Joint Ventures
· The joy of artistic collaborations ·
I met Steve Tilden, a metal sculptor and long-time Blackfish Gallery artist, a decade ago when I asked his permission to use a photograph of one of his sculptures in one of my montages. We have collaborated on several projects since, exhibited together and, most importantly, stretched each other’s thinking around various topics of shared interest.
A recurring theme in Steve’s body of work is mythology and last year he produced a number of sculptures together with glass artist Jen Fuller focussed on mythological themes with a modern slant. I, in turn, photographed their work and incorporated it into montages around the story of Icarus. My series, Free Fall, alluded to contemporary flights too close to the sun and the subsequent crashes – each image represented a location where airplane disasters had happened, and each had a bird in it referring to Icarus and his hubris. You can see more of the images and description of the project at www.friderikeheuer.com
I would have never delved into mythology had it not been for these joint ventures. What I learned in school about the Greeks and Romans was forever tainted by having to take Latin for too many years. Through another artist’s eyes I came to understand the universality of the themes and why they still matter for contemporary art. Trying to find interesting ways to make our two mediums intersect proved to be an intellectual challenge – something we both welcomed. But collaboration offers something more: an audience that reacts to your suggestions in a timely fashion, so potential criticism can be incorporated and your work improved. And collaborative feedback comes in a constructive fashion since you and your collaborator have shared goals. Today’s montage – Lower Manhattan – consists of a photograph of metal feathers made by Steve, an Anhinga (ancestor to the cormorant) that I found in a Florida swamp, and the view from the 9/11 memorial in NYC.
Some years back, shortly after the show Portlandia had targeted the intersection between art and commercialism with the meme Put a Bird on it!, some cultural journalist in Salon wrote about her acute discomfort when purchasing bird-related art and/or craft. She had become self-conscious in the wake of the joke, wondering if she – as so many of us – was the butt of it. She described the feeling with a newly invented German term – der Vogelschäme – which cracked me up since it captured the emotional reaction perfectly, but was all wrong linguistically. (It would be die Vogelscham – the bird shame.)