To accompany our school tours we created some post-visit activities that address collaboration.

Recalling the works by Gabriel Kuri, Gustavo Artigas, Julieta Aranda and Vanessa Bell that students saw in the galleries, we offer the teacher additional examples- Yo Yo Ma and Christo and Jeanne Claude- to share with the class about collaboration and discuss the differences between working alone and with others as well as the varied tasks in works by Christo and Jeanne Claude. (Mark Dion would have offered another great example.)

For the activity we created a series of questions about making a film, a project which requires a number of people to create. Teachers have the option of having students answer these questions on their own or with others, as well as the comparison of doing the activity on their own first, then with a small group and reflecting upon the similarities and differences in the process.

A second activity was inspired by the Bloomsbury exhibition. Members of the Bloomsbury group often depicted or involved other members of the group in their paintings or writing. Students saw an example of in Vanessa Bell’s paintings of the writers Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. The activity, which can be done is pairs or groups, allows the student the choice about painting or writing about other students doing the opposite activity.

While teachers are just receiving these materials, for educators particularly, contemporary artists who are redefining and expanding notions of collaboration offer works that should inspire and challenge us in our own attempts to create lessons that foster and allow students to explore collaboration in new ways.

I completely agree that the notion of handing over a set of instructions (or concept) for someone else to carry out is the most popular way for skeptics to put down contemporary art. Perhaps they need the same art history lesson?

In the end, and again I’m thinking of Mark Dion’s work, doesn’t it all come down to the object, the result of the planning and work, no matter how many are involved? Also, as I asked in the original post, how can educators bring this concept of creating work WITH others into the classroom, beyond murals and other popular “group” projects?

Speaking strictly from my perspective as a high school teacher of Art History (I can’t comment on fine art teaching), when considered from an historical perspective the notion of the solitary angsty artist of Hollywood legend is much more often the exception than the rule. To 17th century artists like Rubens the idea of NOT collaborating (with classical scholars, pigment-grinders, canvas-preparers, brush-makers, oil-purchasers, carpenters, and specialist painters of animals, flowers and landscapes) would be absurd. It would also be impossible. It’s only in the Romantic period and after (and helped by oil paint being sold pre-mixed in tubes in the late 1800s, among many other factors) – in other words, only in the last couple of hundred years – that the notion of collaboration was seen as incompatible with the idea of the creative artist. So what these artists are doing is actually much more traditional in terms of the broader history of art, even if their approaches seem unconventional.

I do find that the whole outsourced-production idea has become a hook for skeptics to hang their doubts on, but the fact is that on a wider (and non-western-centric) scale, most of the best-known works of art could never have been made without at least some form of collaboration.