The Association of Collaboration
Do you avoid asking questions about contemporary art for fear of seeming ignorant? Are you choked-up and jittery when asked for feedback from an artist? Do you wish you could break the silence in the gallery or chat with someone over what it could be about? Are you fed up with consuming brief supportive art texts that fail to critically assess?
TAC helps you to help yourself.
Contemporary Art Mobile Response Unit (2007) oranges up a rally cry for the audience to join The Association of Collaboration (TAC) and trolley volunteers in the common cause of enriching our collective ‘Prospect’ art experiences.
Mobile Response Unit aims to provide an open, interactive alternative to the curatorial voice. The work’s primary function is an attempted intervention in the gulf between art and its audiences, a complication and analysis of interactive roles. With participation and critique at its core, it offers a forum for animated conversation, provoking interrogation of meaning and response.
By providing interpretive models that are suggestive rather than prescriptive, TAC has designed Mobile Response Unit to encourage visitors, offering them thinking tools and opening the passages of communication around contemporary art. The work empowers audiences to clarify and question, establishing opportunities to share critical responses.
Mobile Response Unit is an expression of the journey TAC is making to explore useful operational models of collaboration. The unit is the first product of TAC’s collective process, hopefully building auxiliary voices within the exhibition and challenging notions of authorship.
Potential collaborators – YOU! – join the cause contributing to make this a zesty collaborative experience! From those who like a work just because it’s blue/tiny/shiny to those who respond because it makes them happy/sad/angry, to audiences who seek out broader art contexts or are prompted to consider our world in a fresh light. Sharing is caring :-)
Love, The Association of Collaboration.
The Association of Collaboration bio info:
Collaboration is the answer but what is the question?[1]
The Association of Collaboration (TAC) is an art project currently consisting of seven individuals who meet on a regular basis to practice and critically discuss collaborative processes and frameworks. Current members were initially recruited through an artwork established by an open call for involvement. A number of these participants recombined to begin TAC’s ongoing collaborative experiment through the forum of ‘Every Now and Then’, a show designed to investigate relational practices at artist-run initiative Enjoy Public Art Gallery in late 2006.
Challenging the potential of a ‘creative democracy’, TAC is an ongoing experimentation that seeks to utilise, develop, distil and explore collaborative models and consensus-based decision making.[2] Current members include Liz Allan, Andrea Bell, Alex Bishop, Paula Booker, Melanie Oliver, Thomasin Sleigh and Sian Torrington. To find out more about our processes you could visit: http://www.theassociationofcollaboration.blogspot.com
Notes:
[1] Hans Ulrich Obrist, quoted in Hal Foster, 'Arty Party’, London Review of Books, London, December 2004, pp.21-22.
[2] ‘Consensus involves the complete exploration of a particular situation with the recognition that there are going to be conflicting points of view…These differences are not resolved just because a decision is reached. Individuals who are not in agreement with the ‘majority’ perspective do not just give up their differences and comply… [Consensus means] that everyone has been involved in the process, and that every one agrees to test a particular outcome for its workability.’ William A. Kraus, Collaboration in Organisations: Alternatives to Hierarchy, New York: Human Sciences Press, 1980, pp. 138-139.
Image credits:
The Association of Collaboration (Liz Allan, Andrea Bell, Alex Bishop, Paula Booker, Melanie Oliver, Thomasin Sleigh, Sian Torrington)
Contemporary Art Mobile Response Unit 2007
Construction by Tyree Robertson
trolley, paper, seats, people
Courtesy of The Association of Collaboration