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Third Text, Vol. 18, Issue 6, 2004, 531532

Art and Collaboration

Introduction
John Roberts and Stephen Wright
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This special issue on art and collaboration brings together artists and writers from Western Europe, North America, Australia, Russia, and the Congo. A number of the contributions were first presented as papers at a conference, Diffusion: Collaborative Practice in Contemporary Art, which we organised at the Tate Modern, in October 2003. In this instance, we have decided to broaden the debate, calling on artists and writers to contribute whom we see as working in ways that extend our original remit for the conference. However, if this issue is thoroughly international in its scope, it is important to note the number of contributions from France. For, it has above all been in France since the late 1990s that the issue of collaboration in art and arts cultural form has received some of its most interesting political formulations. Though Nicolas Bourriaud has played his part in drawing mainstream attention to the phenomenon of collaborative practice, a more significant role has been played by such political/cultural journals as Mouvements and Multitudes, and such artist groups as Bureau dtudes, Accs local, and AAA Corp. The conference reflected these current theoretical engagements, which have profoundly shaped the direction of this issue of Third Text, although for the time being this thinking has little audience outside of France. Collaboration in art is as much bound up with value artistic value, the value of artistic labour, the value-form of capitalism as it is with politics and representation. Indeed collaboration in art expressly allows one to talk about value in art as a political matter, for collaboration is where labour embodied in the artwork (manual skill, cognition, artspecific competences of all kinds) is exposed to scrutiny. But there is no singular model of collaboration that might allow artists to address these questions or propose a progressive practice; and this is reflected in the very different conceptions of collaboration under discussion in this issue, which reveal the theoretical heterogeneity of the category: Brian Holmes (collaboration as post-object political intervention); Greg Sholette and Blake Stimpson (collaboration as self-realisation of human nature); Gene Ray (collaboration as a catalytic extension of art into everyday
jorob128@aol.com JohnRoberts 0 600000November 18 2004 & Francis Original Article Ltd Third and 10.1080/0952882042000284934 CTTE100155.sgm Ltd TaylorText Francis2004

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online 2004 Kala Press/Black Umbrella http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/0952882042000284934

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practice); Jochen Gerz (collaboration as a means of achieving public authorship); Eve Chiapello (collaboration in the wake of managements co-optation of artist critique); Charles Green (collaboration as crosscultural dialogue); Bureau dtudes (collaboration as a form of autonomising cognitive mapping); Franois Deck (collaboration as reciprocal expertise); Le Groupe Amos (collaboration as a literacy and consciousness-raising programme); Cornford and Cross (collaboration as institutional critique); Radek (collaboration as asocial resistance through art). Nevertheless, this is by no means a pluralist itinerary of collaborative forms. Although we recognise the importance of this heterogeneity, we also acknowledge that collaboration is more than simply a multitudinous way of making art after Conceptualism. On the contrary, because collaboration defines art as a problem of cultural form its use-values it brings the category of art face to face with it most cherished expectations and ideals individual authorship and autonomy and thus addresses the very basis of arts relationship to democracy, the artworld and capitalist relations of production. Collaboration is that space of interconnection between art and non-art, art and other disciplines, that continually tests the social boundaries of where, how, with what, and with whom art might be made. But if arts potentially autonomising role and constitutive relationship to non-art practices run through many of these contributions, arts post-autonomous status is not, thereby, a settled question. As editors, the post-autonomy/autonomy debate is something we have very different opinions on, as is reflected in our own contributions. Theoretical discussion on the question of collaboration has been largely in abeyance in Anglo-American art since the 1970s. It is really only with Charles Greens work on group learning in art in the mid1990s and its extensive debt to debates from the 1970s and the Critical Art Ensembles foregrounding of group practice that this has changed. As such this is the first journal publication on the subject in English, bridging these earlier moments with work currently being produced across the globe. This issue of Third Text and the conference at the Tate Modern took much time and energy to prepare. We would like to thank Andrew Brighton, Dominic Willsdon at Tate Modern, Antonia Payne and the University of Wolverhampton Fine Art Research Department, the French Institute, London, and Rasheed Araeen for their support. July 2004

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