Is it even possible that two artists, [let alone a collective], can agree on a collective approach, a single idea, a duo methodology that does not compromise both? Or that what they produce has any worth. One of my favourite sayings is that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. The committee, however small or large is always destined towards compromise and many would see that sort of inclusiveness as wholly desirable however appalling the results might be in terms of public monuments or governmental or local council decisions.

History tells us that there have been examples where two artists working in tandem didn’t end up trying to kill each other. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera; Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz; Marina Ambramović and Ulay; Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning. The one that is always quoted though is the work that Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol made together between 1983 and 1985. Keith Haring called the work a physical conversation happening in paint instead of words. However, Vivienne Raynor Writing in the New York Times called them “large, bright, messy, full of private jokes and inconclusive. ‘Olympic Ring’ the enormous 7 feet by 15 Basquiat/Warhol acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, was described as ‘infused with banality’. The question became “who is using whom here”? – Basquiat looking for a leg up or Warhol looking to retrieve some of the vitality of youth. As a piece of work it is of its moment but outside of a discussion on NY eccentricity, it does not rate a mention in the annals.

Can there ever be parity in collaboration? I think it depends upon what collaboration means. Musicians, dancers, advertising executives and Silicon Valley techheads can all claim that the final product was a result of everyone throwing in their two cents worth. Even the most solitary of them, as in the solo musician, relies upon an audio engineer and while Steve Jobs happily took credit on a public stage for all of the Apple advances, he knew just how much the individuals he gathered under the Apple banner contributed to the ides and look of the products.

However, visual artists would seem to be in a quite different category. Many visual artists find it necessary to work alone and self-expression needs to be developed in solitude. The emphasis here is on ‘self-expression’. When the work of the visual artist is essentially self-reflective, as it is increasingly in contemporary art, as opposed to ideas of the past when there was collective agreement about religious iconography or morality, a second voice will simply diminish the overall value of the work. Even listening to other people can be destructive. Picasso didn’t show Demoiselles D’Avignon to his friends, let alone the public, for more than a decade unsure how they’d respond. Creative people like to go off by themselves and may be extroverted enough to exchange ideas and seek reflection but prefer to originate the ideas on their own. That doesn’t mean permanent isolation, however. Having a mentor is not unusual and even Picasso spent hours in discussion with Braque.

Two or more artists working on the same support is also not unknown. There are muralists all over the world doing just that. Kahlo and Riviera covered extensive walls as they made statements about the state of Mexican society from a socialist/communist point of view and the political mural continues to find favour as a means of protest wherever social injustice prevails from Northern Ireland to Brazil. Having a common enemy helps the process considerably but this isn’t self-expression so much as collective angst.

However, this year, for the first time, the Turner Prize shortlist is made up entirely of artists’ collectives. They are Array Collective, established in 2016 in Belfast, with 11 artists organising projects around abortion rights, queer liberation, mental health and gentrification; London-based sound art/activist group Black Obsidian Sound System, set up by and for QTIPOC in 2018; food art/activist duo Cooking Sections; Gentle/Radical, started in Cardiff in 2016, which advocates art as a means for social change and Project Art Works, a group of neurodiverse artists based in East Sussex. The question in my mind is not how these groups worked, or didn’t work, but the notion that the collective is reflective of a new norm in society and art. One comment was that they are simply Milleniums with an axe to grind in an uncertain world.  In modernist times curators pushing their favoured agendas has been rife. Exhibitions that purported to represent a major new direction in art have proliferated but all too often the narrow tastes of an individual curator have proved to be anything but.  Charles Saatchi for better or for worse put British art on the map with ‘Sensation’ in the 1990s. The exhibition included 110 works by 42 different artists such as Damien Hirst’s shark in formaldehyde, Tracey Emin’s tent and Marc Quinn’s Self – a frozen perspex cast of his head filled with his own blood. The links that Saatchi saw have proved to be elastic and the idea of the 42 artists as a direction was largely in Saatchi’s mind.

Galleries confusing their role as representative selling institutions with a propensity to want to change the world is reflective of the current sense of disarray in the art market. While questions of gender and race politics are valid topics for discussion and art what survives the time filter of art history rises above localised concerns or invented philosophies in search of an essence of human creativity. As much as we might empathise with the ideas of any of these groups their efforts in art terms are destined for the dustbin of ‘so what’s’ where they join Warhol/Basquiat and all of the failed attempts to create a new ‘ism’.

In the end we come back to the individual vision of the artist and his or her artefact of culture. Do we even value collaboration as a society when it comes to art? It took teams of hundreds and thousands to create the pyramids and gothic cathedrals let alone the significant buildings of the recent past but what ends up in museums of art is inevitably the work of single, isolated artists no matter who they listened to.  Collective aor collaborative rt is simply a camel with attitude.