[Nettime-bold] Interview with Charles Green

[geert lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

The Art of Collaboration
An Interview with Charles Green
Australian Art Critic and Author of The Third Hand, Collaboration in Art
from Conceptualism to Postmodernism
By Geert Lovink

Charles Green has written an extraordinary rich and well-documented work
about conceptual art in the late sixties and seventies. As the title
indicates The Third Hand shapes art history in a methodological matter.
Collaboration is a metatag to order works. There is no talk here about
schools or chronologies. Instead there are specific contextualized works,
events, happenings, installations, breaking away from painting and the cave
of language, meant to capture art. For Green, collaboration became an entry
point to open up histories which, despite their fame, are at brink of being
forgotten. Collaboration is not so much a mode of production as it is a
trajectory. Green is drawing traces which makes it possible to tell stories
and make the often abstract and complex conceptual art works alive again.
This alternative way of reconstructing art history pays respect to the
original intentions of the artists. In separate chapters Charles Green deals
with Gilbert & George, Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Christo and Jeanne-Claude,
Joseph Kosuth, Ian Burns, Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison and a few
more.
Having collaborated myself a great deal, for instance as a member of the
media theorist association Adilkno, my interest in this topic grew when
Klaus Theweleit published his Book of Kings (Part I, 1988) in which he
describes the psycho-analytic aspects of artist collaborations. Theweleit's
account is a bloody one and deals with the (male) violence, using female
partners to metamorphorize into a next, higher stage of art production.
Charles Green has refrained from psychologism. The Third Hand is not dealing
with the internal dynamics. Instead teamwork is presented as an almost
necessary step towards 80s postmoderism and its questioning of identities
and reconfigurations of meaning. In this email exchange Charles and I have
tried to put the 70s conceptual art experiences into the contemporary
framework of new media.

GL: After you have done so much research, would you say that the origin of
collaboration in art since the sixties is lying in the crisis of the 19th
century ideal of the artist as universal genius?

CG: No, I don't see a crisis created by an ideal of universal genius as
behind any origin of collaboration in art as a widespread phenomenon during
the 1960s. In my book, The Third Hand, I was trying to be both more specific
and more generalized, and above all my narrative was relevant to art
practice right now. On the one hand I wanted to re-explain in a very focused
way a narrow, definite period - the ten years or so between around 1968 and
1978. You see, I think that period is absolutely foundational to art today,
but its significance got lost during the period of classic postmodernism in
the 1980s and then again in the identity politics-based early 1990s. The
period is one of those fascinating phases, riven by crisis and exploding
with possibilities and multiple futures, that require very patient
rethinking, and this rethinking is just beginning now.
I'm certainly not the only person to want to do this, but I chose to think
this through collaboration, and it so happens for multiple reasons this is
important all through visual culture, including internet culture, now. I
find most of the explanations of that time, in art history at least, myopic.
This is partly on account of the authors' generational status, as members of
a generation that came to self-consciousness immediately AFTER the period.
I'm thinking of writers like Hal Foster, for example, who are slightly too
young to have first hand experience of the period. And of people who did, I
know also that participants who write, figures like Lucy Lippard, Harald
Szeemann, Benjamin Buchloh, the artist Jeff Wall, have part of a story to
communicate but not a panoramic view, since they are so implicated as
participants in the action. On the other hand, since my main area of
interest both as an artist and as an art historian is the art of our time,
is contemporary art, I wanted to see if an intuition, that the art that
interests me most represents the resurfacing of those 1968-78 points of
origin but at different points on the map, was right.
The most exciting art of our time often centers around new media, around
really wild new forms of author/artist, often OUTSIDE New York in centers
like Taipei, Seoul, Sydney. We DO see much of the best art circulating in
the globalized networks of curated exhibitions, so I'm not hypothesizing an
excluded canon at all. But throughout the book, I saw the 20th century, not
the 19th, as the locus of the problem: the memory crisis best formulated by
Benjamin is manifest at the start of modernity, but it intersects throughout
this 20th century - so different in the 21st century - with the refusal of
optical and visual knowledge traced so clearly by Martin Jay. That is one
aspect underneath the late 1960s crisis, but it is still only one aspect.
Another was the shift in the nature of artistic work; yet another - my
particular concern - was the shift in the nature of the artist. All occur in
response to crises specific to that moment but present, as your question
suggests, from the start of modernity as well. I suppose ultimately the
collaboration area that interests me lies in the tensions thrown up just
BEFORE there is any clear sign that the transition from modernism to
postmodernism is underway. I definitely do not think that collaboration in
art is particularly radical, not that it arose in the 1960s. But I do think
that at this foundational time it occupies a specially instructive place.

GL: In the period you discuss, from the 60s to 80s, specialization has
become a general social phenomenon, there is more than the 'defeat of
painting'. Don't you think that collaboration within the arts should be seen
in the broader perspective of a rapidly increasing division of labour and
professionalization during that period?

CG: The idea of a defeat of painting so close to conceptual artists'
hearts - and I started my artistic life as an art student making conceptual
art works alongside paintings at the very start of the 1970s - was really
always something else, and this is clear in those artists' writings and
statements: Painting was a cipher, a metonym, standing in for the 19th
century idea of the bohemian artist that artists came to despise. This is
the identity that you mentioned a moment ago.

GL: One could say that the artists you discuss are not so predicting such a
shift in an avant-garde way but rather responding to and reflecting this
long-term trend so visible on the work floor, within academic disciplines
and in everyday life. We see advanced forms of the division of labor
reflected in hybrid art practices transcending singular subjects and media.
Or is this reading perhaps a banal and mechanical Marxist interpretation?

CG: You are very right at one level, but there's more to it than that, for
the productivist aesthetic implicit in Marxist-oriented modernism was also
rejected by those artists, at least for the most part initially, though that
model, which ends up entailing a more conventional idea of collaboration -
the collective - returned later. Their collaborations were not so much a way
of connecting with a social project - though it was in the case of Art &
Language AFTER its start, whose history I leave to the many other people who
are working on it - as a way of working out if it was possible to engage in
such activity. As time went on, and so many writers have traced this, the
desire to see political action in art through collective work increasingly
replaced the desire to see if collaborative action could facilitate, through
the removal of the artist, a new zone between art, writing and history. THIS
zone fascinated me, not the ability to connect art and politics, and I think
it is implicit in a lot of the activity around now, in defining the new
intermedia genre in contemporary art, only some of which involves new media,
and some of which involves a kind of dumbed-down sneaker aesthetic.

GL: What can you tell us about the art of collaboration? Gilbert & George re
still together but Marina Abramovic and Ulay broke up in a rather sad way.
People these days invest a lot of their time and energy in (online)
collaborations and get deeply disappointed when collaborations are falling
apart. I have to think here what Michel Foucault writes about friendship.
You have are collaborating yourself. You must have thought about this.

CG: Abramovic and Ulay apparently met again recently on the occasion of
Marina's 50th birthday, and they danced the frozen tango position
immortalized in one of their endurance works together, or at least a friend
tells me so. There's something else to remember. Collaboration is not the
same as friendship, and by friendship connotes cooperation. Friendship is
always fragile since its contract is so unenforceable. Demands in and on
friendship are always ultimately unsustainable, unless friendship is
governed by an economy of civility. Collaboration involves much, much more.
Collaboration involves the articulation of contractual relations.
As I worked on my project, which as I said before started out as an attempt
to explain a foundational moment in art that was specifically important to
me, I realized that artistic collaboration was one lens through which to
explain the wider world of artistic change. It was a microcosm, and I'm an
art historian rather than an art theorist, whatever that is, horrible term.
But it was also important at a certain moment for the reasons I mentioned
earlier - outmoded ideas of what an artists does, where, and how, even why,
all these had to be defeated if a convincing post-studio art was to emerge
(I'm borrowing, as I do in the book, Michael Fried's priority: the art of a
specific time has to convince its viewers of that time, and it can't do that
through stale clichés). Then way after that, and here I come back to your
question, I realized that the typology of types of collaboration I had drawn
up (cooperation in collective, short-term cooperation; corporate,
bureaucratic groups or partnerships; married couples and families; and
finally intensely and publicly bonded couples who created "third artists")
also formed itself into a narrative, for certain types of collaboration were
answered by others as each proved to be inadequate in the solution of
artistic problems. Productivism gone mad. The final type of collaboration I
list - the couple who identify themselves with their art - is exemplified by
both Marina Abramovic's work with Ulay, but also by Gilbert & George.
I don't know that there are any rules about collaborative longevity, but it
seems to me that the collaborations that modeled themselves on family
structures, with the collaborative identity rather like a castle wall behind
which roles could be swapped and reversed - was an easier model to sustain
than this unless civility was the basis of relationship, which it overtly is
with Gilbert & George, who are even models of cooperation and generosity to
intrusive art critics like myself. Self-revelation was implicit in the
"third hand" collaborations, and is unsustainable since its comprehension,
even by the artists themselves, always comes a moment after experience,
which in turn comes a moment after the event of illumination, as Buddhist
theology argues.
I'm interested that you mention the difficulty of on-line collaborative
sustainability. I know that sustainability and the particular types of
collaborative contract are linked. The problem lies, again, in confusing
collaboration with friendship. Collectives are not the same as
collaborations. All of the artists I researched worked together for long
periods of time. It is highly unlikely that Christo and Jeanne-Claude, or
Ann and Patrick Poirier, or Helen and Newton Harrison, or Gilbert & George,
or a host of others, would choose to work outside their collaboration. Too
much invested and too much mutual pleasure is obvious. But other
collaborations, like Mel Ramsden and Ian Burn, who later joined Art &
Language, were not based on sexual partnership at all, and even in their
case the contractual relationship seemed to have been articulated fairly
early and fairly clearly.
When we started to work as a collaboration - Lyndell and I - we realized
that we needed to commit to working together for the rest of our lives, and
slightly later we realized that we had to completely abandon any idea of
part-time solo production. We can give over a whole series of work now to
one of us to produce - that, I think, is not unusual - but everything is
under the umbrella of teamwork.

GL: Brion Gyson and William Burroughs are discussing collaboration in terms
of the creation of a 'third mind.' Other artists in your book use similar
terms. It is almost as if a new identities, a new persona is created. Where
is this will to become someone else, to design another identity is coming
from and what's exactly so liberating about this desire?

CG: What is liberating is liberation. What is liberation? Freedom from the
prison-house of language, or reconciliation to it, as in successful
psychoanalysis? Artists who constructed doppelgänger or doubles were
involved in flight outside the prison-house of language--if it can be judged
to have been successful-and this was possible precisely because of
collaboration, which means the teams' escape as individual "artists" from
their personal bodies into the uncanny but mobile realm of phantoms. Buried
in my footnotes in the book are constant arguments through, not references
to, the concept of absence--the absence as ground familiar from well-known
post-War philosophy, from Heidegger & Co., but also specifically through
later Mahayana Buddhism that denies the ultimate reality of all essences.
Abramovic and Ulay happened to have become involved directly in this
philosophy from one point of their collaboration, and they were
acknowledging a sophisticated, non-Western, quasi-deconstructive precedent
in Mahayana Buddhism. But I'm not doing anything so obvious as conflating
absence with the restoration of the past, of a spurious humanism, however
well-intentioned, that seeks to oppose "spirituality" against
"deconstruction". Abramovic/Ulay's performance actions are NOT Buddhist,
just as Barnett Newman's zip 1960s paintings are not Kabbalism. It's more
complex than that.

GL: So you're saying that collaboration, in these specific cases, is an act
of disappearance, not born out of a Will to Production, to create a new born
identity, out of a desire to break through the limitations of the Self but
to neutralize. Not 1 plus 1 makes 3 but 1 minus 1 is zero. Is the drift
towards absence perhaps a secret history, underneath the perhaps all too
obvious psycho-analytic dynamics between the two parties involved?

CG: Good point. Absence is ground. It is a secret history, entangled with
the more public history of the impact of Buddhism in Western culture and
art, especially post-1945. Not that Mahayana EXPLAINS anything artistic, but
is it another contextual framework for understanding what is happening. You
see, in the West we are awfully Ameroeurocentric. So when we think about
camouflage and withheld identity and withheld self-disclosure we look to
particular, belatedly canonic texts, to writers like Callois or Bataille.
But on the ground, amongst artists, a whole other genealogy is already at
work, BEFORE we even get to the task of interpretive frameworks. The
exceptions - and their work is immensely exciting - are the books of Leo
Bersani and Alysse Dutoit, books like Caravaggio's Secrets or Culture of
Redemption. This is a very sophisticated anti-psychoanalytic method of
reading texts. It's critically important if we think about improvisatory
authorship, or artistic collaboration.

GL: These days more and more theorists are questioning the revolutionary
potential of the identity change. New identities are becoming commodities.
One could almost see such 'third bodies' or shared spaces as an natural next
step in the capitalist development rather than a subversive practice. But
that's perhaps nothing new. Such a cynical analysis of the late sixties
perhaps destroys the primal drive of that time, which was so full of energy
to discover other dimensions.

CG: I can see that.. Through the 1990s the discourse of the Other, of
marginalized groups, became just another rhetorical lingo. Sarat Maharaj is
particularly acute and cutting on this topic. And so I'll be interested how
he and Okwui Enwezor negotiate this in the process of creating Documenta XI.
The question is - and it's easy to answer - whether authenticity and
inauthenticity can be mapped onto the contemporary landscape any differently
to the 1980s (Saint Andy Warhol's decade). How do we imagine September 11?
Do we blame? What are the ethics in taking human life under any
circumstances? Similar questions came up in Australia in the early 1990s, as
artists realized that the image haze of image-scavenging simply could not
include Aboriginal motifs.

GL: Within theatre, film and music collaboration is a necessity otherwise
there is not art work to be experienced in the first place, except for a
solo work performed by the artist him or herself. Within new media art a
collaboration between the programmers, designers, curators and installation
builders seems almost essential and this process is only getting more
complicated with the development of more sophisticated hardware and
software. There are hardly any new media art work produced by a single
person. However, often there is no shared authorship as you discuss in your
book. The collaborations between the visual artists you describe seem to
happen on a fairly equal basic. In many cases however there are big fights
over authorship which all have financial repercussions in terms of
reputation and careers. You're not really touching this topic in your study.
Is that because the idea of collaboration within the conceptual arts
discourse is still a young one?

CG: No, not at all. Many of the players are still alive and litigious, so it
is sometimes hard to work out the truth. Conceptual art, especially, has
been marked by a fierce, absolutely fierce series of attempts by many
different artists to claim primacy and position, and in the process old
friends become enemies. You are right, though, to suggest that the
discussion of collaboration is young, especially if it has the significance
that I ascribe to it. There's been very, very little analysis of the issues
I describe, though a lot on other areas. Strangely enough, most artists have
a massive investment in their own interpretation of their works, and in
actively policing other interpretations. This desire to police the audience
now seems both distant and odd, but those artists were determined to avoid
"misinterpretation." One artist said, "What I say is part of the art work. I
don't look to critics to say things about my work. I tell them what it's
about." All the art that really interested me - and most of the art that
currently interests me - involves, to some extent, the abdication of
authorial intention as the exclusive determinant of reading. I have run foul
of this before. Recent moral rights legislation will concrete and solidify
this control, and artists have been very reluctant to understand that the
few cents they derive from copyright fees will be offset by more and more
strict rules against appropriation and copying, which is how artists have
always worked. This will have a huge impact of web-based art. Traditional
expressive modes or production are privileged under these legal regimes, and
these are by far the most aesthetically bankrupt.

GL: Certainly. Over the last decades collaboration has become so closely
tied to legal issues. Is the legal business in danger of destroying the aura
of collaboration? What would you advice artists if they are thinking about
engaging themselves in a long-term collaboration? Would you encourage them
to make contracts or is that a step in the wrong direction? I have seen many
cases in which the bureaucratic partner in crime ran away with the
contracts, IP, ownership of content, equipment and brand recognition, while
the creative partners were left out in the cold. Who's the happy one remains
to be seen. Is there anything to be learned from the seventies generation?

CG: I don't want anyone to think that I'm valorizing or glamorizing artistic
collaboration. It's inherently no more important than anything else. I'm not
the least bit impressed by any supposed aura surrounding any mode of
production. And the legalism of conceptual artist collaborations was part of
the point of the work. The discourse surrounding the work WAS part of the
work. Contracts aren't worth the paper they are printed on in the art world,
which is why the artist/dealer contract movement never got anywhere, much
like resale royalties (droit de suite), but is why its spin-offs (dealers
usually now spell out in writing the terms of their association with each
artist) were useful. The point about artistic collaboration is that it is a
test in which individual identity is subordinated to a so-called higher
good - the work of art. It's a lot like working on a magazine. Not everyone
is suited to cooperation, but the art world glamorizes narcissism and has an
incredibly short attention span. My simple point is that self-presentation
is constructed, usually self-consciously, and that the resulting figure is
sometimes central within the work of art. The lesson of the seventies
generation is that they did not compromise, and that they worked out
protective structures to allow that.
I approach new media from the point of view of a participant in the world of
contemporary art, and it's worth understanding that the two are not the
same. I gave a paper at a conference recently - "Dislocations", which was
organized by Cinemedia (Melbourne) and ZKM (Karlsruhe). Peter Weibel and Lev
Manovich were the keynotes. Weibel's point, apart from his sci-fi, William
Gibson behaviouralism and the mistaken idea that memory exists, was good:
new media is in a bleated revolutionary, avant-garde phase in which the
invention of new technologies and forms is more important than the
deconstruction of those forms; new media, however, he says, has a long
pre-history from the period around the 1970s onwards. The other keynote, Lev
Manovich, was thinking in the opposite direction, horizontally, at the level
of a taxonomy of data-base-based new forms, principally of internet cinema.
But listening to Lev, I wondered if his disdain for narrative was echoed in
the impoverished visuality of many of his quasi-interactive Internet project
examples, and why, given the role of montage in most of these new works and
theories, Jean-Luc Godard's theories of montage and sound (both pre and post
Histoires du Cinema), we are compelled to reinvent Godard's wheel. As Peter
Lunenfeld reminds us all in Snap to Grid, this milieu faded to black. I
suppose the thing that worried me about Lev Manovich's presentation was the
way he was positing video artists like Doug Aitken and Douglas Gordon (we
can add Mariko Mori, Shirin Neshat, Matthew Barney) as belated popularizers,
the same way avant-garde film-makers used to look down on art-house movies.
He was working straight out of a productivist set of criteria, horizontal
and unstratified, in which technological take-up and formal difference
govern attention. What kind of cultural dynamic is at work here
historically? Are we witnessing the re-creation of the same space as that
once occupied by alternative, experimental, avant-garde cinema?

GL: I suppose art critics are in a better position to answer this question.
I would say that we are in worse situation, compared to the golden days of
Godard. Art, and with it experiental electronic arts, has become isolated
and can therefore no longer claim an avant-garde position. Within this
tragic, inward looking position, having been neutralized of any substantial
potential, art is hidden within academia, self-referential circles and the
thick walls of the museum and galleries. The caved art system has created
its own autonomous space in which it can celebrate its won freedom. The
price for the gained sophistication is its isolation from society. No matter
how innovative, subversive or creative media works are, they seem unable to
bridge the Disciplinary Divide. So, yes, new media artists can reinvent
Goddard's wheel and create a exciting new school of digital modernism (or
give it a name) but their works will remain unknown-and will be of
homeopathic influence on the global mediascape.
There is a total lack of mediation between the artworks and popular culture.
This situation prompted pioneer computer game developer Brenda Laurel to
publicly distance herself from art (and activism). "It took me years to
discover," she writes in her latest post dotcom essay, "that I couldn't
effectively influence the construction of pop culture until I stopped
describing myself as a. an artist, and b. a political activist. Both of
these self-definitions resulted in what I now see as my own
self-marginalization. I couldn't label myself as a subversive or a member of
the elite. I had to mentally place myself and my values at the center, not
at the margin. I had to understand that what I was about was not critiquing
but manifesting." (Utopian Entrepreneur, The MIT Press, 2001). How sad (and
true) this all sounds, specially if one compares it to hopes and dreams of
the roaring twenties--and sixties. This is why many in new media culture
re-label themselves and work as designers and look for a way out in science,
architecture and film. Brenda Laurel thinks that "culture work" is a more
appropriate description of what she does.

CG: I hate to remove the drama from a text, but I agree with you completely,
and I'm speaking from the other side of the wall, as an artist and as an art
historian whose life has been bound up in art. So the problems are double.
For a start, Manovich's horizontal taxonomic approach is good reportage and
important right at this moment but it trivializes the issues and the stakes.
The cards then get dealt behind the scenes. We know by now, from indexical
events like the Whitney Biennial, that the art world has been slow to take
up technological innovation except in marginal and cosmetic ways, and
because new media is only partly concerned with itself as art, it tends to
have a somewhat touching and definitely naïve belief in either art or its
irrelevance. This overlaying of "art" onto information, this understanding
of the aesthetic as a surplus, I wrote somewhere recently, inevitably
obscures the very information function we value about the internet. It
occludes any archival function - any real data-base truth-value - in terms
of information storage, even as it insists on a memorializing and
educational function (not at all the same thing as an artistic function).
Why make art when you can take a photograph, write an e-mail or make a film?
The alternative lies in understanding the priorities involved in
contemporary art, for a start. The necessary commodification involved in a
successful art practice eliminates certain trajectories, but not in the way
you'd think. Scarcity, branding, uniqueness, aura, charisma, all survive the
elimination of the unique work, oil paint, traditional media, and personal
manufacture and handiwork, even complete deskilling, which was a basic 20th
century avant-garde tactic. But if we take all this on board, we still have
to admit art's almost total loss of a vanguard cultural position. I'm still
left with the question of how to explain the art world fascination with new
media right now. Increasingly, the term "intermedia" is being used to define
works that involve translation and retranslation from medium to medium.
Often, as in the works of the South African artist William Kentridge, this
results in a suite of works in different media ranging from animated films
through traditional prints through to puppets. My point is that copying and
compositing are definitely NOT the sole domain of new media right now. But
right now, in many people's minds, new media occupy a role related to and
ALMOST equivalent to intermedia. There's a window of attention that briefly
coincides with the windows of technological innovation and media evolution,
but it's none of the three that ultimately govern attention except in a
sub-culture. Geography, culture, injustice, globalization: all of these
forces periodize new media instantly.

Charles Green, The Third Hand, Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to
Postmodernism, University of Minnesota Press (USA)/University of New South
Wales Press (Australia), 49.95 AUD. More info: www.unswpress.com.au and
www.upress.umn.edu






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