As a part of our workshop, the
activity which participants enjoy normally is called ‘Paint Together’.
On a large piece of paper,
participants paint one by one. There’s no particular subject/theme for the painting
and the only theme behind it is to explore individual creativity by getting
inspirations from other participants. But a closer look into this activity can
reveal some interesting facts about the group psychology, and how this activity
can scale up to open new ways to an expression that cannot be experienced
otherwise.
Do the participants become
one even while maintaining the individuality? Do they follow others? Do they
feel bad for someone overwriting their work? Do they get inspired by other
participant’s activity on the paper? This post is an attempt to explore all of
this.
Individuality (Dissolved?)
To
work together, in conjugation with another, you have to let go of your
individuality and feel a part of a larger group.
This can
hurt personal space as you have to accommodate and give space to others. While
this looks a bit threatening in the first place. ( what about my creativity?
What about my idea of expression?). Working
together can help participants avoid getting caught up in their own form of
expression, it can help them broadening their own ideas and expand their
understanding.
A painting gets evolved from
imaginations of so many brains and emotions from so many hearts. It’s like one
entity with multiple bodies/souls.Many
can relate themselves to a particular strokes/lines/colours/creation of others.
Many can get inspired by someone’s style. It allows them to work on a common
goal and it’s a balance between keeping their individual expression as well as
evolving a group expression.
It’s like a Street Music:
where people come together jamming without knowing each other, one begins,
other adds and it keeps going, giving it a dynamism. A painting becomes a
Conversation of many. A person who is painting has a dialogue with painting.
And multiple people have dialogue with other people as well as the painting.
Self takes a backseat. You work as a entity higher than self (all selves become
one). You realize that you are not only yourself but someone else too. You have
to accommodate that as well.
Spontaneity
With
no predetermined aim, it allows free expression which is spontaneous,
surprising and enriching giving immense joy to the creator.
React to it, Inspire and Get
inspired
Participants enjoy if they
are given freedom to Ideation and Expression. While you can express your idea,
you can also react to someone else’s idea as a trigger to your creativity. This
calls for inspiration. While inspiration is a larger term, the basic point is
‘reaction’. If you react to other’s creation, they in turn will be motivated to
react to your creation creating a dialogue between expressions. The whole work becomes a Polylogue (Many people
communicating to each other) or a Visual Polyphony.
Art as Commodity/ possession and sense of ownership
When a piece of art is
created or is in progress, there’s immediate sense of belonging to it. The
sense of ownership, can act two ways, it makes us too cautious and at the same
time responsible.
‘Cautious’ kills the free
expression in individually created work. While Responsibility can bring a sense
of order/elegance to the painting. Now if participant works on a group
painting, where sense of ownership is lost, she is free to indulge in
expression while keeping a sense of responsibility intact, she can also
contribute to adding a balance/elegance.
Clash of egos
With participants so
disparate in their thoughts, beings, the Conflict is sure to arise. But it can
be resolved if there’s a mutual respect. Only such group can create work that bears no
conflict.
When
participants ‘Paint together’, they can work over other’s work: overwrite. This
is beneficial for removing the sense of ownership. For some, it can be
satisfying because there’s complete Freedom from ownership burden. However,
some might consider it as a breach to their creativity and free expression.
Many would be inhibited to overwrite somebody’s work. It breaks that inhibition
too. Many would (at least in their minds) not allow their work to be
overwritten, which allows them to be accepting to others. The important thing
for the participants is to build a relationship of trust in such a joint
process.
Cheating cheating …
During the workshop, a group
of children were enthusiastically painting on a large piece of wall paper. They
were supposed to finish their turn in pre-defined time, One participant painted
for a little longer. Other participant noticed and shouted ‘cheating’, then all
started shouting ‘cheating cheating’. It was hilarious at the same time,
thought provoking to note how crowd thinking works. The crowd can express a
common gesture against an individual (a rebel) and also can show disapproval.
Isn’t it contrary to the freedom?
Compromise? How can someone get a fulfilling experience without
compromise?
There won’t be a compromise
to your personal expression. But what about the overall work as a whole? If you
find yourself thinking, ’Oh. What are others trying to create?, this is not
what I want to be painted..’ It could end making you feel you are ‘compromising’.
But this is actually not true. The very sense that you are a part of the group
is that you have to dissolve your personal taste of self and enthusiastically open
up and get lost in the expression of others. (Can you ever do that?) Well, the
answer to this stands open to further explorations from the experience of the
workshop outcomes. Only if you lose yourself in the whole, if you are able to
see and appreciate Unity in the disparity, you can get a satisfying feeling
without a compromise. It will be compromise only if one is unwilling to open up
to new ideas and freeing oneself up to listen to the ideas outside self.
Order and Chaos: Unity?, Disparity? or Unity in disparity?
Here are the works from the
workshop (still more to come in future). The most important point is that
there’s absolutely no subject, no direction in which the work progressed with
these paintings. But it cannot be ruled out that a particular subject
develops/is likely to be seen in future with such a painting. What results is
the ONE expression of the group. Like the first one, it is more depicting the
sober colours. A slight order is also seen with bold rhythmic lines.
 |
| Paint together Activity's result 1 |
Where as this one below shows
less orderliness but is more colorful and more vibrant.
 |
| Paint Together Activity : result 2 |
After the above painting was
done, some participants tried to locate /identify something in the painting
that seemed familiar to them. ‘This looks like so and so’, ‘that resembles
something’ and so on. Why? Because it’s basic Human nature to try to find order
out of chaos. It was pretty amazing to notice this fact with this painting that
they created.
So does a painting always
need to have an order? , when entire life is full of randomness and chaos. While
order and Chaos are vast concepts I will restrict them to only the boundaries
of this topic here.
Order: It’s an arrangement or occurrence that follows largely some pattern. Order brings Coherence, uniformity and consistency. People recognize, relate to it easily.. and they try to bring and find order. If the arrangement looks unfamiliar they will still try to figure out familiar patterns in it.
Chaos: Haphazard and unpredictable occurrence following no particular pattern. No rhythm no harmony.
Order: It’s an arrangement or occurrence that follows largely some pattern. Order brings Coherence, uniformity and consistency. People recognize, relate to it easily.. and they try to bring and find order. If the arrangement looks unfamiliar they will still try to figure out familiar patterns in it.
Chaos: Haphazard and unpredictable occurrence following no particular pattern. No rhythm no harmony.
Neither, complete order nor
complete chaos can bring aesthetic value to the outcome: the finished work. Too
much order leads to boredom and too much chaos leads to disharmony.
When this is applied to
Group expression, The outcome largely depends on the aim/challenge that the
group will see collectively. It also depends on Collective emotion the group
will share and the ability to gel with each other. The results might vary as
per the age group and social and behavioral patterns.
One of the aim of any
creation is making something aesthetically appealing (i.e beauty but not in a
traditional sense). But as every person’s aesthetics in a group might vary and
conflict with each other, the resulting work may or may not be coherent. If
conflict is balanced, it will give rise to work that represents oneness. If
conflict shifts on one side: the outcome may be incoherent showing disparity.
Whether it’s Unity or
Disparity: It’s a voice of the group. If there will be a balance between order
and disorder or a equal contrast between them, then the work will look
interesting to look at.
While Chaos is likely to
occur in disparate group, chaos can also have patterns of order somewhere. And
the order might be seen when larger part of the group is in synch with each
other. It will be interesting to identify this more and more. Does the crowd
follow few people who come out as leader? Yeah. Well it can. There are all
sorts of possibilities that make this activity even more interesting
phenomenon.
The thin line between inspiration and copying
While the aim is to get the
participants inspired by one another. Who knows when inspiration starts and
borders on copying and how do we differentiate between the two. This opens up
for more observations to be noted in this activity.
‘Paint together’ and the real world
The idea of ‘paint together’
activity that we conduct in our workshop was developed without any prior
knowledge that similar acts of collaboration existed in the past. So it’s even
interesting to look at acts of collaborations from history and real world
examples.
Artistic projects used the collaboration
from number of artists for centuries. During renaissance, many old masters had
studios where paintings were made in joint effort. Also, many artistic
expressions found in Indian art (Ajanta Murals, Sculptures from Indian temples)
is a collective creativity of a group. [It’s a topic of exploration that why
individuality was so dissolved in such masterpieces of creation in Indian art.
But it cannot be covered here] During Pre-modern art era, there is an explicit
example of such joint association between Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Jan
Breughel the Elder[Reference 5]. They both worked on several paintings
together.
Although such efforts went
on in historical times, the activity of group expression started getting
acknowledged in 20th century.
Early 20th century, artistic groups worked together to
produce art. Mainly Dada, Fluxus, Situationist International, Colab etc. Some outstanding
examples of working together and producing visual art by collaborative effort
are:
Gilbert
and George: They consider themselves as two people but one artist.(They
say : “a lone artist has a problem because you have to ask questions and no
answer comes back. With two people, its easy, you ask a question, somebody
gives an answer. An artist is so alone in the world, especially when you are
rejected all the time. With two, you are able to comfort yourself and invent
this idea that nothing matters. (Contrary to their actual physical
collaboration, they say this is not collaboration, we are one artist), here's their work called 'The Singing Sculpture'
 |
| Gilbert and George: The Singing Sculpture 1970
© Gilbert and George
|
Surrealist’s
game: Exquisite Corpse: Surrealist artists played a game
together where each person has to contribute his share of drawing to the
existing composition either by some rule or by seeing only the end of what the
previous person has contributed. Each participant would draw an image (or, on
some occasions, paste an image down) on a sheet of paper, fold the paper to
conceal their contribution, and pass it on to the next player for his
contribution. Although this was not explicitly deliberate collaboration, the
resulting work does show the group expression. Following are some examples:
 |
| 'Untitled' from Exquisite Corpse, by Jake and Dinos Chapman (2000), Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York |
 |
|
Cadavre Exquis with
Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise, Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitzky) Courtesy:www.Moma.org
|
Collaboration
for a cause: Artist
Navjyot Altaf and Adivasi’s of Bastar, India
Indian Artist Navjyot Altaf worked
together with advasi tribal and peasant communities to create clean environment
and beauty at village (water) hand pump sites and places for children called
children temples (Pilagudis) . She began working in villages around Kondagaon
in Bastar, central india with a goal of creating more efficient pump sites
using ergonomic designs that would ease the physical burden of collecting and
transporting the water by villagers. She along with Dialogue(An association)
held several workshops that brought together adivasi craftspeople , villagers,
teachers, college students and other volunteers to create quasi-sculptural
constructions around the water hand pump sites. The structures are practical in
the sense that they allow the villagers to rest their vessels and ease them to
lift the water filled vessels. The structures incorporate the symbols and forms
associated with local cultural and spiritual traditions. Check out this work on
the website mentioned under [Reference 3]
Tunisian
Collaborative Painting
This is an art developed in Tunisia
in 80s. Group of artists work on a single canvas simultaneously with no prior
planning or discussion about the painting to be created. They work in complete
silence adding their share to the canvas. In order to mark the work as
complete, the voting takes place and its mutually decided. This concept was
created by Tunisian artist named Hechmi Ghachem in 1988, when Tunisia was under
dictatorship rule and had restriction on freedom of expression. He formed
groups called Brigades d'Intervention Plastique which allowed artists to come
out from their individuality and collaborate with others on the same artwork.
The group created ties built on several collectively felt emotions and created
works that had their part as well as parts from other artists. It was like one
painting representing individuality of all at the same time dissolving
individuality of all.
For checking out more about
this, visit the page for Tunisian Collaborative workshops conducted in US here:
[Reference 4]
There are artists who work
with people or groups outside the art world like children, senior citizens,
sanitation workers or a particular neighborhood. They create art by interacting
and sharing the ideas with the people. These works express variety of social
and aesthetic values. Wendy Ewald, Fazal Shaikh, Eric Gottesman, Harrell
Fletcher are some of such artists.
REFERENCES
1.The
One and the Many : Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context : Grant
H. Kester
~By Shiwalee
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