I do not buy your ridiculous dogma...

Today collaboration got a mostly positive review from the many artists we spoke to, their glowing reports of working with other artists were filled with many good and valid points as to the reason why collaboration is such a good way to work, but through all the talk what I found most interesting was what wasn't said...

We spoke to Dave Ronalds who had collaborated with an already established pair of collaborators to create a piece that seemed to be fundamentally about a loss of communication, (a concept which I actually really like,) but for me, the work seemed to hide behind Dave's self called drama of the smoke and lights. It's my belief that if a work needs an extra addition of "a little drama," even if it's just a new unforeseen response to the space, then the work itself must have originally been a little weak, conceptually or aesthetically. Dave spoke about "pure collaboration," in which all parties have an equal input, and that by relinquishing who you are and how you work a group of people can in effect become a whole new person, frankly I find this idea abhorrent. Within any group one person’s idea, style or presence just naturally takes a stronger role and influences the work more than the other's contributions, whether it is intentional, accidental or just something that seems to happen. Not admitting to this is, I believe, a little naive. Collaboration should not contain hard and fast rules; there is no right and wrong way to go about working with others, and definitely no pure or 'dirty' ways of doing it either.
Janis Rafailidou on the other hand seemed a little more open in admitting that her collaboration didn't exactly work. She spoke of a clash of personalities and different approaches to working, Janis and her partner Noah Sherwood did however seem to find someway around not being able to attain Dave's goal of "pure collaboration," even if that way was simply a negotiation of space. Again the work here didn't exactly grab me, the concept was good and hearing from the artist herself some of her beliefs, approaches and ideas were pretty similar to mine, her earlier work sounded very interesting and I would have like to have seen it, but unfortunately none of this came across in the work created for this brief. The video piece lacked any content that put across Janis' concept and the use of hay as seating and dividing the space only served as a distraction.
A different kind of praise for collaboration came from Martha Jurksaitis who is part of the experimental film collective Exp24. Collective here is the important word, the group don't actually work together rather they just execute their screenings together, and share equipment and skill sets. Martha was a very informative, intelligent, honest and eloquent woman who seemed very earnest in her musings on collaboration. She showed us a few, in my opinion painfully cliché pieces of film, (I would have rather watched the whole of Derek Jarman's Glitterbug,) and I found it quite hard to engage in a dialogue with a woman deeply interested and in love with a field of work I don't really appreciate. Though I didn't really enjoy much of the work, or talks we endured today it was none the less interesting to see and hear, even if it has only strengthened my resolve in knowing that this isn't the path for me to take.
I do however have one last gripe. I found both Dave and Martha's talk of socialism and subsequent hostility to the current order of the world a little unnecessary. To call out Art Funding Bodies for use of "bullshit rhetoric" while we are all lounged around in an oh so "arty" manner, listening to talk of an ideal socialist way of working, seems to me a little crass. This idea that artists do, or should work in a different manner to everyone else angers and frustrates me. Not every artist is a tortured bohemian who wants to live their life in an all too consciously informal manner every second of the day. And what's with this distain for the perceived notion of "work" anyway (here meaning desks, 9 to 5 and scheduled lunch breaks,) is this really such an awful situation? To me this whole "artistic ideal" is more than a little dogmatic, and indeed a paradox when artists call out the capitalist mode of operation for the exact same reasons. If we truly believed in the spirit of collaboration, couldn't we all just get along....?