Doppelgangers and the Third Force: The Artistic Collaborations of Gilbert & George and Marina Abramovic/Ulay

Abstract

Gilbert & George's and Marina Abramovic/Ulay's actions of the 1970s were collaborations that blurred and doubled the “normal” figure of the artist as an individual body. This type of collaboration had the properties of a third identity, but did the new identity resemble a third hand, a doppelganger (an apparition associated with death, sometimes experienced historically as a shadow or as the double of a living person), or a phantom extension of the artists' joint will, rather like a phantom limb?

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Charles Green

Charles Green is a lecturer in the School of Art History and Theory at the University of New South Wales. In 1995 he published an introduction to the last twenty-five years of Australian art, Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970–94 (Sydney: Craftsman House, 1995). His next book, The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Modernism to Postmodernism, will be published by Universtiy of Minnesota Press in late 2000.