An excerpt from Individualism Was A Mistake (But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone)

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The excerpt from Curieux manuel de dramaturgie pour le théâtre, la danse et autres matières à changement, from my text Individualism Was A Mistake (But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone), that I read at the launch:



“With every collaboration I’ve ever been a part of, the overarching goal was to make something that would be performed in front of an audience. Collaboration was never an end in and of itself. For me, the idea of art has always been connected to the idea of an audience. I’m attracted to the possibility of making something and keeping it secret, but I’m attracted to it mainly because it undermines most of my key conceptions regarding art. For me, art is when you make something and attempt to show it to a large number of people over time. When you do so, you put your name on the line. You invite judgement. People can say you’re a good or a bad artist. (Or a good or bad collaborator? But since they weren’t present during the process how could they actually know.) As the prospect of an audience grows closer, this sense of an impending judgement always creeps into the process of the collaboration and often begins to dominate.

As we know, this business of the “artists name” is deeply connected to capitalism. An artist puts their name on a work so that they are able to profit from it. It is significantly more difficult to profit from a highly collaborative work. And the more artists involved in the work, the more difficult it is for each individual artist to profit from it. However, what I have found most depressing over the years is how difficult it is for a collaborative group to collectively profit from their collaborative work. Art institutions almost always gravitate toward presenting art as something made by a single name, no matter how many people worked on it. And despite all my longing for collaboration, I cannot deny the incredible charge I get from seeing my own singular name printed on a giant poster or on the cover of a book. For me, every time this happens, I feel a little bit like my ego is on cocaine (followed by the slight hangover of guilt for having such a big ego in the first place.) I worry this feeling is a large part of what has undermined my ability to make collaboration a more satisfying and effective part of my artistic life. Even though so much of my life has been dedicated to artistic collaboration, the cocaine-ego feeling of pushing my singular name too often wins out. I realize that many (or most) artists don’t even question this aspect of the state of things. Never question their name on the poster. Never question why their name is a priori the most important one when others worked on the project alongside them. I have questioned all of this a great deal but with what results? Nonetheless, I simply can’t live with the fact that so often the underlying meaning of art is that people accomplish things alone, that the artist makes the work and has a final say in its authorship. Since no one does anything alone. Everything is part of an interrelated web.

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What is an artistically productive compromise? What does it look and feel like? I still don’t really know. But I do know that I absolutely don’t want it to be about sanding down your personality or your desires to suit the needs of the group. I am hoping for strong individual personalities that together search for, and hopefully often discover, a multitude of different ways to effectively work together. And find equally useful ways to manage the many conflicts that arise along the way. I don’t need to be less of myself in order to connect with your point of view. A compromise is not that I have to completely give something up, but rather that I come to see the value, in the moment, of doing something differently.”

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[As well, as some of you might already know, Individualism Was a Mistake is also the title of a performance PME-ART made in 2008.]



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