This was published  ?Educating the Third Mind,? afterimage vol. 27, No. 3, November/December (1999)

Information about afterimage at:  http://vsw.org/afterimage 

Our names are Ian Pollock and Janet Silk. Each of us has been pursuing collaborative relationships within an art context since we began to take ourselves seriously as artists. Ian has been involved in several two-artist collaborations as well as projects with up to 12 collaborators. Janet worked as part of a small group called Decode in the mid-1980s "decoding" advertisements and creating bulletin boards. In early 1993, we started working on projects together and have had an exclusive working relationship ever since. We received a collaborative MFA from the University of California at Berkeley in 1998.

Both of us were influenced by our early art education in the mid-1980s. At that time Marxist and feminist critique of authorship and originality was the pedagogical rhetoric, including "postmodern" social and literary criticism by philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. There was a critical stance toward modernist avant-garde philosophies of art as an end in itself and for the art market (this was parallel to the big art boom in the '80s). Working in collaboration was a way to put into practice some of these concerns. What initially drove us into the collaborative process has changed. It has shifted from a conscious political decision--a way to be in the world--to a personal relationship of some depth.

Brion Gysin and William Burroughs's book The Third Mind (1978) describes the moment in a collaboration when a new entity emerges (what they term the "Third Mind") that is the culmination of the energy between the collaborators. The Third Mind was an image that explained the phenomenon of collaboration in terms of how we thought of it. It returned to our thinking at the end of graduate school when we reflected on the psychodynamics of our experience. We wondered why our experience was so different from that of other graduate students. We had not bonded with faculty and fellow students to the same degree as the other students. We analyzed it through an analogy to travel. When traveling alone a person is forced to interact with other travelers or locals.  Once the traveler attaches him- or herself to a partner this forced interaction becomes less critical and is often virtually absent. For example, a person is less likely to learn a new language when the opportunity exists to speak their native language with a traveling companion. The Third Mind is not predictable and tends to be much different in character from any of the individuals within the collaboration. It is the growth and manifestation of our Third Mind that continually inspires us.

In duo collaborations Janet has worked with both men and women and from 1990 to 1992 she worked with another female artist in San Francisco. Gender-bias and authorship are recurring challenges for us. Such biases can be in our favor. When a curator is looking for a female artist they may curate "Janet." We were interviewed as "Janet" for a women's radio talk show. This was interesting because the interviewer talked to both of us but referred to us as a singular woman. From this experience we learned that our Third Mind could emerge as a gendered entity, depending on the agenda of the individual or institution we work with. Authorship is an important issue. If a group is actually able to get something done as a team, then people want to know who did what. In our working process there has been a blurring of task-origination. Whether generating ideas, writing proposals or executing a project, we take turns manipulating the medium, shaping it and passing it back and forth until there is no line of demarcation by which to locate either of us. There is really no evidence of individual origin. Of course each of us has strengths and weaknesses with regard to different skills, but we are learning from each other, a process that brings us back to the emergence of the Third Mind. Creating a language to discuss collaborative work is difficult. Artists' statements illustrate the dominance of singular identification in creating a cohesive statement. Do we identify ourselves as "we," "they," "he," "she," "I"?

The issues of authorship greatly effected our graduate school experience. Simply filling out applications was a complicated endeavor. (Should we apply as individuals or as a team? Do we give a biography of our collaboration or of each of us as individuals?) We discovered a mostly inflexible bureaucracy. We were rejected as a collaborative team by most institutions which simply could not comprehend the situation. We often have to compromise in order to accommodate bureaucratic needs. For example, when we are given a commission or are paid for a piece of writing, there is always the issue of whose name is going to be on the check. This adds to a paper trail establishing the existence of one of us as an artist (according to the funding organization), at the expense of the other. In the business of art, these economic records can suggest that one of us has more validity. Opportunities such as residencies are not usually realistic because many programs stipulate they can only award or accommodate one of us. This is similar to what we faced when applying to graduate school. Most programs had a limited number of graduate students they could accept, so to fill two "slots" with one body of work did not seem like a good deal. We realize this is part of a larger problem of limited resources (and are extremely grateful for whatever we have been given), but it does foreshadow what kind of career and educational opportunities you might have if you endeavor to maintain your collaboration within institutional contexts.

When we were finally accepted into an institution, it was a mixed educational process. Our collaboration was alternately ignored or acknowledged depending on whether or not it was convenient for the institution. For example, we were given only one studio space but we were not allowed to team-teach our work-study class. While we believe that the administration and faculty tried their best to work with us, much of what we experienced enforced the traditional philosophy that art students are naturally educated as individuals. In our case, some of the teacher-student dynamics were strained due to the conventional pedagogy of criticism and intimidation. The usual method is to confront the student through constructive criticism and intense one-on-one dialogue about the nature of his or her work. For us, this method backfired. It occurred to us that much of the dynamic was one of an artificial stress that was developed by the faculty to destabilize the student and to force a mentor and peer relationship with the faculty and other students, respectively. These relationships were to be the basis from which to critique the student's graduate work. Instead, we found that our Third Mind resisted this intimidation and became more self-reliant. The result was a kind of introversion rather than the forced interaction, bonding and critique process.

It is difficult to determine to what extent a group of collaborators might succeed or fail within other disciplines. Our opinion is that their experience would be difficult--a lot of energy would have to be expended on the mechanics of how to function within the institution. One does hear of collaborations within the context of research and their difficulties when defining authorship, especially in the fields of science or medicine. Usually when it comes time for accolades or economic benefit, even the most harmonic collaborative endeavor can be strained.

Both faculty and students, as well as many other people in our non-institutional lives, relate to us as a unit. Our idiosyncratic habits and individual character traits get transposed onto each other. By the same token, one person's success becomes that of both of us. People who relate more to Ian will attribute the characteristics onto Janet and vice versa.

Fortunately for us, graduate school was the beginning of a series of insights into the darker nature of collaboration that we jokingly phrase, "What happens when your Third Mind is an anti-social slob?" We started to realize that the Third Mind not only produces work that neither collaborator would develop on their own, but also that it has a psychology that differs from that of the collaborators. Or at the very least it can intensify the existing personalities. This is something to be aware of.

Our collaboration has evolved from an artistic critique of authorship to what in German is termed a "Beziehungs Kiste," or relationship box. Like this symbolic box our collaboration is filled with endless complexities that revolve not just around the production of art, but also around a marriage, with all of its intricacies and delicious negotiations.

IAN POLLOCK and JANET SILK have collaborated since 1992. They are presently working on two projects: www.gardenofeternaltime.com and an installation project for the end of the twentieth century based on sounds of waiting rooms and departure lounges.

Copyright 1999 pollock/silk