On Recognising Collaboration

Abstract

The proposition of this paper is that collaboration in artistic production is both a norm and an uncannily mysterious phenomenon. It is a norm that can be obscured from our awareness by a common belief in artistic individuality: the persistent insistence on recognition of individual authorship. Despite the pathologising narratives of genius provided by Freud, and the efforts of Barthes and Foucault in the late 1960s (which I do not intend to reprise here) to diffuse responsibility for art out into an unfinished historical and societal project, and more lately scepticism over essentialist thinking offered by post-modernism and deconstructive approaches (with Mary Orr’s Intertextuality perhaps..