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As an artistic strategy, collaboration also occupies ‘intervention by’ or ‘participation’ with the public. And
an increasingly central and dominant position in the third are works that are a combination or ‘slices’ of
current stream of contemporary art. Since the 1990s, the two types. Although it has a long history rooted
talk of collaboration has emerged in discussions in the model of European guilds, new collaboration
about various practices signaled by terms such as is discussed in connection with a number of key
‘relational art’, ‘socially-engaged art’, ‘community- developments manifested in the birth of works,
based art’, ‘dialogical art’, or ‘participatory art’ which manifestos, movements, and artistic styles in modern
appeared in blockbuster exhibitions. Certainly, I’m not art, at least since the early twentieth century. In a
generalizing all of those terms under one umbrella modernist framework, collaboration is seen as an
of the category ‘collaboration’. There is a separate inventive methodological breakthrough capable of
discussion that deals with differences and similarities producing aesthetic newness.
in understanding. But in plain view, collaboration as
1
an indication of an artistic paradigm shift shows at In more recent times, a number of critics and
least two major phenomena. First are works of art historians discuss collaboration as an artistic
done collectively by two or more people (whether by phenomenon that marks the transition from
those who call themselves ‘artists-units’, ‘collective modernism to postmodernism. Charles Green,
2
artists’ or among artists and non-arts practitioners in his study of art practice in the Euro-American
who are temporarily collaborating for an artistic context after the 1960s, for example, understood
presentation). In this category, collaboration can also collaboration not only as a new way to redefine art,
be the result of interdisciplinary initiatives. Second but also as a conscious effort by artists to project
are the proliferation of works that are oriented or their artistic identity. Collaboration is an alternative
open to ‘interaction and / or collaboration with’, way for artists whose image is construed as isolated
3
1 See Maria Lind, Complications: On Collaboration, Agency and and aloof. Maria Lind, in her review of critical debates
Contemporary Art, in Nina Montmann (ed.), New Communities,
Journal of Public | Art | Culture | Ideas, no. 39, Spring 2009, pp. 2 Lind, ibid., pp. 53–54, see also Charles Green The Third Hand,
57–62. These terms are almost always associated with the names of Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism,
a number of curators, critics and historians, for example, ‘relational University of Minneapolis Press, 2001, p. x.
art’ with Nicolas Bourriaud; ‘dialogical art with Grant Kester, ‘new 3 Various collaborative practices that emerged after the conceptual
genre public art’ with Suzanne Lacy, etc. art of the 1960s in the Euroamerican context, including those
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