space between :: about

Canberra . Halle . Honululu . Ann Arbour

Janet De Boos :: National Institute of the Arts, Canberra, Australia

The very nature of art making is that it is essentially a solitary process, even when we work alongside others. My experience in being part of the East-West Ceramics Collaboration made me think about the nature of collaboration a great deal, partly because it was called that – a collaboration (as opposed to a symposium or some such), and partly because I had already been involved in two collaborations in my own practice at an earlier stage.

The idea of collaborating is attractive -- it is an ideal that a superannuated lefty like myself finds seductive. The first collaboration that I participated in was an attempt to "get inside" the process of making pots. What happens when one makes a great many pots using the same gestures, the same general shapes etc, and what are the implications of all of this for general art practice? How can the "act" be demonstrated to an audience when the actor is not there? This activity was part of an exhibition in 1995 called "Performance and Passion" at the Performance Space in Sydney. The collaboration involved a filmmaker, a musician and myself. I made hundreds of the same bowl- same? Well, they weren’t exactly the same of course, but I used the same gesture in shaping each.

The filmmaker (Christine Olsen) filmed the throwing very close up, capturing the magic of the slip galaxies as the wheel turns. (We throwers have all at some time just sat and drawn wheel head spirals in the slip, haven’t we?). …the pot growing like magic under gentle pressure.

The musician (Tony King) recorded me talking about making pots, then digitally manipulated my voice to create a soundtrack where only occasionally could words and phrases be recognized. It had a driving beat and repeated theme, and captured some of the feeling of repetition throwing -- the same, yet not the same.

It was a successful work, and yes, we did call it a collaboration. But did we really collaborate? Did we have a shared vision? Not really; it was in the end my vision, and each of the others worked in accordance with that vision. The filmmaker and the musician both had autonomy within the directions that I gave though, and so a kind of collaborative model began to emerge. The key to the development of this was the fact that we each trusted the other, and each was boss of their own part.

The second collaborative event in which I took part was the designing of a pot with Jeroen Bechtold of the Netherlands. He is a well known designer of both real pots for industry, and virtual pots for the Web. It was an attempt to see what happens when a thrower and a designer share pot design, and what happens in the process of the realization of the pot. Jeroen was very encouraging of my input- "it must have your design mark also!". I made the pot and the result and comment can be read in Peter Lane’s book Ceramic Design (1998 edition), and Ceramics Technical (Vol. 1998). Was this collaboration? Yes, certainly the design aspect was, even though I was not operating the computer. And it shared with the solitary act of making the fact that neither of us knew what the end product was going to be. It was that same creative act that is the process -- the travelling rather than the arrival.

So maybe collaboration is possible if neither party has a view of what the end point will be?

And so to an official collaboration, The East-West Ceramics Collaboration in Hawai’i. What did I expect? I found myself surprisingly anxious about just what level of collaboration was going to be expected. Could collaboration be designed?

Somehow I thought we might talk more about what we hoped to achieve before we started the making. But perhaps all artists are as anxious as -- nay, even more anxious -- everyday folk. We were going to strut our stuff so it seemed. Almost like a laying out of territory, a defining of oneself before the others. And so all of us made what we usually made for the most part. After a while I decided that I would actively plagiarize others’ techniques and aesthetics to make a set of saucers for my porcelain cups. If the others wouldn’t come out and play, then I would borrow their toys and play by myself.

But inevitably the techniques became mine, as did the aesthetics, in the marvelous way that the act of making consumes otherness and makes it self. The pieces became much more a homage to the other artists, an attempt to get inside their heads by doing what they did. This seemed very different from my original idea of what a collaboration was. Could there be a different way of looking at collaboration?

As the weeks passed, and we became more relaxed, it seemed that indeed there was. And it was not about producing joint works. It was about co-laboring, working alongside one another, learning from one another, having one’s work change in ways that were never conscious. However, if there was a universal collaborator, it was Hawai’i – a persistent voice that emerged in nearly all the work. But a collaborator that was an unwitting one?? Is it possible to be a collaborator and not know it?

This leads to the final kind of collaboration that I have experienced. It is the collaboration that exists between the maker and the user of functional pottery. Use has the capacity to extend the critical life of objects. Every time a piece is used it is "remade" in some way. It accumulates history through the user. The maker cannot control it. In the same way, critics remake artworks when they analyze them and state what the works are about. This commentary sticks to the object and travels with it as part of its baggage for the term of its existence. This is a collaboration in time.

So where does that leave us for the possibility of true collaboration in art making?

True collaboration needs one of the following two conditions -- 1. a shared vision of how the finished work will be. This is the designer-model collaboration, where the end point ix fixed before the making can start, or 2. no idea of what the end point will be, but an equal input along the creative journey.

And yes, it is possible to have an unwitting collaborator, for we do not work in a vacuum. It is the rare individual who can honestly declare that all inspiration has sprung unfettered from her own imagination. We might even call it a conceit. To quote Ogden Nash (from his verses to accompany Saint-Saen’s Carnival of the Animals):

The graceful swan sails the wide lake over, claiming to have never heard of Pavlova .

Georgette Zirbes :: University of Michigan, Ann Arbour, USA

Suzanne Wolfe :: University of Hawwai'i, Honululu, USA

Antje Scharfe :: Burg Giebichenstein, Halle, Germany