A few of my colleagues in the College of Visual and Performing Arts here at TTU have conspired over the last few years to create an opportunity to engage in collaborative artmaking. The College doesn't really have much like this, and even our Fine Arts Doctoral Program has been criticized as "multidisciplinary" as opposed to "interdisciplinary."
So today, the fruits of our labor are beginning to show. We had the first class meeting of Art and the Transformation of Space, an interdisciplinary course that is team-taught by myself and three of my colleagues. You can find some details and a syllabus here. The class is going to meet daily for three weeks with the outcome being some sort of collaborative art project to be presented at the First Friday Art Trail in June. My hope is to chronicle the unfolding of this class on the blog.
Today, after the usual introductory stuff (introductions, why we're here, syllabus, etc.) Melissa Merz started us off with a discussion of the relationship between cooperation and collaboration. According to many of the students in the class, the words overlap considerably in meaning, but we decided that cooperation tended to be more physical and spontaneous; collaboration more mental and planned. We talked about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, the cyclical nature of both, and the end result of each process.
Genevieve Durham DeCesaro then talked about some collaborations in the 20th century. She mentioned the collaboration between Nijinsky and Stravinsky at the Ballet Russes, which produced Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913. She went on to talk about Merce Cunningham's collaborations with Copland and Louis Horst (a composer whose name was unfamiliar to me--I guess even I have homework!), and finished by discussing the collaborations of Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg. Theirs was a sort of collaboration without cooperation in that each typically worked independently of the others, and they only assembled the parts sometimes as late as the first performance!
In most of the cases discussed above, the music can be (and often is) performed separately from the dance and the stage design, suggesting a sort of dependence among the forms. One of our goals for the class is to have the students create a work whose parts are inseparable. The final project will involve transforming an outdoor space on campus into a work of art.
Terry Morrow suggested that collaboration involves a cycle of action and reaction, which prompted a physical improvisation exercised led by Genevieve, where we clumped ourselves together, held hands, then had to untangle ourselves.
To conclude, we watched two videos about the collaborations between Cage and Cunningham, one of which you can see here. The other was called (I think) The Collaborators and was more of a sit-down interview with Cage, Cunningham, and Rauschenberg.
Tomorrow, the students and faculty are presenting mini-personal histories, to comprise portfolio sorts of things, hobbies, etc. so that we all might get to know who it is we're working with and each person's strengths and potential contributions.
So today, the fruits of our labor are beginning to show. We had the first class meeting of Art and the Transformation of Space, an interdisciplinary course that is team-taught by myself and three of my colleagues. You can find some details and a syllabus here. The class is going to meet daily for three weeks with the outcome being some sort of collaborative art project to be presented at the First Friday Art Trail in June. My hope is to chronicle the unfolding of this class on the blog.
Today, after the usual introductory stuff (introductions, why we're here, syllabus, etc.) Melissa Merz started us off with a discussion of the relationship between cooperation and collaboration. According to many of the students in the class, the words overlap considerably in meaning, but we decided that cooperation tended to be more physical and spontaneous; collaboration more mental and planned. We talked about the whole being greater than the sum of its parts, the cyclical nature of both, and the end result of each process.
Genevieve Durham DeCesaro then talked about some collaborations in the 20th century. She mentioned the collaboration between Nijinsky and Stravinsky at the Ballet Russes, which produced Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913. She went on to talk about Merce Cunningham's collaborations with Copland and Louis Horst (a composer whose name was unfamiliar to me--I guess even I have homework!), and finished by discussing the collaborations of Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg. Theirs was a sort of collaboration without cooperation in that each typically worked independently of the others, and they only assembled the parts sometimes as late as the first performance!
In most of the cases discussed above, the music can be (and often is) performed separately from the dance and the stage design, suggesting a sort of dependence among the forms. One of our goals for the class is to have the students create a work whose parts are inseparable. The final project will involve transforming an outdoor space on campus into a work of art.
Terry Morrow suggested that collaboration involves a cycle of action and reaction, which prompted a physical improvisation exercised led by Genevieve, where we clumped ourselves together, held hands, then had to untangle ourselves.
To conclude, we watched two videos about the collaborations between Cage and Cunningham, one of which you can see here. The other was called (I think) The Collaborators and was more of a sit-down interview with Cage, Cunningham, and Rauschenberg.
Tomorrow, the students and faculty are presenting mini-personal histories, to comprise portfolio sorts of things, hobbies, etc. so that we all might get to know who it is we're working with and each person's strengths and potential contributions.