CTTE100162.fm Page 595 Friday, October 29, 2004 12:59 PM Third Text, Vol. 18, Issue 6, 2004, 595–608 Group Soul Who Owns the Artist Fusion? Charles Green TheTaylorCTTE100162.sgm10.1080/0952882042000285005ThirdOriginal2004186000000NovemberCharlesGreenc.green@unimelb.edu.au Text and& Article Francis Francis Ltd 2004 Ltd intersection of Western Desert painting and a 1980s post-studio artist collaboration makes us think, and assert overtly the importance of Western Desert painting to a global audience, even though critics and curators find it difficult to place it in the context of contempo- rary art. They acknowledge its importance, but are constricted by categorisations based on the assumption that nationality or ethnicity equals narrative. The last twenty years or so demonstrate, though, the failure, not the necessity, of the idea of nationalisms and, equally, the dark dangers lurking behind the valorisation of ethnicity and reli- gion. By this I mean that the regional narrative does not really explain very much, except to Sotheby’s or Christies’ clients; although models that show the virtual Balkanisation, overlapping dispersal and globalisation of different types of art and audiences certainly seem to – as anthropological frameworks are being displaced at the same time in the study of Aboriginal art. The reasons for this history lesson I hope will become clear: the stakes are high with regard to artists and visuality. The genesis of this paper lies in a couple of paragraphs in my book, The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (2001), about a strange 1983 action by the collaborative team, Serbian artist Marina Abramovic and German artist Ulay, the significance of which only became apparent to me much later. I see a shift from the 1960s–1970s artistic collaborations towards something quite 1. For an explanation of the concept of world memory, different – a shift from fashioning the self through collaboration (Gilbert see Gilles Deleuze, Cinema & George, Mel Ramsden and Ian Burn, Christo and Jeanne-Claude) to, 2: The Time-image (1985), now, depicting the collaborating self in order to enact particular ethical trans Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta, University problems or positioning the self in relation to new or old friends and of Minnesota Press, communities, and in relation to tasks and projects. Within this, though, Minneapolis, 1989, p 119. we are asserting a less familiar cross-cultural genealogy. I will argue that See also Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs: The the overarching field of world memory that artist collaborations inevita- Complete Text (1964), bly foreground1 – in which post-studio artist collaborations are a special, trans Richard Howard, symptomatic case – is governed by a set of rules and distinctions. These University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2000. rules transcend and override the now-hackneyed discourse of postmodern Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © 2004 Kala Press/Black Umbrella http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/0952882042000285005 CTTE100162.fm Page 596 Friday, October 29, 2004 12:59 PM 596 appropriation and its associated postcolonial protocols of speaking positions. My aim is to delineate the artistic field generated by the incorporation of others and ‘Others’ within cross-cultural or cross-artist fusions. In Australia, this is a particularly loaded topic. My review of art’s autonomy takes a different direction from that of most writers. The emphasis of my essay will be on ownership rather than production. I am also insisting on the difference between two models of artistic collaboration. The first is the popularly held view of collaboration as reconciliation, implying both profit and loss. This book-keeping sense of the word sees artistic collaboration as a balance. A deficit in one part of the relationship is compensated by a surplus somewhere else – a partnership or a cooperative to which individuals bring something that can also be taken away. In the second model of artistic collaboration, the parts of the relationship merge to form something else, in which the whole is more than the sum of the parts. The parts are not removable or replaceable because they do not combine, as much as change. The collaboration itself exists as a distinct and distinctive entity. Collaboration, in specific cases like the one I describe – and perhaps in more recent task-based collectives such as Atelier van Lieshout in the Netherlands – is an act of disappearance, born not out of a desire to break through the limitations of the self but from a desire to neutralise the self in order to clear 2. See Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, ‘Robert working space. Smithson’s Ghost in 1920s There is a cultural problem at the core of my insistence that difference Hamburg: Reading Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne is not necessarily of foremost importance and I need to spell this out. I am Atlas as a Non-Site’, Visual not arguing for naïve aestheticism, nor equally do I think that artistic Resources: An collaboration is a good thing in itself. I am going to draw upon my artist International Journal of Documentation, 18:2, June collaborator Lyndell Brown’s recent work on Aby Warburg, the early 2002, pp 167–81. This twentieth-century art historian who invented the discipline of iconology paper draws on Lyndell and who renovated the study of the survival of the Antique in later Brown’s unpublished PhD thesis, Mnemosyne: periods of art. Warburg, of course, has been reassessed in opposing ways Memory and Forgetting in both by Benjamin Buchloh and by Brown as prefiguring the archival turn Art, College of Fine Arts, in recent art – Buchloh insisting on Warburg’s modernity and Brown on University of New South Wales, Sydney. The artists the reverse, as she says: in this paper were not so much combined by We might mistakenly think that Warburg was conflating intentionality collaboration as supplanted or obliterated. (the intention to represent pathos through allegorical description) with the Mieke Bal contends that creation of empathic affect (the affect of pathos), but he wasn’t. Instead, ‘the subject’s agency … in his 1927 Mnemosyne Atlas, Warburg saw the artist as the hostage of consists not of inventing cultural memory and as a supplementary presence in the work of art. The but of intervening, of a “supplementation” that collision of culturally constructed imperatives with technological and does not replace the image social change, accompanied by the much less important variables of but adds to it’. Mieke Bal, personality, forces us to see, he pessimistically and critically thought back Quoting Caravaggio: in the 1920s, the history of artistic styles as the result of the pressure of Contemporary Art, cultural memory, rather than of innovations through self-expression or Preposterous History, 2 University of Chicago invention. Press, Chicago, 1999, p 13. Bal repeats theorist Judith I now turn to the visits to Australia in 1979 and 1981 by Marina Butler’s astute refusal to replace ‘the intentional Abramovic and Ulay. I am suggesting that the importance and authority subject with a personified of Western Desert Aboriginal painting during the same period, when it “construction”, which, as was still a largely undiscovered and barely comprehended phenomenon, she puts it, “belongs at the grammatical site of the is crucial to comprehending Abramovic/Ulay’s gruelling, ritualistic subject”’. Bal, ibid, p 14. performance art. It is therefore important to point out where and how CTTE100162.fm Page 597 Friday, October 29, 2004 12:59 PM 597 3. Jennifer Phipps, interview with the author. Biennale director Nick Waterlow hosted the two artists in Sydney, introducing them to Western Desert Aboriginal artists at one dinner party; Phipps hosted the artists in Melbourne. For a contemporary review of their Sydney performance Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Gold Found by the Artists, 1981, action (duration 16 days), Art see Mike Parr, ‘Parallel Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney. Photo courtesy of Marina Abramovic Fictions’, p 183; see also Jennifer Phipps, ‘Marina Abramovic/Ulay/Ulay/ Marina Abramovic’, Art & Text, no 3, Spring 1981, multiple narratives, including that of Western Desert painting and post- pp 43–50. They were studio art, overlap. already shifting the focus of their work from violent They first visited Australia in 1979, presenting The Brink (1979) at actions to passive the Sydney Biennale and Go … Stop … Back … Stop (1979), at the immobility (even though 3 both types of work National Gallery of Victoria. In 1980, Abramovic and Ulay visited involved obliviousness of Australia for the second time. Between October 1980 and March 1981, the audience). they travelled across the desert centre. Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Go … stop … Back … stop, 1979, action (duration 1.5 hours), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 4. Abramovic’s biographical Much of their second journey was spent struggling with sheer phys- entry for that year read: ical discomfort while driving and camping alone for extended periods ‘EXPERIMENTS WITHOUT EATING AND at remote desert waterholes. They were hoping their uncomfortable TALKING FOR LONG desert retreat would develop heightened sensitivity and the ability to PERIODS OF TIME communicate through means other than speech or physical sight – in MEETING TIBETANS NIGHTSEA CROSSING other words to attempt (though it sounds wacky) telepathy and clair- PERFORMANCE BE voyance.4 QUIET STILL AND Their slightly mad, Bruce Chatwin-like epic of crushing heat (they SOLITARY THE WORLD