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Third Text, Vol. 18, Issue 6, 2004, 531–532

Art and Collaboration

Introduction

John Roberts and Stephen Wright

This special issue on art and collaboration brings together artists and
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writers from Western Europe, North America, Australia, Russia, and the
Congo. A number of the contributions were first presented as papers at a
conference, ‘Diffusion: Collaborative Practice in Contemporary Art’,
which we organised at the Tate Modern, in October 2003. In this
instance, we have decided to broaden the debate, calling on artists and
writers to contribute whom we see as working in ways that extend our
original remit for the conference. However, if this issue is thoroughly
international in its scope, it is important to note the number of contribu-
tions from France. For, it has above all been in France since the late
1990s that the issue of collaboration in art and art’s cultural form has
received some of its most interesting political formulations. Though
Nicolas Bourriaud has played his part in drawing mainstream attention
to the phenomenon of collaborative practice, a more significant role has
been played by such political/cultural journals as Mouvements and
Multitudes, and such artist groups as Bureau d’études, Accès local, and
AAA Corp. The conference reflected these current theoretical engage-
ments, which have profoundly shaped the direction of this issue of Third
Text, although for the time being this thinking has little audience outside
of France.
Collaboration in art is as much bound up with value – artistic value,
the value of artistic labour, the value-form of capitalism – as it is with
politics and representation. Indeed collaboration in art expressly allows
one to talk about value in art as a political matter, for collaboration is
where labour embodied in the artwork (manual skill, cognition, art-
specific competences of all kinds) is exposed to scrutiny. But there is no
singular model of collaboration that might allow artists to address these
questions or propose a progressive practice; and this is reflected in the
very different conceptions of collaboration under discussion in this issue,
which reveal the theoretical heterogeneity of the category: Brian Holmes
(collaboration as post-object political intervention); Greg Sholette and
Blake Stimpson (collaboration as self-realisation of human nature); Gene
Ray (collaboration as a ‘catalytic’ extension of art into everyday

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © 2004 Kala Press/Black Umbrella
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/0952882042000284934
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practice); Jochen Gerz (collaboration as a means of achieving public

authorship); Eve Chiapello (collaboration in the wake of management’s
co-optation of ‘artist critique’); Charles Green (collaboration as cross-
cultural dialogue); Bureau d’études (collaboration as a form of autono-
mising cognitive mapping); François Deck (collaboration as reciprocal
expertise); Le Groupe Amos (collaboration as a literacy and conscious-
ness-raising programme); Cornford and Cross (collaboration as institu-
tional critique); Radek (collaboration as ‘asocial’ resistance through art).
Nevertheless, this is by no means a pluralist itinerary of collaborative
forms. Although we recognise the importance of this heterogeneity, we
also acknowledge that collaboration is more than simply a multitudi-
nous way of making art after Conceptualism. On the contrary, because
collaboration defines art as a problem of cultural form – its use-values –
it brings the category of art face to face with it most cherished expecta-
tions and ideals – individual authorship and autonomy – and thus
addresses the very basis of art’s relationship to democracy, the artworld
and capitalist relations of production. Collaboration is that space of
interconnection between art and non-art, art and other disciplines, that
continually tests the social boundaries of where, how, with what, and
with whom art might be made. But if art’s potentially autonomising role
and constitutive relationship to non-art practices run through many of
these contributions, art’s post-autonomous status is not, thereby, a
settled question. As editors, the post-autonomy/autonomy debate is
something we have very different opinions on, as is reflected in our own
contributions.
Theoretical discussion on the question of collaboration has been
largely in abeyance in Anglo-American art since the 1970s. It is really
only with Charles Green’s work on group learning in art in the mid-
1990s – and its extensive debt to debates from the 1970s – and the Crit-
ical Art Ensemble’s foregrounding of group practice that this has
changed. As such this is the first journal publication on the subject in
English, bridging these earlier moments with work currently being
produced across the globe.
This issue of Third Text and the conference at the Tate Modern took
much time and energy to prepare. We would like to thank Andrew
Brighton, Dominic Willsdon at Tate Modern, Antonia Payne and the
University of Wolverhampton Fine Art Research Department, the
French Institute, London, and Rasheed Araeen for their support.

July 2004