Current Collaborations - Page 1: Overview
"What distinguishes the current wave of collaboration is that the majority of the participants seem to have little or no artistic identity outside of the union." Glenn Zorpette
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Bernd Becher, a painter and montagist and Hilla Becher, a photographer began chronicling stark, utilitarian industrial structures (left - Crailsheim, Germany, 1979). In hundreds of mostly black and white photographs, they have preserved the work of often-unknown architects whose silos, grain elevators, blast furnaces, and water tanks dot the landscapes of Europe and North America. Bernd died in 2007, marking the end of one of the few collaborative teams to sign as one beginning in 1949. |
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Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid, are the most well known veterans of the Soviet dissident art movement of the ‘60s. According to Melamid, the cult of the individual had no place in the Soviet Union of the ‘20s. Their work (left - "Portrait of Ronald Reagan as Centaur", Mythological Creatures series 1986-1987) challenged the establishment with humor and wit. In 1969, they were censored from an exhibition of young artists in Moscow. “Our work is more exciting because we have different perspectives on a project.” Alexander Melamid |
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Helen Harrison was an academic, a sociologist who was offered the vice chancellorship of the University of California at San Diego. Newton Harrison was a painter and sculptor. (left - "Vision for the Green Heart of Holland" 1995). “if I was going to do anything of worth, it had better take up the issue of survival. And I couldn’t do that alone. In a sense, Helen had become an artist and I became a researcher, in the process of teaching each other to be the other party.” Newton Harrison |
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Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel make large-scale ephemeral installations in public spaces (left, "Panopia" 2005"). Romantic involvement led to informal sort of collaboration. “We worked not knowing we were a team, but with the consciousness that together we could produce certain kinds of things we could not produce on our own,” Andrew Jones. |
“Triple Christ” (above), by the Starns brothers |
Doug and Mike Starn (above, "Triple Christ") “The ideas are very often understood, even before they have a chance to be spoken,” says Mike Starn. |
Ira and Corliss Lesser
A Forty-year Ongoing Artistic Collaboration