Thoughts on Collaboration

When I was invited to join as the fourth member of the Visualising Geography team in February 2002, much of the preliminary thinking about the project had already taken place and there was a structure from which to work. The award from the AHRB had been granted on the basis of a very thorough proposal which detailed how eight collaborations between geographers and artists would be forged and managed, how workshops would be held to discuss the nature and the process of collaboration, and how a curator (in the guise of a post doctoral research assistant) would set up, facilitate and oversee these collaborations, which would in turn lead to an exhibition in the department. In addition to these main goals I proposed the making of this publication as a way of documenting the work carried out and as a way of disseminating the results to other audiences, specifically those interested in geography and art.

The outcomes of the project were not prescribed in terms of what the results might 'look like' by the original funding application. But the nature of the project's construction and process gave it a framework that, in my curatorial experience, presented a very different and intriguing way of working. In the first instance I was drawn by the fact that this 'creative' project was instigated and hosted by an academic institution that would present me with a new physical and intellectual environment for presenting contemporary art. But I was particularly attracted, if not a little intimidated, by the scope and ambition of the project. My first task was to set up and manage eight collaborations that would result in an exhibition five months later. The second part of the project was to oversee the continuation of these collaborations and, with the team, produce this publication in the following four months.

This project also allowed me to consider my position as curator and I was conscious that it comes at a time when the role of the curator has acquired, or perhaps adopted, a more prominent position in exhibition making. This has come about for a number of reasons: partly as a way of professionalising our practice, partly because of the intense media attention that contemporary art has received in the last decade, and perhaps also because it is now acknowledged that curating isn't simply a question of art historical knowledge combined with connoisseurship. The curator is someone who can and should engage in critical discourse and is aware of a range of theoretical or philosophical arguments that can be brought to bear on their selection and presentation of work. Although it is unusual for an academic research project to be 'curated', the curator's language and methodology is often that of the social scientist, and will be concerned with the production, consumption and interpretation of the artwork in a complex contemporary society. The academicising of this role is best reflected in the fact that postgraduate courses in curating are offered at a number of universities and art colleges throughout the UK, such as the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths College.

In the case of this project, my curatorial position was both constrained and productively enabled by the project's framework. I began by considering a list of staff from the department, all of whom had provided short descriptions of their main research interests, which ranged widely from physical to cultural to development geographies. I then drew up a parallel list of artists who I thought would respond positively to this experiment as a whole, but also whose own activities would work well in relation to the various research contexts. It is significant that my role was not to curate ideas or objects, but to curate people into what would hopefully result in productive pairings. Operating in a way not dissimilar to a dating agency, my job was to broker these new relationships, and in doing so, encourage a cross fertilisation of ideas between the two disciplines. There are a number of aritsts in the UK who work very directly with ideas about cartography, mapping or the construction of landscapes, and Kathy Prendergast's work focusses on some of these issues. As AHRB Fellow at the Department, and one of the project team, she is already involved in a longer collaboration with fellow team member Catherine Nash on ideas of longing, belonging, identity and the naming of place. In addition to the inclusion of work which draws in a more direct way from geography models, I was keen to pursue artists whose work may link with the less familiar elements of current geography.

From the start, this project prompted the team to think very hard about what is meant by collaboration. Perhaps a rigorous definition would be that it is a symbiotic, and in this case, cross-disciplinary relationship between two or more people that results in a thing, an event or an idea that would not have existed otherwise. But beyond this, true collaboration may also imply a real, intellectual understanding of the other's practice - and this is significantly distinct from one practice (usually creative) simply appropriating the language or illustrating the idea of another (usually academic). The debate around cross-disciplinary collaboration is most current in the activities of the sciart consortium which has spawned a number of projects and exhibitions in recent years. A recent high profile example of this was an exhibition at the Science Museum called Head On: Art with the Brain in Mind which explored how artists engage with neurological investigations. In an article in The Observer the outspoken, media-savvy biologist Lewis Wolpert continued to cast serious doubt on the benefits claimed for such collaboration. He wrote, "Although science has had a strong influence on certain artists, in the efforts to imitate nature and thus to develop perspective or in the area of new technologies, art has contributed virtually nothing to science."

The scepticism of Wolpert's remark perhaps reveals a more real fear - that the factual, rigorous and objective discipline of the scientist runs the risk of being misinterpreted or made banal in the hands of the creative, impulsive and subjective hands of the artist. To a degree, I sympathise with his fears. However, I would argue that the acquisition of a visual and aesthetic language similarly results from prolonged study, which although different from scientific research, is equally intense. To this I would add that contemporary art practice frequently suffers from oversimplified interpretation (particularly by the media) and therefore artists and scientists alike have good reason to be protective about the dissemination of their work.

In the case of this project, collaborations were forged with both physical geographers, whose practice is very much rooted in hard science, and with human geographers, whose grounding in social science and humanities is closer to the propositional or theoretical practice of the artist. This allowed for the notion of collaboration to be tested in a variety of ways. It is tempting to measure the different degrees of engagement between artists and geographers in terms of their relative 'success'. But qualitative terms such as 'success' and 'failure' are problematic because an ideal collaborative model does not necessarily produce innovative or exciting results. Here I am thinking particularly about schemes devised by cultural policy makers which may look great on paper for all its cross cultural, inter-disciplinary, educational elements, but which in fact produces something that appears compromised and unadventureous. Similarly, a collaboration that is deemed to have 'failed' because of problematic communication between the collaborative partners may be revealing through its awkwardness and honesty. While it is not my intention to pick apart the degrees of a collaborative engagement in each of the eight instances, it is worthwhile making some general observations about the various outcomes that this project produced. Of the eight pairings, it is interesting to compare two models which involve 'fieldwork' - one with a physical geographer and the other with a cultural geographer. In the case of Dalziel and Scullion and Schwenninger, this meant a three day journey into the natural landscape of Barra in the Outer Hebrides. Perhaps more unconventionally, Wentworth and Crang's fieldwork meant a day trip to the artist's favourite landscape for investigation - the Caledonian Road in North London. The text written by Dalziel and Scullion remarks upon how their vision of the environment became altered through the "long-sighted" scientific analysis offered by Schwenninger. In contrast to this, Crang clearly delights in the fact that he can temporarily abandon the analytical language of the cultural geographer and adopt a more singular and self-reflective voice.

In the work carried out by Nils Norman and Vandana Desai, the interests of the artist (Norman) in the creation of a better, sustainable world for developing countries and/or communities in economic hardship are closely aligned with the research of development geographer (Desai). Norman has designed a series of proposed structures that are feasible, affordable, and potentially highly beneifical which Desai speaks about as a "design company might". But in the context of this project, however serious, they must remain utopian aspirations. One wonders what impact these proposed structures might have in a publication about sustainability in the developing world and whether, because they have been proposed by an artist, they are destined to remain in the realm of the fictional. Another pairing, that of Juan Cruz and Luciana Martins, also delves into questions of the aspirational, but their's is rooted in the non-utopian reality of the planning permit. Cruz's quasi-performative actions of photograping these usually overlooked yet ubiquitious notices are accompanied by the insightful and at times poetic text by Martins.

The collaboration between Jacqueline Jeffries and Rob Kemp stands as a model for the creative practice of the artist being 'responsive' to the academic research of the scientist. Jeffries talks about her interest in the depiction of rock and the landscape that prompted this pairing and, for the purposes of contextualization, she has chosen to include work carried out prior to the project, in addition to producing three new pieces. Although Jeffries quite literally draws from the research work of Kemp, this is very distinct from her simply illustrating it. The work of Jeremy Deller, Adrian Palmer and David Gilbert seems, for me, a model of collaboration that gathers together the expertise of individuals to produce a work that is multi-, as opposed to cross-disiplinary. It is a 'collaged' collaboration that by definition offers more than the sum of its parts. Deller's interest in the edges of communities and alternative histories have prompted him not simply to visit, but in fact to purchase a piece of land in the California desert. While Palmer's analysis of this land and it's mineral composition offers a scientific weightiness, Gilbert's text is an opportunity to investigate our preconceptions of 'the tourist destination'.

The collaborative relationship between Kathy Prendergast and Catherine Nash has a longer history. Over ten years, it has involved Nash writing about Prendergast, curating her work, gathering research material in the form of place names and maps, and practically facilitating her fellowship in the department. This is, in a sense, a 'naturally evolved' collaboration, not one which was artificially brokered by a curator . For the purposes of this experiment the collaboration was re-kindled and the resulting work has a clarity and openess that is telling of their mutual interests and respect. I think that it is this sort of collaboration that the artist Tim Rollins refers to as "deep collaboration", which he says "compels us to see ourselves through others".

The last of the eight pairings for discussion is another model of deep collboration which would fit Rollins' definition. Unlike previous examples where the academic usually produces a text and the artist an image, Janice Kerbel and Felicity Callard have jointly produced work that does not apportion authorship. Callard's research interests in the history of agoraphobia have combined with Kerbel's work on plants and cultivation, and together they have co-created a proposal for an indoor garden. Their collaboration instigated an in-depth consideration of each other's work, and a number of meetings. Ironically perhaps, the coloured drawing on page 37 that illustrates their proposal was commissioned from a third party specially for this publication and was not, as some may expect, made by the artist. For Kerbel and Callard this project was the beginning of a collaboration which they plan to continue.

In describing these eight projects I have become even more aware of their breadth and diversity. The experience of being part of this experiment in collaborative practice made me think about the expansiveness of curating both academically and creatively, allowed me to work with a number of artists that I had long admired and introduced me to new people and ideas that will, I hope, feed back into my own work.

Ingrid Swenson