THE CREATIVE ASSEMBLAGE

Abstract

This paper contributes to theorizing contemporary art collaborations in the context of the mediatory labour required of artists, and the complexity of the collaborative contexts in which aesthetic production is now enmeshed. In order to account for this complexity without reducing its analysis to ‘structured fields’ or ‘systems’, we use elements of assemblage theory in a quite specific way: drawing on DeLanda's work on social and organizational forms; and Law's ‘method assemblage’ to analyse the specificity of working interfaces that craft new boundaries and working relations. We develop a case study of C3West, an Australian initiative encompassing arts institutions, businesses, and communities. The analysis traces assemblage processes that generate dispersed working arrangements (partnerships, intersectoral, and interdisciplinary working interfaces) across apparently incommensurable domains, yet without forming overarching structures or requiring common rationales for cooperation. To demonstrate the work of assemblage, we discuss the practices of French artist Sylvie Blocher and the multidisciplinary collective, Campement Urbain, who employ aesthetic and performative means to forge new institutional practices and alliances for intervening in urban planning processes in regional Sydney.

Keywords:

• assemblage theory
• collaboration
• contemporary art
• creativity
• business-arts partnerships
• urban planning

Notes

1. The Art of Engagement research team has been tracking C3West. Research for this paper was funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage Projects scheme, and our research partners, Museum of Contemporary Art, Penrith Regional Gallery and Lewers Bequest, and the Casula Powerhouse Arts. We wish to thank Michelle Kelly for research support, and Elaine Lally, Ien Angt and two anonymous reviewers for suggestions about the direction of this paper.

2. Clough et al. (2007, p. 387) note that DeLanda pursues the construction of an ‘ontological’ account of social formations based on relations of exteriority, in contrast to the work of many Deleuzian theorists engaging in a more overtly political critique of societal discipline and control.

3. Cofunctioning elements of assemblages are not limited to human actors and social entities – they can equally be objects, materials technologies, discourses and ideas, and documents, such as the skulls, archives, instruments, and paintings that figure in Bennett's study which uses assemblage theory to analyse the ‘exhibitionary complex’ of two French colonial museums (Bennett 2008, p. 6). Curiously, in A New Philosophy of Society, DeLanda chooses to delineate the human individual as the smallest element of a social assemblage (DeLanda 2006, p. 47; Clough et al. 2007, p. 389). In the following analysis, given the space constraints, we do not pursue non-human flows as constituents of assemblages, although it would be possible in a separate discussion to include flows of objects, documents, emails, artists' proposals etc.

4. C3West also entered into a partnership with HammondCare, a charity specializing in aged and dementia care, although this partnership is not currently active. In 2007, a sensory garden was developed along with staff and residents of a HammondCare residential care facility by C3West artists Hossein and Angela Valamanesh.

5. This event occurred too late to be included in this analysis. Activate 2750 was a public art performance focusing on the politics of waste. It was comprised of an installation made of some ten tonnes of waste material normally destined for landfill in a prominent public square in Penrith, and a series of processions and performances in commercial spaces throughout Penrith city (see Activate 2750 Catalogue 2009).

6. The arrangements made for inserting artists in relation to a commercial or institutional setting is particularly crucial for the possibilities of detailed or sustained engagement. C3West's practice of negotiation around artist proposals differs from a formal artist-in-residence arrangement, or the model developed by the Artist Placement Group from the 1960s where artists were (at least theoretically) cast as direct participants in the everyday running of the organization (Kester 2004, pp. 61–63).

7. At the time of writing, Regina Walter had withdrawn her proposals.

8. Unlike, say, Latour's or Callon's actor-network analyses of scientific processes, rather than working together as flows of translations (Latour 2005, p. 132), the assemblage dynamics in this case are frequently dispersed and episodic: one entity makes a move that causes an effect on the other who then makes a move. Delays occur as flows are negotiated through organizational processes that are more ‘vertical’ in nature. This is magnified by the spatially distanciated nature of assemblage relations: for instance Blocher's location in France.