about reciprocal interference

New website!

2011-12-06T14:58:00.002+08:00

I am pleased to announce the launch of my website. The blog where you now find yourself some background to the Reciprocal Interference project.

About the Reciprocal Interference project

2010-07-20T14:27:00.000+08:00

A little history may help to introduce Reciprocal Interference. In 2005, when Sue Rawlinson was visiting Macao, we had a conversation about our respective art practices. During this discussion I described to Sue a work of art that I was currently researching. Entitled Underground (1994-5), the piece is a mixed media work on paper by the South African Amsterdam-based painter Marlene Dumas and her (then) 5-year-old daughter Helena. It consists of twenty eight unframed panels, each depicting a close-up representation of a face, which are arranged in a grid on the gallery wall. When I first saw Underground in London’s Tate Gallery in 1996, I was struck by its disjunctive appearance. Almost all of the panels contain two radically different styles of mark-making. Helena’s bold rainbow-coloured palette jars against her mother’s restrained black and white ink painting. In order to give Helena something to do while Dumas got on with her own work, she gave Helena a stack of her ‘failures.’ The Tate catalogue cites the artist’s account of what followed: Helena decorated, improved and worked on my black and white drawings, which she found boring, with colour. ‘It was her underground.’ She worked against me. I allowed her to play with my drawings so I could do other work. This was not set up as an art project in the first place. She ‘recast’ my original models into her own stories. One was kidnapped, she said, and one walked into a horse.[1]My research on Underground explored its transgressive features and the senses in which the work instantiates a kind of artistic gift-exchange.[2] As visual art practitioners, however, what Sue Rawlinson and I found inspiring about Underground was its apparent playfulness: it models a way of working without thinking or planning too much. We were also struck by the way the series functioned to ‘rehabilitate’ failed or uncompleted works, and how such a process might amount to a kind of mutual encouragement and validation. Inspired by Underground, we resolved to create a series of small pieces together, mailing works-in-progress between Macao and Australia.A few rules for the collaboration were established from the outset. It was agreed that subject matter and medium would be kept open. We decided not to communicate verbally about our intentions for works we had started, nor to send each other accompanying messages, directions or titles. A consistent format was chosen—A4-sized panels are an easy size to mail and to scan. We agreed to send each other 5 pictures at a time, in hopes that at least one of the five ‘starts’ might prove particularly engaging for the other artist. The rules for the collaboration also involved a ‘stopping rule’[3] and a decision regarding who would own the completed works. It was agreed that the person who started the work would be the one to declare it finished. This meant a picture could go back and forth many times—indeed some went back and forth over a period of years—before it was decided it was finished. It was also agreed that the originator of a piece would become its eventual owner. Of the aforementioned rules, the most important was the one concerning the absence of accompanying instructions. The thinking here was that the project was to be a process of visual communication, with the fostering playful exchange taking precedence over the realisation of any explicit artistic intentions.In early 2006, I wrote to Sue Taylor, Johanna Trainor, Even Mak and Mary Grehan to see if they’d be interested in working with me in a similar manner. I initiated these new collaborations by citing the existing work being done with Sue Rawlinson. Irish artist Mary Grehan and I chose to follow the ‘rules’ outlined above, while some other artist-pairs modified them. For example, Hong Kong artist Even Mak and I, because of our geographic proximity, chose on occasion to work simultaneously while the Reciprocal Interference works produced in collaboration with Johanna Trainor, entailed the latter working photographically and digitally to finish scanned watercolour and mixed media ‘starts’ that I sent to her. And at a certain point in the collaboration with Sue Taylor, we recognised that our best pieces were the ones involving only ‘two goes,’ so we adopted a procedure whereby we each completed the other artist’s ‘starts’. The most recent phase of the Reciprocal Interference collaboration with Sue Taylor involves the production of collaborative as well as solo postcards, incorporating our addresses, postmarks and stamps.The title of the project was inspired by a passage from Henri Bergson's essay Laughter. In this essay Bergson identifies a number of dynamics through which humor is generated. One of these he calls ‘reciprocal interference.’ In a footnote to the essay Bergson notes that the term ‘interference’ should be understood as it is in optics, to mean ‘the partial superposition and neutralisation, by each other, of two series of light-waves.’ He goes on to describe how a situation ‘will invariably be comic when it belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time.’[4] We felt that this was an apt title for our project. Our aim was not explicitly to produce comic works, although there was definitely a comic aspect to the process of surprising each other by the additions and changes we made to each other’s works. The main reason for choosing this title had to do with the fact that, like the comic situation identified by Bergson, the collaborative works in our project each bring together two different kinds of subject matter and/or style, so that interpretation often becomes a matter of negotiating the two. Like Bergson’s definition of a joke, when these two ‘waves’ meet, the resulting work often comes as a surprise. Whatever one’s intentions had been, they may be completely overturned by the other artist. The ‘interference’ that is a key part of this artistic project isn’t just about any ideas one might have had about the meaning of the work one had started. It covers the most basic of details. One might intend a work to have a certain orientation, for example, but it might end up another way around, changing from portrait format to landscape.It is in this sense that the resulting works appear to have come out of thin air rather than by as the result of any conscious intention or plan. However, as I hope to have shown, planning and theoretical research actually played a significant part in the development of these pictures. Conversely, the questions and insights generated by first-hand experience of creative collaboration have been vital for my background research on the topic of contemporary artistic collaboration. ‘Hands-on’ experience allows me to formulate research questions of a kind that might not occur to the non-practitioner.A series of blogs document the work-in-progress of the five artist-pairs, all of which are accessible through a blog entitled ‘About Reciprocal Interference.’[5]

Out of Thin Air – collaborative and solo work

2010-06-04T15:14:00.000+08:00

Out of Thin Air – collaborative and solo work
憑空而來—個人及合作畫展

Carol Archer

The works in this exhibition are part of two larger series of work, both of which are ongoing: the Reciprocal Interference project and Time with the Sky. The Reciprocal Interference project consists of two-person collaborative works by Carol Archer and artist-friends Sue Rawlinson, Sue Taylor, Johanna Trainor (Australia), Mary Grehan (Ireland) and Even Mak (Hong Kong). The Time with the Sky series of charcoal and watercolour drawings was begun during Archer’s residency at Bundanon, Australia in July 2009. Australian artist Arthur Boyd and his family gave their home, a splendid property on the banks of the Shoalhaven River, to benefit local and international artists working across the range of arts disciplines. The Time with the Sky drawings show sky framed by the uppermost branches of trees. Solo works, these pictures are destined to contribute to a cross-disciplinary collaboration with poet Christopher (Kit) Kelen. Both series of work came out of thin air: Reciprocal Interference works-in-progress were air-mailed by collaborating partners in Hong Kong, Macao, Australia and Ireland. The Time with the Sky works are inspired by the big Australian sky, and the eucalypts that stretch up toward it. But the exhibition title Out of Thin Air is also ironically intended, because seemingly unpredictable aspects of the two series are in fact the result of sustained thought and effort, dialogue, and conducive circumstances. The purpose of this essay is to introduce the two series in the Out of Thin Air exhibition, discussing how they came into being, and the productive synergy between these art practices and more theoretically-oriented forms of research.

A little history may help to introduce Reciprocal Interference. In 2005, when Sue Rawlinson was visiting Macao, we had a conversation about our respective art practices. During this discussion I described to Sue a work of art that I was currently researching. Entitled Underground (1994-5), the piece is a mixed media work on paper by the South African Amsterdam-based painter Marlene Dumas and her (then) 5-year-old daughter Helena. It consists of twenty eight unframed panels, each depicting a close-up representation of a face, which are arranged in a grid on the gallery wall. When I first saw Underground in London’s Tate Gallery in 1996, I was struck by its disjunctive appearance. Almost all of the panels contain two radically different styles of mark-making. Helena’s bold rainbow-coloured palette jars against her mother’s restrained black and white ink painting. In order to give Helena something to do while Dumas got on with her own work, she gave Helena a stack of her ‘failures.’ The Tate catalogue cites the artist’s account of what followed:

Helena decorated, improved and worked on my black and white drawings, which she found boring, with colour. ‘It was her underground.’ She worked against me. I allowed her to play with my drawings so I could do other work. This was not set up as an art project in the first place. She ‘recast’ my original models into her own stories. One was kidnapped, she said, and one walked into a horse.[1]

My research on Underground explored its transgressive features and the senses in which the work instantiates a kind of artistic gift-exchange.[2] As visual art practitioners, however, what Sue Rawlinson and I found inspiring about Underground was its apparent playfulness: it models a way of working without thinking or planning too much. We were also struck by the way the series functioned to ‘rehabilitate’ failed or uncompleted works, and how such a process might amount to a kind of mutual encouragement and validation. Inspired by Underground, we resolved to create a series of small pieces together, mailing works-in-progress between Macao and Australia.

A few rules for the collaboration were established from the outset. It was agreed that subject matter and medium would be kept open. We decided not to communicate verbally about our intentions for works we had started, nor to send each other accompanying messages, directions or titles. A consistent format was chosen—A4-sized panels are an easy size to mail and to scan. We agreed to send each other 5 pictures at a time, in hopes that at least one of the five ‘starts’ might prove particularly engaging for the other artist. The rules for the collaboration also involved a ‘stopping rule’[3] and a decision regarding who would own the completed works. It was agreed that the person who started the work would be the one to declare it finished. This meant a picture could go back and forth many times—indeed some went back and forth over a period of years—before it was decided it was finished. It was also agreed that the originator of a piece would become its eventual owner. Of the aforementioned rules, the most important was the one concerning the absence of accompanying instructions. The thinking here was that the project was to be a process of visual communication, with the fostering playful exchange taking precedence over the realisation of any explicit artistic intentions.

In early 2006, I wrote to Sue Taylor, Johanna Trainor, Even Mak and Mary Grehan to see if they’d be interested in working with me in a similar manner. I initiated these new collaborations by citing the existing work being done with Sue Rawlinson. Irish artist Mary Grehan and I chose to follow the ‘rules’ outlined above, while some other artist-pairs modified them. For example, Hong Kong artist Even Mak and I, because of our geographic proximity, chose on occasion to work simultaneously while the Reciprocal Interference works produced in collaboration with Johanna Trainor, entailed the latter working photographically and digitally to finish scanned watercolour and mixed media ‘starts’ that I sent to her. And at a certain point in the collaboration with Sue Taylor, we recognised that our best pieces were the ones involving only ‘two goes,’ so we adopted a procedure whereby we each completed the other artist’s ‘starts’. The most recent phase of the Reciprocal Interference collaboration with Sue Taylor involves the production of collaborative as well as solo postcards, incorporating our addresses, postmarks and stamps.

The title of the project was inspired by a passage from Henri Bergson's essay Laughter. In this essay Bergson identifies a number of dynamics through which humor is generated. One of these he calls ‘reciprocal interference.’ In a footnote to the essay Bergson notes that the term ‘interference’ should be understood as it is in optics, to mean ‘the partial superposition and neutralisation, by each other, of two series of light-waves.’ He goes on to describe how a situation ‘will invariably be comic when it belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time.’[4] We felt that this was an apt title for our project. Our aim was not explicitly to produce comic works, although there was definitely a comic aspect to the process of surprising each other by the additions and changes we made to each other’s works. The main reason for choosing this title had to do with the fact that, like the comic situation identified by Bergson, the collaborative works in our project each bring together two different kinds of subject matter and/or style, so that interpretation often becomes a matter of negotiating the two. Like Bergson’s definition of a joke, when these two ‘waves’ meet, the resulting work often comes as a surprise. Whatever one’s intentions had been, they may be completely overturned by the other artist. The ‘interference’ that is a key part of this artistic project isn’t just about any ideas one might have had about the meaning of the work one had started. It covers the most basic of details. One might intend a work to have a certain orientation, for example, but it might end up another way around, changing from portrait format to landscape.

It is in this sense that the resulting works appear to have come out of thin air rather than by as the result of any conscious intention or plan. However, as I hope to have shown, planning and theoretical research actually played a significant part in the development of these pictures. Conversely, the questions and insights generated by first-hand experience of creative collaboration have been vital for my background research on the topic of contemporary artistic collaboration. ‘Hands-on’ experience allows me to formulate research questions of a kind that might not occur to the non-practitioner.

A series of blogs document the work-in-progress of the five artist-pairs, all of which are accessible through a blog entitled ‘About Reciprocal Interference.’[5]

***

The Time with the Sky series resulted, in a very real sense, from the generosity of Australian artist Arthur Boyd and his family. The privilege of a residency at the rural retreat of Bundanon on the New South Wales South Coast, provided me with dedicated time and space for creative work. Also resident at Bundanon during July 2009 was Christopher (Kit) Kelen. While the two of us began working on parallel projects, we soon recognized important points of intersection, not least of which was our shared interest in representing the Bundanon environment in a manner that took into account our presence in it.

Time with the Sky is a series of drawings in its own right. And it is a twelve part poem by Kit Kelen. The two are also intended to be read together, as a collaborative whole. Throughout the poem, there is a persistent tension between the notion of the natural world as representation and as autonomous entity. What connection is there between our ‘reading’ of the world and the way it actually is? Is this drawing and poetry engendered through specific experiences of viewing and reading? The aim of the image-and-text work is not to answer but to keep such questions open. Here is a sample from the seventh section of the draft poem:
glimpse of the infinite
and tribute too
we offer all our skill for this
to take the heart along
its own way
an opening

as if this were writing

which turns
forgets itself
goes on

how fine
that the eye goes with it
and the eye is a boomerang too
it falls to mold like leaf
never gives up the ghost

and lower still the camera
casts and catches
this for you
In these lines of the poetic work-in-progress, attention is drawn to the reciprocity between the textual and the visual, between subject and object, between the world ‘out there’ and the world as representation. The poem is a highly visual text and the drawings—composed of innumerable marks—have a script-like quality. In this way text and image partake of each other’s materiality and method; hence their connection and their concerted demand to be read each in the other’s terms. Both the drawings and poem direct the viewer’s and reader’s attention to the openness of the sky, to the act of simply looking up and out of the everyday. These works share with their audience the meditative and healing practice of spending time with the sky.
Out of Thin Air brings together two ongoing series of work, both of which foreground collaborative creative processes. Each series has evolved through conversations that take up questions artistic, literary and scholarly in nature. Without the generosity, trust and respect of my many collaborators, none of the work presented here would have been possible.

[1] Dumas is cited in Catherine Kinley, “Marlene Dumas.” Marlene Dumas, 2 April – 30 June 1996, exh. cat. London: Tate Gallery, 1996, unpaginated.
[2] See Carol Archer, ‘Gifts and Transgressions: Marlene Dumas’ Underground’ in Crossings, No 8, 2006.
[3] I am borrowing this term from Paisley Livingston. See “When a Work is Finished: A Response to Darren Hicks,” Journal of Aesthetics and Criticism 66:4 Fall 2008, 394.
[4] Henri Bergson. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of Comic. The full text is available at Authorama, http://www.authorama.com/book/laughter.html [Accessed 31 January, 2010].
[5] ‘About Reciprocal Interference’
http://www.aboutreciprocalinterference.blogspot.com [Accessed 31 January, 2010].

Visual Studies Department Exhibition Celebrates Collaborative Creative Processes / 嶺南大學舉辦「憑空而來」畫展

2010-03-02T00:28:00.011+08:00

Lingnan University’s Department of Visual Studies has organized a one-month painting exhibition, titled Out of Thin Air – collaborative and solo work, which opened on 27 February 2010. The artworks showcased in the exhibition are by Assistant Professor Dr Carol Archer, and produced either individually or in collaboration with artist-partners. The works in the exhibition are selected from two ongoing series, Reciprocal Interference and Time with the Sky.

The Reciprocal Interference series comprises collaborative artworks by Dr Archer and five artist-friends: Ms Sue Rawlinson, Ms Sue Taylor, Ms Johanna Trainor (Australia), Ms Mary Grehan (Ireland) and Ms Even Mak (Hong Kong). Reciprocal Interference works-in-progress were airmailed between collaborating partners in Hong Kong, Macao, Australia and Ireland. The most recent phase of the project includes a series of postcard-works by Ms Taylor and Dr Archer. The Time with the Sky series of charcoal and watercolour drawings were begun during Dr Archer’s residency in Australia in 2009. They were inspired by the big Australian sky and the eucalypts that stretch up toward it. Solo works, these drawings are destined to contribute to a cross-disciplinary collaboration with poet Dr Christopher (Kit) Kelen.

“But the exhibition title Out of Thin Air is also ironically intended,” Archer comments, “because seemingly unpredictable aspects of the two series are in fact the result of sustained thought, effort and dialogue, as well as conducive circumstances.”

Dr Archer has been teaching in the Visual Studies Department at Lingnan University since 2007. She has shown her work in twelve solo exhibitions and over 30 group exhibitions held in Australia, Japan, Italy, China, Hong Kong and Macao.

Out of Thin Air – collaborative and solo work will be shown in Sun Yat Sen University, Guangzhou from 30 April – 13 May 2010 as part of the Visual Studies Department’s ‘travelling exhibitions’ initiative funded by the Lingnan Foundation.

嶺南大學舉辦「憑空而來」畫展

嶺南大學(嶺大)視覺研究系將於2月27日舉辦助理教授區勵志博士的個人及合作畫展：「憑空而來」。是次畫展為期一個月，展出的作品來自區博士兩個仍在進行中的創作系列，包括她與五位友人合作的「互涉」及個人創作的「與天共度的時光」。
「互涉」是區博士與5位藝術家友人包括Sue Rawlinson女士、Sue Taylor女士、Johanna Trainor女士(澳洲)、Mary Grehan女士(愛爾蘭)及 Even Mak女士(香港) 正在進行的合作系列，這系列的作品涉及五位藝術家在香港、澳門、澳洲及愛爾蘭之間的郵遞互傳。是次展出的是區博士與Taylor 合作的名信片作品。
「與天共度的時光」則是區氏2009年在澳洲居住期間創作的炭筆及水彩繪畫，靈感源自澳洲廣闊的天空及伸展向天空的桉樹。系列是為畫家與詩人Christopher Kelen將會合作的跨媒介創作的一個嘗試，畫作可獨立來看，亦可與詩人的詩一起閱讀。
區博士說：「畫展的題目 - 憑空而來 – 卻是諷刺的特意點題，兩個系列的創作過程以乎無法預計，卻是持續不斷的思巧、努力及對話的成果。」
區博士2007年加入嶺大視覺研究系任教，曾舉辦過十二個個人展及參與逾30個聯展，作品曾在澳洲、日本、內地、香港及澳門展出。

嶺大視覺研究系「憑空而來」畫展由嶺南基金資助的，在嶺大校園展出後將於4月30日至5月13日巡迴至廣州中山大學展出。有關是次展覽的資料可瀏覽區博士的網誌http://carolarcher.blogspot.com/。

2010-03-02T00:28:00.007+08:00

2010-03-02T00:28:00.005+08:00

2010-03-02T00:28:00.003+08:00

2010-03-02T00:28:00.001+08:00

Out of Thin Air – collaborative and solo work 憑空而來—個人及合作畫展

2010-01-06T22:40:00.004+08:00

Out of Thin Air – collaborative and solo work
憑空而來—個人及合作畫展

Carol Archer 區勵志

Exhibition Opening:
Saturday 27 February, 3:30-5:30 pm

Exhibition dates:
27 Feb – 28 March, 2010
Lingnan University, Hong Kong

30 April – 13 May, 2010
Sun Yat Sen University, Guangzhou

Brief Description of the Exhibition:

The works in this exhibition are part of two larger series, both of which are ongoing; namely, the Reciprocal Interference/互涉 project and Time with the Sky/與天共度的時光. The Reciprocal Interference project consists of two-person collaborative works by Carol Archer and artist-friends Sue Rawlinson, Sue Taylor, Johanna Trainor (Australia), Mary Grehan (Ireland) and Even Mak (Hong Kong). The most recent phase of the Reciprocal Interference collaboration includes the production, by Taylor and Archer, of a series of postcard-works, which incorporate addresses, postmarks and stamps. The Time with the Sky series of charcoal and watercolour drawings was begun during Archer’s residency at Bundanon (Australia) in July 2009. Solo works, these pictures of sky framed by the uppermost branches of trees, are destined to contribute to a cross-disciplinary collaboration with poet Christopher (Kit) Kelen. Both series came out of thin air: Reciprocal Interference works-in-progress were airmailed between collaborating partners in Hong Kong, Macao, Australia and Ireland. The Time with the Sky works are inspired by the big Australian sky, and the eucalypts that stretch up toward it. But the exhibition title Out of Thin Air is also ironically intended, because seemingly unpredictable aspects of the two series are in fact the result of sustained thought, effort and dialogue, as well as conducive circumstances. Each series has evolved through conversations that take up questions artistic, literary and scholarly in nature. Out of Thin Air is an exhibition that foregrounds collaborative creative processes.

Reciprocal Interference: a collaborative art project by Carol Archer with Mary Grehan, Even Mak, Sue Rawlinson, Sue Taylor and Johanna Trainor

2008-07-16T14:26:00.003+08:00

Catalogue

2008-07-16T13:38:00.005+08:00

Picture 1
Reciprocal Interference: Mary Grehan and Carol Archer 1, 2007

Collection of Janet Murchie

Picture 2
Reciprocal Interference: Sue Rawlinson and Carol Archer 1, 2006
Collection of Janet Donald

Picture 3
Reciprocal Interference: Even Mak and Carol Archer 1, 2008

2008-07-16T13:36:00.005+08:00

Picture 4
Reciprocal Interference: Johanna Trainor and Carol Archer 1, 2008

Collection of Janet Murchie

Picture 5
Reciprocal Interference: Sue Taylor and Carol Archer 1, 2006

Picture 6
Reciprocal Interference: Sue Taylor and Carol Archer 2, 2006

Picture 7
Reciprocal Interference: Sue Rawlinson and Carol Archer 2, 2006
Collection of Janet Donald

Picture 8

Reciprocal Interference: Sue Rawlinson and Carol Archer 3, 2006

2008-07-16T13:35:00.002+08:00

Picture 9
Reciprocal Interference: Johanna Trainor and Carol Archer 2, 2007

Collection of Terese and Jonti Lambourne

Picture 10

Reciprocal Interference: Sue Taylor and Carol Archer 3, 2007

Picture 11
Reciprocal Interference: Sue Rawlinson and Carol Archer 4, 2006
Collection of Johanna Trainor

Picture 12
Reciprocal Interference: Sue Rawlinson and Carol Archer 5, 2006

Picture 13
Reciprocal Interference: Mary Grehan and Carol Archer 2, 2007

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Picture 14

Reciprocal Interference: Sue Rawlinson and Carol Archer 6, 2006

Picture 15

Reciprocal Interference: Sue Rawlinson and Carol Archer 7, 2006

Picture 16
Reciprocal Interference: Mary Grehan and Carol Archer 3, 2008

Picture 17
Reciprocal Interference: Even Mak and Carol Archer 2, 2008

Picture 18
Reciprocal Interference: Mary Grehan and Carol Archer 4, 2007

2008-07-16T13:31:00.003+08:00

Picture 19
Reciprocal Interference: Sue Taylor and Carol Archer 4, 2006

Picture 20
Reciprocal Interference: Sue Taylor and Carol Archer 5, 2007

Picture 21
Reciprocal Interference: Even Mak and Carol Archer 3, 2008

Picture 22
Reciprocal Interference: Sue Taylor and Carol Archer 6, 2006

Collection: Magdaline Shenton-Kaleido

Picture 23
Reciprocal Interference: Sue Rawlinson and Carol Archer 8, 2006

2008-07-16T13:29:00.002+08:00

Picture 24
Reciprocal Interference: Sue Taylor and Carol Archer 7, 2006

Picture 25
Reciprocal Interference: Sue Rawlinson and Carol Archer 9, 2006

Picture 26
Reciprocal Interference: Johanna Trainor and Carol Archer 3, 2008

Picture 27
Reciprocal Interference: Johanna Trainor and Carol Archer 4, 2008

Picture 28
Reciprocal Interference: Mary Grehan and Carol Archer 5, 2007

Reciprocal Interference Project: Collaborations opens at Newcastle’s Podspace Gallery on Thursday 17 July, 2008.

2008-06-04T11:59:00.007+08:00

Images from left to right: Carol Archer and Sue Rawlinson (mixed media on paper), Carol Archer and Mary Grehan(mixed media and moth's wing on paper), Carol Archer and Johanna Trainor (watercolour and photomedia), Carol Archer and Even Mak (acrylic on paper), Carol Archer and Sue Taylor (mixed media on paper) , all A4 sized. To look at the evolution of each collaboration, and works in various stages of their progress, go to www.rawlinsonarcher.blogspot.com, www.grehanarcher.blogspot.com, www.trainorarcher.blogspot.com, www.makarcher.blogspot.com, www.taylorarcher.blogspot.com

Reciprocal Interference Project: Collaborations opens at Newcastle’s Podspace Gallery on Thursday 17 July, 2008. Each piece in the exhibition is by Hong Kong-based artist Carol Archer and one other artist: Sue Rawlinson (Bondi), Sue Taylor (Canberra), Johanna Trainor (Newcastle), Mary Grehan (Ireland), Even Mak (Hong Kong). The first of these collaborations began in 2005, the others in 2006. Packages of works-in-progress have been bouncing back and forth ever since. No written instructions or descriptions arrive with the pictures – the conversation proceeds by means of the visual language in the works.

Reciprocal Interference? The phrase comes from Henri Bergson’s essay on laughter. When “two altogether independent series of events” come together, it may generate a comic effect, “the precise formula of which is very difficult to disentangle, by reason of the extraordinary variety of forms in which it appears”. Like the ingredients of a good joke, the works in the Reciprocal Interference Project are extremely diverse and could not have been predicted by their makers. Two artistic sensibilities meet in each work. Each picture results from a challenge posed by one artist and an answering visual intervention by the other. Process is important: these pictures could not have come into existence in any other way. A series of blogs, each highlighting the work-in-progress of a particular collaboration forms the virtual component of the project. Specific blog addresses are listed to the right of your screen.

The exhibition ends on Saturday 2 August.

5 collaborations, 5 works

2008-04-20T11:33:00.017+08:00

Sue Taylor and Carol Archer, 2007,
mixed media on paper, 30 x 21 cm

Johanna Trainor and Carol Archer
photomedia, 30 x 21 cm, 2008

Suzanne Rawlinson and Carol Archer,
mixed media on paper, 30 x 21 cm, 2005

Mary Grehan and Carol Archer, 2007
mixed media and moth's wing on paper,
30 x 21 cm

Even Mak and Carol Archer, 2006
mixed media on paper, 30 x 21 cm

2008-04-20T11:33:00.011+08:00

You are warmly invited to the opening of

Reciprocal Interference Project – collaborative works on paper

Carol Archer (HK), Mary Grehan (Waterford, Ireland), Even Mak(HK), Sue Rawlinson (Sydney, Australia), Sue Taylor (Googong, Australia) and Johanna Trainor (Newcastle, Australia)

Thursday 17 July - 6-8pm

Podspace, 1st floor, 3/231 King St, Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Gallery opening times: Wednesday-Saturday 12pm – 5pm

Exhibition runs Wednesday 15 July until Saturday 1 August

2008-04-20T11:32:00.000+08:00

From Maria Lind, "The Collaborative Turn"

2008-04-19T21:02:00.005+08:00

"Groups of artists, circles, associations, networks, constellations, partnerships, alliances, coalitions, contexts and teamwork- are all notions buzzing in the air of the artworld. However, cooperation in the art context is by no means new. On the contrary, its genealogy is long and complex, and includes a number of different formats for organising artistic work and its aesthetics. It extends from Rubens and other Baroque artists' hierarchical large-scale studios, which were lucrative businesses, to Surrealists' group experiments, constructivists' theatre projects, Fluxus games and Andy Warhol's pseudo-industrial Factory. It also has been argued that collaboration was crucial in the transition from Modernism to postmodernism, particularly since the advent of Conceptualism in the late 1960s. During the following decade, redefinitions of art tended to go hand in hand with collaborative practices." (16)

"Concepts like collaboration, cooperation, collective action, relationality and participation are used and often confused, although each of them has its own specific connotations. According to the collaboratively-compiled Wikipedia, however, collaboration can be described as follows: 'Collaboration refers abstractly to all processes wherein people work together- applying both to the work of individuals as well as larger collectives and societies. As an intrinsic aspect of human society, the term is used in many varying contexts such as science, art, education, and business.'
'Collaboration' is, as the above definition suggests, an open-ended concept, which in principle encompasses all the others. Collaboration becomes an umbrella term for the diverse working methods that require more than one participant. 'Cooperation', on the other hand, emphasises the notion of working together and mutually benefiting from it. Through its stress on solidarity, the word 'collective' gives an echo of working forms within a socialist social system. 'Collective action' refers precisely to acting together while 'interaction' can mean that several people interact with each other as well as that a single individual interacts with, for example, an apparatus by pressing a button. 'Participation' is more widely associated with the creation of a context in which particpants can take part in something that someone else has created but wherethere are, nevertheless, opportunities to have an impact" (17) .

"...But the result then? Does it make any differecne if diverse forms of artistic collaboration lie behind an artwork or another kind of cultural production? Is collaboration a 'better' method which produces 'better' results? The curatorial collective What, How and For Whom has a clear explanation for choosing collaboration as a method: the motivation to collaborate is that it would otherwise not take place;it simply has to make possible that which is otherwise impossible" (29).

Maria Lind, "The Collaborative Turn" in Johanna Billing, Maria Lind and Lars Nilsson (eds), Taking the Matter into Common Hands: On Contemporary Art and Collaborative Practices . London: Black Dog Publishing. 2007.

On the functions of literary collaborations between women

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"Collaborative writing, at first glance, would support both these exceptions to professionalism, projecting alternatively an amateur practice (something done for amusement) and an expedient materialism (two can write more efficiently than one) ... Neither explanation, however, fully comprehends these partners’ literary investments. Even the Findlaters, who were reputedly so poor they had to write their first manuscripts on the back of grocers' paper and were in fact supporting themselves and their family by their pens, saw their writing as more than journeymen's labor. These were women, in other words, who did dream of counting themselves as professional authors. Collaboration, I want to argue, facilitated this dream by masking it. For under the guise of collaboration's evident amateurism, a number of women were able to slip into a professional position" ( Bette London, 1999, Writing Double: Women's Literary Partnerships, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 104-105).

"If the literary culture at the turn of the century demanded a single author (if only the single author of individual parts) for writing to be deemed serious, what double writing inevitably achieved was to bring the work of writing into visibility. The very terms that governed public curiosity about these collaborations focused attention, in ways perhaps unprecedented, on the material of writing: on the hands of the author, the control of the pen, the possession of the page, not to mention the mechanics of character and plot construction, the components of a stylistic signature, the art of producing dialogue, the process of revision. Appearing at the very moment when popular writers' guides began to be codify these processes and procedures, literary collaborations could thus be read as a kind of living handbook to the art of fiction."
( Bette London, 1999, Writing Double: Women's Literary Partnerships, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 107).

About the title of the project

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The title of the project was inspired by a passage from Henri Bergon's book Laughter. Bergson writes:

"We have dwelt at considerable length on repetition and inversion; we now come to the reciprocal interference [Footnote: The word 'interference' has here the meaning given to it in Optics, where it indicates the partial superposition and neutralisation, by each other, of two series of light-waves.] of series. This is a comic effect, the precise formula of which is very difficult to disentangle, by reason of the extraordinary variety of forms in which it appears on the stage. Perhaps it might be defined as follows: A situation is invariably comic when it belongs simultaneously to two altogether independent series of events and is capable of being interpreted in two entirely different meanings at the same time." (an online version of Bergson's Laughter is
available at www .abacci.com , 55).

The notion of reciprocal interference seemed an apt way to title the project because it encompasses two important aspects of the collaborative artmaking process - reciprocity and struggle. While the collaborative artworks produced so far have sometimes been comic, and I have often laughed to see what I have received in a parcel from a fellow-collaborator, it is the "extraordinary variety of forms" that have emerged I have found particularly surprising and exciting. One's work is made strange by friends' interventions. It is fascinating to see how another artist deals with your work-in-process and the direction in which they take it. Because of those interventions, one becomes aware of entrenched habits - some examples in my case were a tendency to work in portrait format, to avoid figures, animals, narrative. It is invigorating to work in new ways, learning from and being challenged by one's friends. And it is scary - the more one admires a work the more one fears wrecking it. These collaborative practices entail putting aside such fears, resisting preciousness, and trusting that this risk-taking will generate good work, not every time perhaps, but often enough to make it worthwhile.

What is the Reciprocal Interference Project?

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The Reciprocal Interference Project is a series of art collaborations between pairs of artists who are women and friends. It grew out of a collaborative art project developed by Carol Archer and Suzanne Rawlinson, artists who became friends during a winter school course on artist's books in Sydney in 2004. When Sue visited Carol in Macao in early 2004, the two of them hatched a plan to work together, inspired by a work titled Underground (1993) by the Amsterdam-based artist Marlene Dumas and her (then) five-year-old daughter Helena, and a shared desire to challenge their existing art practices. Initially conceiving the artistic exchange in terms of the rehabilitation or rescue of "failures", the two quickly redefined the function of the other's contribution. It could also supplement, develop, alter, contradict or otherwise shift a work that was not thought to be problematic. The collaborative intervention was initially thought in therapeutic terms - we decided to aim to make our additions to the other's work quick and slight, keeping the notion of play foremost in our minds. It was this playful and irreverent aspect of Helena's contribution to her mother's work that we found particularly exciting.

Sue Rawlinson and I generated a set of "rules" for our collaboration. Absolutely any subject matter could be used. We would work in any media on A4-sized pieces of paper, since this is a size that is easy to post and simple to scan. One of us would post a number of pieces to the other who would add something new to them before sending them back to their originator, along with a number of "starts" of her own. After some time, we elected to send 5 pieces at a time. Although the works would be collaborative, ownership and final control would rest with their initiator. On the return of a package of works, their initiator could deem them finished, add a new layer to finish them, or add to them and resend them to her partner. Works that went back and forth several times would nevertheless end up with their initiator - she would maintain final creative control over them. A time-limit for the return of works was discussed - I think it was 2 weeks - but since we both found this unworkable we opted to be more flexible - aiming to keep up the momentum but not at the cost of our pleasure in the process. The possibility of documenting and later exhibiting some of our works was floated early on, but we determined to keep our focus practice-centred for the time being. The blog titled Reciprocal Interference - http://www.rawlinsonarcher.blogspot.com/ documents Sue Rawlinson and Carol Archer's ongoing artistic collaboration.

Because the above-mentioned collaborative art process was so exciting and interesting, I decided at the beginning of 2006 to float the idea of similar collaborations with a number of other artist-friends. All of these collaborations use a similar set of "rules" to those outlined above, but key differences emerged as our respective collaborations proceeded. Mary Grehan (Waterford, Ireland) and Carol Archer, followed the same set of general principles for our collaboration. Take a look at Reciprocal Interference 3 at http://www.grehanarcher.blogspot.com/ . However, Sue Taylor (Googong, NSW) and Carol decided at a particlar point to only have one "go" each on a particlar work, so that in each case a work was started by one of us and finished by the other. See the blog titled Reciprocal Interference 2 at http://www.taylorarcher.blogspot.com/ . The collaboration between Johanna Trainor (Newcastle, NSW) and Carol has taken a different course again, with Johanna working digitally and photographically to complete Carol's watercolour and mixed media "starts". The details of this collaboration may be found on the blog titled Reciprocal InterferenceI at http://www.trainorarcher.blogspot.com/. Johanna introduced Carol to blogging, facilitating the documentation of collaborative processes that is a key part of the project. Hong Kong ceramicist Even Mak and Carol Archer chose to work around a theme - the feet and dance/movement - and simultaneous mark-making, a consequence of living in the same part of the world, is a feature of this collaboration. Works by Even and Carol are included on Reciprocal Interference4 at http://www.makarcher.blogspot.com/.

The plan has been to work collaboratively in pairs, and use the blogs as a means of documenting the progress of the works generated. Although blogging is new to us, maybe it will also provide a means for other artists to communicate about our works in progress. It is the material processes of collaborative art production that are the main event here. For my own part, I am using this particular blog as a space for making observations, and assembling relevant quotes and theoretical reflections on collaborative art processes, and I warmly invite your comments and contributions.

Notes: For an essay on the complex nature of the collaboration entailed in Marlene Dumas' Underground see Carol Archer, "Gifts and Transgressions: Marlene Dumas' Underground" in Crossings: A Counter-Disciplinary Journal of Philosophical, Cultural, Historical, and Literary Studies. The "Work" of Art (Special Issue), no. 8, 2006, 77-100