The Appreciative Inquiry and Project Plan and Evaluation exercise we did at the Barnsley workshop was insightful and interesting, and certainly an approach I would like to continue. However, such was the timing, that I felt rather curtailed in my thinking. For my challenge I had identified probably the most challenging area of practice for me – collaboration. Basically I initially thought up the sorts of things I would least like to do, am least drawn to, and find most uncomfortable. It is almost a perverse sense of challenge to approach work like this.
My challenge was to be to make work in collaboration with another artist, sharing all processes and stages. Further, I then thought up having various controlled experiments, where I run parallel projects where I tell or do not tell collaborators my feelings about working like this, or where I do not collaborate, and so on. The end of the session curtailed my thinking there.
I do not like to collaborate in work – I detest suggestions while I’m working, and resent the interruption to my creative process by translating my thoughts into words at too early a stage. I feel the trajectory of my thinking gets dissipated. Taking on suggestions disrupts the inventive mechanism of the individual artist’s mind in coming up with integrated solutions, which in turn creates new forms. I have never enjoyed making work jointly, and also feel that I have never done worthwhile, meaningful or satisfying work in groups. I did value the experience of having to try this at art school, but feel it gave me insight into why I do not work like this.
I feel collaboration comes at the wrong stage of creativity for me. Collaborating may come after – at the editing or curating stage, but what is interesting and valuable in art is the individual solution an artist comes up with in their direct relationship with the page. It is a novel, a painting, a piece of music. One person and their mind. Other people come later.
I understand there are collaborative arts, films and architecture and many others. I also remember that Tracy Emin had the chance to collaborate with Louise Bourgeois, and who would turn something like that down?
But I think there are other approaches rather than direct. I feel the collaborative challenge is like eating a big tasteless art vegetable, just because it will do me some good in the end. I’m not averse to exploring this. For me the easy collaboration challenge would be to work with someone from another discipline, perhaps a scientist or writer. The difficulty is other artists, unless it’s a “lite” project, one for the audience to participate in. But for actual core art practice, with personal ideas which are as meaningful as possible, I feel collaboration is inappropriate for me.
So having identified a challenging area, my next quest is to ponder further, and create a more positive project, whilst incorporating the essence of that challenge into what I actually do wish to do as an exploratory project.
I would like to make some Moving Image. I would like to get my teeth into a piece and spend some time really making and editing and polishing up a piece of Moving Image, as is my wont. I would like to pick up the threads I started through MA projects last year, and work on the subjects of material and museums. I felt I had opened up some ripe and fruitful avenues there, but had not pushed through or really created. I had collected ideas, which I would now like to try to make into something and transform into a piece of art. These threads of art are the ones which I feel will develop into my final MA piece – otherwise that will just be a piece of work I happen to make.
If I think through further what it actually is about collaboration that I find so counterintuitive, I realise it is nothing about people, or indeed joint enterprise. It is purely about having to articulate, share and expose my thoughts as I am thinking them, and at the stages, moreover, where I am making the connections and leaps into imagining a piece of art. So the challenge of collaborative I will transmogrify into being completely open and transparent about process on my blog. I will identify as much of my process as I can and communicate my logic, references, influences and intentions along the way. In this way I can challenge and identify these resistances to sharing and openness, but in my own terms and at my own pace. I think also, if I can do this thoroughly, it will conversely equip me better for collaboration, as I can ponder and examine my psyche in this area.
From where I stand, this is challenging, and in fact unfeasible that I would be able to sustain such transparency for months. I also suspect that I will feel various layers of resistance. I feel I will reveal too much, come to dead ends, and tamper with and somehow destroy my process by iterating it. I fear losing something by doing this, but can also step back and see how it will be useful and potentially enlightening to have done this. I also fear I will ramble on forever and only produce a very long explanation of a piece of work without the work itself.
The challenge then, is the approach as much as the work. As to the work, the first stage for me will be for me to review and immerse myself in the MA art projects from last year – drawing invisibly at the V&A, examining the ideas of museums, and developing the moving image footage of embroidered materials, which was an attempt really to fracture the format of the media. As if I could render material, museum collections, antique dresses, and what is within museum cabinets, into a different form. To touch the museum objects, to hear the material, to feel the memory of the gold. A fanciful start perhaps, but I think I am always trying to know something in terms of something else in order to really experience it anew, or within. Plenty for me to start with.
In the spirit of being transparent in my thinking, the next stage for my project is to revisit that previous work and thoroughly think it through before I decide on further plans for the new work.
9th February 2012
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