Artistic Bedfellows

What is collaboration?  How many names have to be on everything?  Who get credit? How do we decide: For funding, for the idea, or building it! Did Leonardo really work alone? Or did he have assistant who painted the last supper?   What happened to the solo genius?  Or is that the community leader, but history dropped the community.  How are  we are connected?  How are communities formed and whose name is on the building?  Our art and culture institutions are a mirror that we hold up to our world.

"Collaboration is an absolutely central topic in contemporary art practice, seen by many as freeing art from its traditional constraints of self-referentiality and subjectivity. In this useful anthology, artist and theorist Holly Crawford collects the most passionate practitioners and critics of collaborative art. With over 40 texts from noted academics and artists in the field, exploring both socio-political and psychological dimensions, Crawford documents a major development in contemporary art." wrote  Dr. Daniel Palmer, Theory of Art & Design, Monash University, Melbourne

 Although the modernist notion of art as autonomous has been thoroughly contested, the discourse of the artist as celebrated individual persists. As a counterto that, this eclectic collection of writings on 'collaboration as a cultural practice' starts from the standpoint that collective approaches have been a characteristic feature of artistic production throughout the 20^th century and that a rich cultural and  artistic interchange results from shared experience and dialogue. Informed by contemporary notions of an emergent 'relational' sensibility and participative forms of social and cultural activity (such as the worldwide web) the editor, Holly Crawford,  brings together a series  of interviews, essays, conversations and remarks on collaboration. International visual artists, critics, writers and musicians explore a range of histories, discourses and theories relating to communal, collective practices including FLUXUS, Zero, GRAV and SPUR in mid-20^th century, women artists in the GDR and the Critical Art Ensemble in the Eighties and the experimental New Social Art School set up in Aberdeen in 2004. The resulting anthology, a considerable collaborative project in its own right, challenges orthodoxies and engages in the vital and currentdebate within the global artistic community about participative cooperative approaches. 

 "The ideas presented are an inspiration... This is an important book."—Christine Palma,  host of Echo in the Sense,  and Public Affairs Director,  KXLU,  Los Angeles.

Dr. Holly Crawford's is an art historian, curator and the author of Attached to the Mouse, Disney and Contemporary Art (2006) and numerous articles and catalogue essays.