It all started way back, during a time when political revolution was a by-word for artistic practice, when people came together not to generate high-street hits selling out galleries and pumping private views with the dregs of celebrity. This history wasn't in black and white, churned out on a crackling TV set with a mono-tone narrator, this was the future of our past, the dawn of a new age, the flash of red, blue and green – this was the blood and sweat of a steam train vaulting up the length of Italy and France over the Baltic and blasting the suburbs of a wind-swept Russian Peninsula. The history of collaboration my friend - starts in the future.

The Futurists as a collective were alive and well, seething with fury and hotheaded exhaustion. They anchored the very act of collaboration from the get-go of the 20th century, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto seemed to sum up the essence of collaboration in the 20th and 21st century so effortlessly, as one which had a political engine behind it, utilizing the big word COLLABORATION as a place for art, architecture, design, fashion, film, sculpture, textiles and theatre. Collaboration was a shape-shifting conversation which situated all artistic practice as side-by-side, equal in the pursuit of the future. With hindsight the brass structure of Umberto Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) spoke as an aggressive instruction to the early 20th century crowd, unbeknown that later this would come across as a slender insight into a practice of perfection. The Futurists gathered in small smoky rooms lined with the velvet wallpapers of discussion, formation and beyond this - action. Back then collaboration made the possibility for something new to actually become less of a possibility, and more actuality.

If The Futurist’s pursuit for the new was the misanthropic older underbelly of collaboration, then the irresponsibility of collaboration was found and affirmed through the wry attitude of The Surrealists. The coffee shops and bars of Paris played home to the gatherings of Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Dali, Ernst, Man Ray and Artaud – Guillaume Apollinaire may have first coined the term 'surrealist' but it was these gatherings and indeed collaborations which lay the ground work for The Magnetic Fields a 1920s publication / manifesto for The Surrealists. The move was one into an era near-to-obsessed with the pursuit of abandon as supposed to pure identification. Collaboration made it possible for glitches to arise within both The Futurists and The Surrealists approach, unifying something that could not be contained or articulated but essentially moved towards strength, action and the power of numbers. Collaboration it seemed was a manifesto, utilising a strong political ethic at its very core. Again, Surrealism was a movement which understood the essence of collaboration to be something less about encompassing and wrapping-up and more about un-doing and dismantling, in less than 30 years since the beginning of the 20th century both movements had forged collaboration into not just a production for art, but a philosophy and a way of life.

As time passes so do ideas and the way collaboration grew in strength; Fluxus was the articulation of collaboration during the 1950 and 60s. As with The Futurists and The Surrealists before, Fluxus maintained a strong 'do-it-yourself attitude. Looking towards collaboration as a moment to be against the system, to strike out and declare activism against the western capitalist backbone. Fluxus collaborative practice revolved around the New York based The New School, a collective that sourced art, theatre, and this time music at its heart. Conceived by the forefather of Fluxus, John Cage, this moved on the political philosophy of collaboration as a tautological suggestion; Cage, Brecht, Kaprow and Segal came to define the late 1950s early 1960s collaborative path as one fixated on “The Happening”. The strength of collaboration moved in such a fast and unforgiving pace that the production of ideas far outweighed the objective of “The Happening” - arresting time and remaining within the presentness of a moment or situation created a space for dialectical reflection. Slowing down the juggernaut power of collaborations force like this created a much-needed pause for air.

Air and maybe a last thought, a wincing contemporary conclusion to this polemical conundrum; collaboration seems to be a by-word for 'getting things done,' communication and discussion. The early years of the ill-fated YBA movement saw pop-up shows and work for the likes of Hirst, Taylor-Wood, Lucas and Fairhurst gaining recognition by a collective exuberance. The term collaboration isn't marred by the eventual star-quality of all of the practices I have mentioned throughout this 100-year process. The term collaboration for me is a reminder of what art practice does best which is a rigorous theoretical resourcefulness in the face of oppressive politics. The term collaboration manages to transparently sweep through the years it has yielded and supported by pulling together as opposed to creating isolation - this is not to add that uniformity is the linguistic of collaboration – but the push to act out or up, and to come together in a way that doesn't conform but moves to substantiate claims of subversion and the search for the new. Thus my friend, the story of collaboration starts in the future.

Sophie Risner

Sophie Risner is a freelance art writer and artist living and working in London.
www.sophierisner.com / sophierisner.wordpress.com

Image:

Umberto Boccioni
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space 1913 cast 1972
Bronze