:

Everyone has a circle of influence, which extends throughout their life.

In terms of the ‘tables’ or networks I was talking about earlier, the ‘ripple’ [of creativity] can disappear very quickly once an individual leaves – here, there is dependence upon a charismatic person rather than creating a support network.

Angus Farquhar:

If artists and project are funded by outside bodies – how can we do something that is possibly critical of the funder?

In scientific research it is OK to trash legitimized truths or norms in order to make progress.

Here art can learn from science – scientific research is very good at changing policies – art has, overall, not been very good at changing cultural policies.

Some of the attempts at policy changing such as community-led design have been problematic – there is a problem in the process in that there is a question as to whether they are truly democratic (artists come in as specialist consultants) or sometimes these projects produce very bland results.

Peter McCaughey:

Is the pursuit of truth through scientific methods enough?

Scientific methods are not unbiased – failed research is not published especially to the same extent that art and its failures are documented and embraced.

John Latham’s Artist Placement Group in the 1960s was a project which involved the linking of diverse institutions.

From this we can learn that we all have our own knowledge that we can exchange for a particular problem.

Blane Johnson (Artist and Recent Graduate of RGU:

I’d never thought about collaboration at all – it wasn’t spoken about or explicitly communicated at university.

I suppose I was unaware that it was actually happening.

It is obviously important for any art practice.

Peter McCaughey:

Degrees are always individually awarded, so it is difficult to assess explicit collaboration and how or when it is happening.

The idea of the ‘unique individual’ is still an index for contemporary practice and assessment which stems from the mechanisms of capitalism.

We should make critical decisions based on these traditional values.

For example with textiles [Blane studies Textiles as Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen], how the maker of ‘the thing’ can extend into the realm of/connect to the user of the thing.

Craig Barrowman:

Capitalist culture manages collaboration across the globe.

Angus Farquhar:

Artists need to be taught ‘how’ you make your work, as well as ‘why’.

We’re all to some degree complicit with these power structures – asking ‘how?’ has an ethical consequence.

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