A Selfless Art

The relationship between the process and the product has been debated throughout my working life. Many of the community artists with whom I’ve worked placed process first, sometimes to the extent of disregarding product entirely, but they are both important to me, and both open to misinterpretation.

Co-creation must be about something. It must be working towards an artwork to be shared with an audience, however that is understood. Otherwise, it’s an education process, whose purpose is the growth of the people involved. Education is essential to human beings, but it’s not the same thing as co creation. People grow through co-creation, but that is not why I do it, or why others join me it the process.

Sharing artwork brings many things, including the possibility of dialogue with others, and a chance to test the creators’ hopes against their achievement. But paradoxically, the stronger the artwork is, the more it overshadows the process that created it. 

And when I talk about the work, it’s usually the artwork I show, because workshop photographs are rarely eloquent or visually interesting: they tend to look alike, because what matters, what is happening to and between the people in the room, is not visible. At best, if they’re working towards a performance, it looks like a rehearsal.

And the artwork often endures, physically or in video and photographs, and that endurance makes it look like the project itself, overshadowing the process and becoming the story. It’s necessary, but insufficient.

The tension between these things, which I have described as restlessness in the past, gives co-creation some of its energy. It’s also what has made me keep thinking about it throughout my working life.