It may be said that any issue of A Prior involves intense collaboration and somehow practically engages with the idea. One thing that defines A Prior from other publications is the team’s interest in defining content, not at an arm’s length distance from the artists featured (a ‘critical distance’ that has perhaps traditionally been thought of as a requirement of good journalism), but in close collaboration with them. The artists’ projects involve a degree of give-and-take, often requiring the editorial team to trust and give substantial control to the artist, but also to encourage artists’ treatment of these pages as a true work/exhibition space, which may open new perspectives on their practice/praxis. Essays are also often understood as an extension of intense dialogue and further generate a sense of ‘critical proximity’ if you will. We are working toghether with a web designer to re-vamp the a prior site to be able to show the thinking, collaboration, reflection and activity that goes on beyond the printed pages and the computer screen. It should be noted that the Visions section of A Prior does not quite work with the monographic focus—instead it offers opportunities for other discursive approaches to enter the fray and offset the monographic essays. But it too is often sympathetic to writing that cuts against the grain of what we see available in other publications—many essays are the product of extensive research and/or daring speculation and tend to result in texts that are too unusual or simply too long to gain voice in the mainstream.
But with A Prior 16 the everyday practice of collaboration towards a publication has been extended to a set of historical and philosophical questions—about collaboration and notions of ‘intense engagement’. We wished to foreground the practices of three artists that derive particular energy from unsettling monographic structures: Anouk de Clercq, Susan Philipsz and Renzo Martens. Not coincidentally, two of these artists—Anouk de Clercq and Susan Philipsz—establish sound and (more specifically in the case of Philipsz) song as a basis. While the question continues to linger of how work with sound, music and song so often attracts artists that wish to share agency, we soon strayed from overstating this as the base for exploring collaboration.
The three texts on the artistic practice of Anouk De Clercq actually point to three fundamental parts of her work—three parts that she manages to integrate smoothly into rather abstracted works that are nonetheless firmly rooted in the real world: Maaike Lauwaerts interprets De Clercq’s use and implementation of technology in a broader reflection on how the very notion of ‘technologies’ structures our relationship to the world; Pieter Van Bogaert reflects on site specificity and the ideal and highly sensory way to view De Clercq’s video installations in general, and specifically her upcoming installation Echo; and finally, Anouk’s correspondence with Frederik De Preester sets into relief her collaboration and exchange with other professionals.
Whereas De Clercq’s work is nearly always the result of a collaborative effort, it also always takes its context or rather its ‘positioning or location’ into account, and simultaneously aims to understand the spaces ‘in between’ producers—between makers and audience, between various technologies, between image and context, between what we see/experience and what we understand. For A Prior, De Clercq set out to unravel the publication structure, creating a perceptive flow comprised of images of her various works that collectively pursue the echoes of the written, the seen and the heard in the book format. In this, she—like all artists in A Prior—was aided by our graphic designer Jurgen Persijn (who always collaborates closely with featured artists to give their projects the best possible structure, but who has perhaps been challenged rather more in this case as A Prior 16 embraces artistic practice engaged with text, sound, song and music, abstract narrative, design and a high degree of site consciousness).
In the case of Susan Phillipsz, Peio Aguirre’s exploration of her practice to date, focuses on the superimposition of voices in the work of this single artist, attending to the political and psycho-analytic implications of repetition and the migration of voices between bodies (not just human/collective bodies, but also the physical media at her disposal such as speakers, film projectors and landscape). He also notes the paradoxical presentness, or awareness of site, that comes with these migrations. For her contribution to A Prior, Philipsz collaborated with the Berlin-based designer Florian Ludwig in a solution that extends Aguirre’s observation: in this context, presenting a song/book within a book/journal accentuates awareness of the page before our eyes and the (im)possibility of making that page sing.
Thus, while sound functions as an important connective tissue, the question of collaboration is broader. Here, Els Roelandt’s introduction of Renzo Martens’ practice becomes paramount. It focuses on the artist’s attempts to implicate himself and the viewers of his documentaries in the impoverished lives of Congolese citizens that are otherwise presented in news media as absolute ‘Others’. In the process, we are further implicated in the mechanisms of mediation. The question of collaboration thus shifts to notions of political engagement, ‘imbeddedness’ and the moral implication of mediating between cultures. Some of these problematics find elaboration and new tactics for navigating suppressed and invented traditions in The Continental Unconscious, a detailed account of Anders Kreuger’s research for his upcoming exhibition of art from the Finno-Ugric peoples of the former Soviet Union, which will take place in Tallinn in the Spring of 2008.
Further expanding within and beyond these notions of artistic collaboration are the distinct voices of our other contributors in the Visions section. A truly prismatic view of collaboration emerges. The correspondence between Lou Cope and Andrea Wiarda extends the conversation to the realm of theatre and the question of directing collaborative efforts, which is interestingly distinct from the discussion of performance within Charles Green and Anthony Gardner’s jointly written reflection on the history of artistic collaboration. In the latter case, the notion of ‘collaborating with the dead’ is introduced—a notion that is given an altogether different treatment in the chapter that Jalal Toufic has contributed from his recent book Two or Three Things I’m Dying to Tell You (2005).
Thinking of Jalal’s reading of One Thousand and One Nights —our continental consciousness shifts to the Middle East, where power has been cut (and only temporarily restored) to Gaza, holding it’s population in suspense—to put it mildly. Here is a part of the world where the cameras are always ‘on’ and collaboration seems far from possible. Or is it the case that collaboration has to exist in a twilight, even unconscious, state—and it is this state that we need to attend to more urgently?
January 2008
