Text/Object 2008 - An exhibition of collaborative and interdisciplinary works by staff of the CSU SVPA

Text/Object 2008

Essay : Collaboration: Cannibals of the Hidden Mind - Neill Overton

The greatest collaborations never occurred. They existed in the hidden mind as thought or intention never fully realized; derailed dramatically on the iron rails of their own molten ambitions. Salvador Dali famously began a collaboration with Walt Disney in 1946 on an animated film called Destino that burnt out and never saw the light of day. Even by invoking this now, it raises an image of a dark Mickey Mouse melting on a beach surrounded by waxen fob-watches, animated three-fingered white gloves upheld by telegraph pole branches and lobsters, with black strings of shadows yawning towards an abyss. Such signals are the potent perimeters that collaboration conjures in thought; rattling like tiny bottles of nitroglycerine in crates on a truck.

Kurt Schwitters in MERZ in 1919 was a collagist/painter/sculptor and typographer - it was said that ‘he realized environments’ in the sense of making them manifest. Real-izing of environments and landscapes of connections is a romantic impulse leaning into myth. Schwitters’s works such as Mz 231 Miss Blanche 1923 typify these collisions of text with chocolate wrappers, train tickets, feathers, smudged paint and a disconnected, formal Cubist grid geometry. The artist collaborates with the media to be led in the direction they initiate. John Wolseley used the land as co-conspirator in a drawing’s development by burying a half-drawn page in the desert, and returning years later to view nature’s completion of it… eaten away, stained by the rain, or blessed with mysterious tracks of nocturnal insects who have lumbered across its surface in Gosse Bluff - yellowed; tea coloured, the paper improved for being pocked or sun-bleached. Lloyd Rees said much the same thing regarding the seductions of ink; we become mere co-conspirators with its buttery fluidity, which flows onto the paper in ways of its own - making the artist a tram conductor along the way, rather than driver of the artwork.

Collaboration involves this same giving over to chance or to the inherent nature of the materials at hand; a relinquishing of control of all aspects to the convergence with another artist/image-maker’s work and ideas. Theatre by its nature was always collaborative; which is why the Dadaists sprang from the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, out of theatre and performance pushing art off the walls and into the living moment. When a film script leaves the author’s hands, or a costume designer’s works take the stage - by their very nature of being collaborative mediums, in theatre, music or film, their control leaves the jetty and sets sail into other hands and interpretations. These types of collaborations are well understood; are explicit - whereas those between printmaker and technician, performance artist and photographer, painter and text - are often more covert operations; hidden as we direct ourselves towards the final outcome displayed on a gallery wall rather than at the process beneath. These collaborative undertakings are the uncertain traffic of art, ideas and means; trusting to ravens.

In Lautreamont’s phrase, “Beautiful like the fortuitous meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella” resides all the required logics of meeting and incident …and further that “Breton summarized the surrealists’ investigation of the use of incongruity, juxtaposition, and transformation”, a procedure he termed “the cultivation of a systematic bewildering”. 1 Surrealists shuffled the rational like cards; waiting to reveal sense from senselessness. To bewilder is after all an incarnation of wonder; a reaffirmation of truth. 2

Uncertain traffic conspires between media, between thought and expression, and between image and its evolution: the now iconic images of Jill Orr’s Bleeding Trees performance works from the 1979 Sydney Biennale, her naked back bowed and head immersed in the dirt, are as much a collaboration with the photograph that recorded this body performance as the work itself. The photograph becomes the work’s lasting trajectory into history; its embalmment of the performance, if you will, to take on board Mike Parr’s thoughts on ‘photodeath’ that the photograph imposes on the live immediacy of the performance. 3 The photograph conspires to impose a mummified stillness upon the moving image. In the recent Marking Time Conference at COFA, at the University of New South Wales, this debate continues into how time came to emerge as a “constituent parameter of the very nature of an art work” 4 - in fact how contemporary art lends itself to mapping the passage of time, looking at this incursion of movement and photography into the domain of painting out of the twentieth century. Of Marcel Duchamp’s sequential painting, Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), Professor Mike Esson said it was made: “At a time when artists were trying to claw back the area taken away from them by photography.” 5 Perhaps not only ‘claw back’ contested territory, but more importantly collaborate to find neutral ground towards art’s active future.

Artists no longer originate - they collaborate with past artists - to place themselves in the continuum of all images that have preceded them. All of postmodernism is a collaboration with the styles of past art; exhumations of the past reassembled towards new purpose; realignments to offer new interpretations. It is impossible to paint a bull or the human figure without the spectral impressions of all previous works within art history clinging there like so many cicada shells on a tree trunk. Ghost-brush and the twin devil-dogs of the moonrider leap into view. From the 19th century, all art was locked into a collaboration with photography: either in how images were produced, or documented; certainly with what an image meant. Photography represents the second real collaboration with art; the first was with literature, in the ‘painting out’ of the written word. With the advent of the shutter mechanism, the blinking eye of the machine refused to be obviated until it imposed its aesthetic upon painting. Now, all painting sits in the ambient shadow of Cartier-Bresson, or of Bill Viola’s sepulchral, tidally majestic Five Angels for the Millenium (2001). 6 These are ‘paintings’ that move and engulf with sound; where video meets the Renaissance and the sublime Turner seas of the churning eye of the octopus, to slowly pull figures loose from the watery stone-yard of Viola’s elastic blue ponds.

The false dichotomy of new media/old media is subsumed through collaboration; it becomes an immersion in the bottomless art well. Collectively, contemporary art is only an archeology intending to resurrect the flaked bones below to other meanings than the initial ones. The twentieth century announced itself in the chocolate wrappers, paste glue and feathers of Kurt Schwitters’s Merz drawings. These are the first real integration of text from magazines, newspapers and posters into pictorial painted form. The arguments can be made for Picasso, Braque or Rodchenko, but it was Schwitters who saw text as more than found object or form, by privileging typography as ‘visual art’. In his Dada/Merz shards of words - the collaboration between graphic design, newspaper typography and painting tore the belly out of gallery art. Picasso had already used chair caning, torn music sheets, and a flurry of mud browns to create the Cubist language of fragmentation - skidding city traffic trapped in a perpetual mirror maze - to make the leap of time into space.

The ‘new media’ have enforced collaborations of science and technology into art; of the mechanical imposed upon the hand. The ancient imperatives of hand, eye and mind persist in art - but no longer in that order. Collaboration can take manifold expressions. It is more than hybrid arts practices that transgress across borderlands of differing art and design disciplines. Often it is the shotgun marriage between disparate forms of artists; of matching means to idea, towards this evocation of the bewildering.

Robert Klippel and James Gleeson represent one of the purest collaborations in past Australian art; in 1947 and 1948, the formalist sculptor Klippel built a series of small wooden marquettes, from his usual language of organic-machine parts, and totemic block forms. Upon these Gleeson painted all manner of surrealist mysteries elucidated from T.S.Eliot’s poems; of hidden worlds brought into vague tableaus curving around the tiny theatrical assemblages Klippel had made, towards an ‘x-ray magic’ beyond their individual efforts. Klippel’s wooden seed-machines juxtaposed themselves against the Surrealist mindscapes of James Gleeson’s oeuvre in their collaborative painted sculptures such as No.35 Madame Sophie Sesosoris (a pre-raphaelite satire) 1947-48. Or as Gleeson stated regarding this collaboration: “Some time in the first half of 1948 we decided to pool our technical skills in a work in which painting would be used to suggest the interior structure of a carved form.” 7 It was named after a character in ‘The Burial of the Dead’ sequence from poet T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land. Furthermore, Gleeson added: “On one level the carving-construction-painting sought to catch the spirit of this part of the poem, but - the idea was to suggest that by some kind of x-ray magic, one could look through the opaque skin of the form and see all that lay within.” 8 In this collaboration, each artist retained their own essential language, and out of this combination created not individual works, but a ‘third entity’ that sprang to life like a crash at an intersection. The best of collaborations acts upon us in precisely this way; we are witnesses at the scene of the unfolding accident.

Schwitters’s definition in 1932 was that “With determination, one can destroy a world and, with knowledge and a respect for possibilities, construct a new world out of the ruins.” 9
This offers a firm grasp of the explosive potential buried within collaborations; as a walk into the dark which shatters predetermined intentions, and in its wake releases the new and unexpected. Max Ernst spoke of collage as a ‘confrontation’, and perhaps collaboration is at its core this same testing of opposites to arrive at new dictates. He wrote that:
Collage technique is the systematic exploitation of the chance or artificially provoked confrontation of two or more mutually alien realities on an obviously inappropriate level - and the poetic spark which jumps across when these realities approach each other. 10
I am drawn repeatedly to this concept of ‘elegant irony’ that underpinned Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoch’s works; her language of collage and montage that bespoke these strategies of collaboration as this notion of a bridge between paths of working that a ‘poetic spark’ leaps across.

Dr. Neill Overton
October 2008

1 Anna Blakian, Surrealism: The Road to the Absolute, New York: Noonday, 1959, p.154.
2 Neill Overton, Of Magic and Surgeons, Wagga Wagga Art Gallery cat., November 2002.
3 Mike Parr, Photo(graphed), 1984, Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art cat., p.57.
4 Michael Rush, New Media in Art, Thames and Hudson, 2005, p.12.
5 Professor Mike Esson, Marking Time Conference, COFA, University of New South Wales, 3rd October 2008.
6 Bill Viola, Five Angels for the Millenium, 2001, video artworks, Whitney Museum of American Art. Press Release, 17 October 2002.
7 James Gleeson, Robert Klippel, Bay Books Pty. Ltd., 1983, p.60.
8 Ibid., p.62.
9 Serge Lemoine, Dada, Universe Books, St. Martin’s Press, 1987, p.55.
10 Max Ernst, in Dietmar Elger, Dadaism, Taschen, 2004, p.74.