Collaboration

Project 4: Collaboration: Create a work with interdisciplinary input from 3 people (Critique April 22nd) -one person from history who you haven’t met -one person in the class who you have met -one person in a different discipline that have or have not met

For this project I partnered with Lily Strandberg & Natalie Frisinger from our painting class.


We were trying to come up with a frame of reference to do it in. We decided on the "Exquisite Corpse" which is a collaborative drawing activity which originated in the early 20th century by the Dada & YBA artists. Essentially, it is one unified piece of work that is broken up into equal parts, vertically, each person draws and then folds their portion under to pass it onto the next person. The next person, without knowing what preceded them, draws their own, and it continues on. Only to reveal a collaborative and very different firgurative image that lacks any preconvention.

With this concept with thought of our own bodies. And of course referenced Yves Klein as the historical reference. Yves Klein is known for his anthropmetries in which he painted women and had them press themselves upon to canvas. Sometimes he would drag them or move them around, other times it was done up against a wall. This was the first time that making of a painting was revealed; the process of creation was a very physical practice and became something of its own in Klein's work-- and very performative. These impressions create a dialogue not just about artistic practice and the creation that goes into the final product, but also a dialogue about authorship and feminism.

We decided that we would do impressions in blue, after trademarked International Yves Klein Blue-- monochrome. And we would use ourselves. We decided that we would ask a person from another discipline for a pose which we would all do on our piece of paper. Then cut up the paper at like points and put them back together, mixing one's upper body with another's legs and the last's torso.












We asked my friend Taylor Owen, an actor major who does yoga with me, to name her favorite pose. Her response, jokingly, was "corpse pose" or Savasana. This is the pose one does at the end of their yoga practice that requires absolute stillness and is intended to allow the body to absorb and take in, slowly, what they have just completed; to create muscle memory.


It was only after the fact that we made the connection that we were doing an exquisite corpse AND the pose was corpse pose!












With all the discourse of Klein's work considered, we were also adding another dynamic element. Which was that we were facing forward in order to make these, so while the image presented to the audience is of our backside, it is also a confrontational position because it requires us to be facing the viewers.

The pieces turned out great and managed to work with one another in a way that we could not have planned. The beauty of the collaboration was developing the structure or framework for our piece and then being able to perform our painting on our own-- which created varying degrees of color in the colbalt blue, the way we put the paint on and how we laid down, perhaps index marks of the experience were left, the minor shifts in positioning were made visible and certainly we emphasized our differences in stature.

 (My own scenario for the painting)



In the end, we come back together to create three collaborative works that are each new individuals, hybrids of the three individual artists. Beyond, they could be put back together in a different way, leading to new possible forms only achievable through collaboration.

In the future, we want to redo the project. I envision working with a more fluid surface, like linens or sheets and actually folding it into three parts where by we can all lay onto a uniform canvas, attain the same connectivity that the original exquisite corpses had.

Us with our backs covered in paint from doing the project. )