Does collaboration have a future?
Whether collaboration has a “future” raises a deeper question as to how collaboration can stake a claim on the future as such.
Today, the idea of artistic autonomy is constrained by a compulsion to collaborate. For me, whether collaboration has a “future” raises a deeper question as to how collaboration can stake a claim on the future as such. This question arises due to the burden of “the present,” which introduces contemporary context and responsibility to the role an artist plays in society. The artist remains accountable and tethered to the present, even when they stray from the pack and perform mitosis.
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Before pop, before Warhol, before Hamilton—there was Donald Duck. In a wartime outpost in Papua, Charles Bush painted an eerily prescient vision of mass media’s encroachment. A symptom, not an agent, of pop’s first age, Bush’s work sits uneasily in art history’s timeline.
Tim Burns’s art blurs fiction and reality, often staging disasters before they happen. His 1972 Ghost Train redesign eerily foreshadowed the 1979 Luna Park fire, just as his 1977 film Why Cars? uncannily prefigured 9/11. Through rupture, collision, and shock, Burns’s work remains less prophetic than provocatively attuned to history’s unfolding disasters.
The Tennant Creek Brio transform mining maps, dead TVs, and frontier wreckage into new cultural claims—rejecting imposed “otherness” and forcing the settler gaze into confrontation. If their art is a shock, who’s really being unsettled?
