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Some artists actively engage in dialogue and exchange with others, and then there are artists who retreat within themselves and prefer to work alone. But even in the works of an archetypal hermit like Ian Fairweather one can read responses to the images of others. All art draws in some way on communal aesthetic resources, and so all is in a sense collaborative. In the present context we speak of collaboration as the explicit interpersonal engagement with another artist in the production of a work. In this form collaboration marks a departure from the romantic notion of the individual artist-genius. It is a recognition that all art springs ultimately from dialogue, and a celebration of that fact.
Adam Geczy has participated in a sequence of collaborations of this sort, with Thomas Gerwin, Peter Sculthorpe and Mike Parr. There is no doubt that the excitement gained from interaction with other artists gives the works produced an especially inventive feel. In response to the question of how such collaboration effects aesthetic independence, the Geczy responded that, ‘The experience is paradoxical insofar as you have to be a very secure person as an artist. There are a lot of concessions to be made, but this is only possible because you are so defined in your agenda’.1 One might put it that the experience offers an opportunity for a special kind of distancing from one’s process, which in turn introduces a new element of mobility in the collaborative engagement. Ironically then such explicitly, direct collaboration can actually offer the artist a greater feeling of creative autonomy.
Geczy’s first collaborative project was in September 2001 with the exhibition Enfolding at the Dresden Hellerau, a... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline