Collaboration is about being in the world

unless you want to be alone in the woods somewhere

 

And it is not about perfect unity,

collaboration is, as Tim Etchells suggests

about differences, collisions, incompatibilities

Are you ready to feel the embodiment of these terms?

Or are you feeling them already?

Friendly, convivial and equal collaboration,

is that possible?

No power relations?  

Shared sense of democracy?

 

Stand in a group around the table

Choose a coloured pen

and place pen in the middle of the paper

Hold the pen together, ready to draw onto the paper

You must hold the pen together

Move the pen as one across the page  

to mark the paper

While you do this,

make a mental note of your thoughts and feelings

As I read this poem, I invite you

to respond to certain things

that catch your attention and draw together

Try not to use any words. Ready?

On your marks, 3, 2, 1, GO!

 

collaboration

etymological origin,

mid 19th century: from Latin collaboratio(n-),

from collaborare ‘work together’

 

Nicolas Bourriaud urges for

convivial participation in

Relational Aesthetics -

audience as community,

intersubjective encounters,

meaning elaborated collectively,

rather than in the space of

individual consumption

 

Will you be a convivial participant,

friendly in this collaboration?

Am I a good host, are you a bad guest

or vice versa?

What will happen when the pen goes

in a direction you don’t want it to?

 

Relational Aesthetics

False notion of democracy

Happy clappy to your fellow chappy

Bring on Claire Bishop,

Jean-Luc Nancy and Chantal Mouffe    

Bishop v Bourriaud

Participation for Bishop is hell

Artificial Hells

Disrupt the comfort!

Undo the conviviality!

Upset the status quo!

 

No democracy exists without antagonism;

a democratic society is one in which relations

of conflict are sustained, not erased

Without antagonism,

 there is only the imposed consensus

of authoritarian order—

a total suppression of debate and discussion,

which is inimical to democracy

 

Bourriaud knows this deep down,

acknowledging conviviality may have its limits,

denying social conflict and dispute,

differences and divergences

Social power

Michel Foucault suggests power

operates in all aspects of our lives

The marks you make on the paper,

the indexical traces

 

Performance as mirroring

the mechanisms of power

that take place in all forms of

daily human existence

Making ‘visible’ through marking,

implicit power relations explicit

See the tensions, differences,

collisions, and incompatibilities

in these marks, drawn marks

 

Anti-Relational Aesthetics provocateurs

undoing conviviality with discomfort and the inhospitable

Celebrate self-proclaimed purveyor of discomfort  

Michael Rakowitz and his “failure of manners”

Join a merry band of artists

creating dissent, disgust, discomfort

Art’s long interest in the inhospitable

Vito Acconci’s confrontational staring

Dan Graham’s Performance/Audience/Mirror

Holding a mirror in front of an audience

Announcing the audience’s every move,

every gesture

and every sound

in a deliberate

attempt to unnerve

Living Theatre’s Mysteries and Smaller Pieces -

addressing the audience

“You are being looked at

You are unprotected

Why you are salivating

Why you are breathing

Why how terribly

self-conscious you are.”

 

ambivalent conviviality

 hosting to disrupt convivial participation

Jacques Derrida’s understanding of hospitality

hosting less as convivial gesture,

more an act of welcoming as a form of governance

His term, hostipitality,

A portmanteau of ‘hostile’ and ‘hospitality’,

hospitality etymologically rooted

 in the terms ‘hospitable’ and ‘hostile’.

The German word, Hospitalität, a word of Latin origin,

so says Derrida, has a troubled and troubling origin,

a word which carries its own inherent contradiction,

a Latin word which allows itself to be parasitized

by its opposite, “hostility,”

the undesirable guest

which it harbours as the self-contradiction

in its own body

 

Deploy being a bad ‘hostile’ host,

Set up a situation where your guests/ your participants

start to question your courtesy

 

How’s the drawing going?

Is everyone playing ball?

Playing fairly?

 

 DRAW FASTER, FASTER, FASTER

 

I can hear laughter. What’s funny?

Is the laughter controlling you?

Nothing is more controlling than laughter!

Now, close your eyes as you draw!

Who is controlling the pen?

Equitable holding

Is there equity in how the pen is being held?

Who is leading?

Does it matter where you hold the pen

to influence the movements and decisions, and energies?

Does the person at the bottom have more power?

We always think of a top-down hierarchy

but maybe the person at the bottom

is the grounding one who provides the stability

The leadership might come from the top

but are not actually the ones controlling it

or maybe the middle one is the mediator

between top and bottom

Quite a lot happens in the middle

If directives come from here,

it gets converted and then gets stabilised

Is the person holding the pen at the bottom

holding the power at the base?

Are they grounding the process

so everyone else feels safe and secure?

Is the person in the middle

playing quite an important role

 mediating between the one

who’s directing from the top and the one holding at the base?

This gives us a whole new way of looking at the gay slang term

‘Power bottom’

A power bottom is a sexual partner

 who is receptive during sex

but takes control of the interaction

 

This Ouija board,

séance-like encounter

The push and pull against each other,

learning to question,

taking feedback,

trusting in a process rather than the outcome,

surrendering whatever you are holding onto,

being part of a larger process,

leaning into its meditative quality

 

You don’t know if you are leading or not

Sometimes you are and sometimes you’re not

You don’t know where anyone else is going

Who is leading? Is the pen leading?

When you stop, will the pen carry on without you?

By itself?

 

STOP!

Now do the activity again,

this time holding two pens,

with your eyes closed

READY?

 

Step away from the paper and inspect the drawing

Drawings create an aggregation of time coming through

You can still feel the tension of the marks being made on the paper

even if you can’t see it or hear it

Do you need to be there and do the action to feel its

powerful resonances in your body?

The words of Rebecca Schneider,

‘A document that will be exhibited as an indication

that ‘you’ (the viewer) were not present at the event

- you missed the action contained by the frame

but more than the frame. The paper, frame, and photo

 of the action all represent to the viewer

that which the viewer missed - that which,

standing before the document,

you witness yourself missing again

And yet, in missing you are somehow more available

to this ‘excess’ of the object

than you would be in a situation of ‘presence’.

Missing it, you are available to hear it otherwise,

through the retelling, the recitation of the document,

and thus are ‘present’ to it otherwise,

in a mode of transmission - a re-enactment’

 

Back and forth between trust and tension.

be comfortable with being lost.

if you force yourself to know where you are,

you don’t go on a journey you might go on

Embrace the discomfort

 

NOW GO FASTER, FASTER!

BALANCE A BANANA ON YOUR HEAD!

STAND ON ONE LEG!

STAND ON YOUR HEAD!

 

          Are you showing a willingness to submit to this

unsettling, dystopian Kafkaesque dissonance?

Maybe this is the only instance where those at the bottom,

when you can actually be a power bottom,

are the ones which have the greatest influence and control

It can often be difficult from the top to see what is going on

When you're holding something heavy, but you're faking it

And pretending that you actually know.