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Rational Rec’s second panel discussion 14 May 6.3

2 Live Views 5 In Crowd Rational Rec’s second panel discussion
Matt Robert’s Arts Open Forum
Friday 14 May, from 6.30-9pm

Find out more about the artists’ plans for the first Rational Rec commission and hear their plans for their final presentation.

Drawing on the… Rational Rec’s second panel discussion
Matt Robert’s Arts Open Forum
Friday 14 May, from 6.30-9pm

Find out more about the artists’ plans for the first Rational Rec commission and hear their plans for their final presentation.

Drawing on the composition of, and emotional response to, the Rational Rec commission, the artists propose to create a publication setting out ideal rules and philosophies for collaboration with concrete tasks that can be followed by anyone. A wide range of existing structures will influence these rules alongside their own experiences: past artistic movements, such as the OuLiPo literary group; religious laws from the Methodist Book of Discipline; the ancient Greek Axiomatic system. A draft of this ‘rule book’ will be tested during a group journey somewhere inside the UK, with members of the public encountered along the way asked to evaluate and consider the rules, add to them, change them, destroy them and feed back into the final publication.

Each has worked on so-called ‘organic’ collaborations in the past – where artists find each other and fuse their practices based on mutual interests, personal or professional – and the current commission provides a more structured space for them to reflect on the methodologies they have used in the past, a pause to reconsider how they have collaborated in the past and how they intend to collaborate in the future. Inspired by commercial music and fine art collaborations – such as Snoop Dogg ‘featuring’ on the tracks of rival rappers, or Damien Hirst’s work with Louis Vuitton – and bringing these lessons into a non-commercial project, they will consider what happens when artists work together and why is this often deemed better (more creative, more exciting). What can artists do together that they can’t do on their own, and how does the idea of help and exchange inherent in collaboration feed into working processes and outcomes? How could these facets become visible, exposing the hidden costs of collaboration: compromise, plagiarism, antagonism, frustration, misunderstanding and mistranslation?

The second panel discussion, taking place at Matt Robert’s Arts Open Forum, will trial this idea, involving around 20 rules and tasks being tested during the live dialogue session. These rules will be presented to the audience, who will act as a judge on their efficacy, and initiate the process of change and editorial that will continue with the rest of the project. You are invited to come along and get involved with this process, to challenge the artists’ ideas and make your mark on their evolving rule book.

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