Gareth Moore Collaboration with a future individual at the present time 2011-47 Courtesy CIAC / BNL MTL 2011 / photo Ludovic Beillard

Last month, at the Montreal Biennale, I saw a work by the Vancouver artist Gareth Moore entitled Collaboration with a future individual at the present time 2011–47. The title is fairly self-explanatory: a box full of art supplies sits besides a package of posters that advertise in search of an artistic collaborator. The poster is dated October 30, 2046 and is “seeking one individual for collaboration in the fabrication and finalization of an earlier initiated yet undermined and partially conceptualized artwork.” The pay is $500. (A roll of crisp fifties also sit in the corner of the arts-and-craft box.)

Thinking about the work got me wondering about collaboration: the cornerstone of much of my practice and the bane of my existence. I continue to believe in collaboration but, as I test my desires against the ongoing difficulty of experience, my will to believe in it becomes more of a struggle. I’m saddened to admit that I believe in collaboration much less than I once did and feel fairly certain this is a rather common trajectory.

There is a line in a song by Destroyer: “collaborators fuck us every time.” I know Dan Bejar (the mind behind Destroyer) a little, and I remember telling him how much I related to that line, how closely it hewed to my artistic experiences. He replied that he also had in mind a different kind of collaboration, the kind during World War Two with the Nazis. So yes, there are many kinds, many frames of reference. Words with double-meanings often have a charming ability to de-stabilize us.

The work Collaboration with a future individual at the present time 2011–47 made me wonder if the desire for collaboration was somehow also a desire for the future. Before one starts a new collaboration one can’t imagine what might come out of it, where it might lead. It is a more uncontrollable, unpredictable version of one’s immediate artistic future. (This is also what one searches for in life, the excitement of occasional, semi-controlled unpredictability.)

A work one makes alone can be conceived and then executed. In this sense the future is already imagined. But in a true collaboration what one imagines has the potential to come undone in the encounter with the other. This can of course happen while working alone as well. But the desire for collaboration is perhaps also the desire to make the unexpected happen in ways we cannot foresee. In a sense to make the future feel more like the future again.

Collaboration with a future individual at the present time 2011–47 also reminded me of this passage from Boris Groys:

“As is generally known, the figure of the art critic emerges at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, alongside the gradual rise of a broad, democratic public. At that time, he was certainly not regarded as a representative of the art world but strictly as an outside observer whose function was to judge and criticize works of art in the name of the public exactly as would any other well-educated observer with the time and literary facility: good taste was seen as the expression of an aesthetic “common sense.” The art critic’s judgement should be incorruptible, i.e. bear no obligation to the artist. For a critic to give up his distance meant being corrupted by the art world and neglecting his professional responsibilities: this demand for disinterested art criticism in the name of the public sphere is the assertion of Kant’s third critique, the first aesthetic treatise of modernity.

The judicial ideal, however, was betrayed by the art criticism of the historical avant-garde. The art of the avant-garde consciously withdrew itself from the judgement of the public. It did not address the public as it was but instead spoke to a new humanity as it should – or at least could – be. The art of the avant-garde presupposed a different, new humanity for its reception – one that would be able to grasp the hidden meaning of pure colour and form (Kandinsky), to subject its imagination and even its daily life to the strict laws of geometry (Malevich, Mondrian, the Constructivists, Bauhaus), to recognize a urinal as a work of art (Duchamp). The avant-garde thus introduced a rupture in society not reducible to any previously existing social differences.

The new, artificial difference is the true artwork of the avant-garde. Now it is not the observer who judges the artwork, but the artwork that judges – and often condemns – it’s public. This strategy has often been called elitist, but it suggests an elite equally open to anyone in so far as it excludes everyone to the same degree. To be chosen doesn’t automatically mean dominance, even mastery. Every individual is free to place himself, against the rest of the public, on the side of the artwork – to number himself among those constituting the new humanity. Several art critics of the historical avant-garde did just that. In place of the critic in the name of society arose social critique in the name of art: the artwork doesn’t form the object of judgement but is instead taken as the point of departure for a critique aimed at society and the world.

The art critic of today inherited the older public office along with the avant-garde betrayal of this office. The paradoxical task of judging art in the name of the public while criticizing society in the name of art opens a deep rift within the discourse of contemporary criticism. And one can read today’s discourse as an attempt to bridge, or at least conceal, this divide. For example, there is the critic’s demand that art thematize existing social differences and position itself against the illusion of cultural homogeneity. That certainly sounds very avant-garde, but what one forgets is that the avant-garde didn’t thematize already-existing differences but introduced previously nonexistent ones. The public was equally bewildered in the face of Malevich’s Suprematism or that of Duchamp’s Dadaism, and it is this generalized nonunderstanding – bewilderment regardless of class, race, or gender – that is actually the democratic moment of the various avant-garde projects.”