Adequate
—

Affinity? How does it play out among three artists whose illusions about one another are probably stronger than the ties of their association? Perhaps this would be a situation in which to set aside a magnified sense of self-doubt and to formulate a sense of personal involvement as art. To work very spontaneously, making decisions side by side and over one another? The premise is riddled with blind-spots, all the coordinates are overloaded. The fantasy of work in unison, or work in dischord, is up against its dissolution. I think we could come up with an insolent style. Webs and sediments of associations laid bare, the spillage of a personal trove touched up by someone else, stretched, mistreated, embellished, uplifted.

The hazard of collaborative work is founded on mutual esteem and an interest in the work of the others. Since the process is by nature experimental and difficult to calculate in its unravelling, the instinct to outrun it with an apprehensive trust is met with the hope that each individual’s moments of despair, fantasies of abandonment, and fear of falling into the bottomless can always be caught again in the hands of the others to be dissolved in the picture, as in reality, into a kind of beauty. The belief that ultimately everything that seems to me difficult and personally insurmountable can be realized by one or the other with surprising ease, synthesized in the fitting expression. That is how I really imagine it. You work yourself into a dead-end and can’t anymore, and one of the others sees a beginning. And if not, it is left to stand as a bare example, attesting to itself unsparingly. A great anticipation has set in and I don’t know what could be meant by the word failure, other than: we were cowardly, too polite, didn’t risk enough.

In anticipation of once own possible mediation issues in a place that is widely unknown to us in its complexity and density we are carrying in our own problems, hopes, conflicts, beauty-ideals and crises. Something we can overview and partially asses. As discursive as it must be, but with openness applied as a principle. Not to be a satellite or ambassador of the wrong stability that must erode – crumbling it up between us and on the walls. No more simulation!

An adequate exposure of conflicted projections of what it could mean to be an artist today experimenting with a collective practice, that negates the form of the collective that responds as an individual.