Between echoes an experiment in creative collaboration

• Main Author: Purvis, Bryony
• Other Authors: Younge, Gavin
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Cape Town 2015
• Subjects: Fine Arts
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11427/12466

Includes abstract. === I had been living in South Africa for almost a year by the end of 2010, when I instigated a series of creative collaborations with seven individuals, symbolically understood to represent the heterogeneous assortment of relationships that make up real-life social worlds. The people I began working with comprised those closest to me, those I live with, friends living in distant parts of the world and others that I have never met, but whose work or labour I have so greatly admired that I considered them to be an integral part of my world. I extended seven invitations to join me in a dialogue from which we could produce a visual artefact together. I asked that this dialogue address experiences and thoughts on the relationship between the individual and another; what makes us feel intimate and what causes us to feel estranged. The core aim of this project has been to develop a methodology/process that will produce art from dialogue. I centralised the need for the process to be sensitive to the identity and values of all those involved and capable of a deep engagement with the particularities of that encounter. Through this, a space between individuals is activated from which genuinely new ideas/social meanings are formed, and art produced. I regard this process of formation rather than affirmation as an approach that can redistribute agency in the production of meaning. Communication theorist Sara Diamond notes a distinction between collaboration that is ‘simply working together, creating in a context where there is an intention to either make that relationship on-going or create a product of that labour’, and the kind of collaboration that is ‘the process which combines the knowledge, experience and previous understandings or methodologies that are substantively different from that which the participants or even the partners entered the relationship with’ (Diamond 2003). Her distinction points towards a need to balance inter-subjective dialogue with the preservation of individual identities. Diamond’s later definition of collaboration implies that participants actively engage with difference, and resist conflating the initial diversity that made collaboration an appealing prospect in the first place. In this model, however, there must be an awareness of the limits of communication to represent an external reality as a shared reference. This is potentially a paralysing limitation: if communication of any kind can fail, where does this leave us? Shedding the security of relativism (of subjective expression) in exchange for the perilous task of cumulative, inter-subjective engagement has been key to the development of these eight experiments. The artist in this framework is a provider of ‘context’ rather than ‘content’, entering into collaborative encounters and communicative exchange (Dunn, cited in Kester 2004: 1). This document outlines the complexities of collaborative works, so as to do away with an easy reading. It contextualises the subtleties that define the collaborative approach in which I am interested. Much of what I understand about the work we have made, and the process that produced it, has only come about upon reflection and as a result of countless exchanges and conversations with the seven individuals I have worked with. As such I present the following document as both a retrospective of the collaborative experience, as well as a condensed cluster of ideas that help anchor this project’s core meaning. To structure this ‘research’ document, I have divided my work into nine chapters. The first describes my methodology in a wider context of collaborative practice from an ontological and genealogical perspective, before refining the key concerns that inform my making. These are: the space collaborative art occupies; a pluralistic sensibility towards multiple perspectives; and, finally, the role of dialogue in collaborative projects. The subsequent seven chapters are the visual and textual documents of the process of each collaboration. They illuminate aspects of the process specific to the seven working partnerships. Through separating each partnership my aim has been to preserve their authorship and prevent each collaboration from collapsing under the weight of my own agency. However, the process that unfolds in each of the chapters is only the process thus far, and many of these projects continue to evolve and form a part of my ongoing practice. I regard this research and the practical work it supports to be the generation of a specific collaborative methodology.