The project is aimed at researching collaborative projects relized in the Czech Republic between 1998 and 2008. It shall start with an analysis of discourse on collaborative art; a field of the research will be specified through a comparison between resources from Anglophone discourse and their Czech equivalents. The research will employ a range qualitative methods. After bibliographical search and document analysis is completed, a sample of relevant projects will be selected to be examined as case studies. Interviews with artists, curators, critics and gallery educators, or other agents who influence formation of the researched discourse, will follow. The research will lead to broadening the knowledge base of both history/theory of art and art education. The main outcome of the project will be a monograph; other outcomes will be articles published in relevant journals and conference presentations.

Results

There were two registered outcomes of the project "Art as Collaboration" in the year 2010. Firstly it was an essay "Critical Art and the Curatorial in Precarious Times" published in the Notebook for Art Theory, and Related Zones. It resulted from the research on the discourse of collaborative and participatory art. The second result was an exhibition Moving Image in the Prague-based gallery Futura. The exhibition focused on the Brno art scene and its collective activities, such as Fiume and Anymade artistic groups. Two outcomes of the project “Art as Collaboration” were published during the year 2011. The first is an article “Breaking Point: Looking for a Social Turn in Czech Art“, that is based on a paper given at a conference The Outcomes of Conceptualism (26th and 27th of May, 2011, Prague). The “Breaking Point” is focused on several exhibitions held at the second half of the 1990 that signalled a move in interest towards socially and politically engaged forms artistic practice, towards interventions in public space and towards site-specific artwork. The essay “Breaking Point” is an adjusted chapter of the book The Art of Collaboration, which is the main outcome of the project. It surveys outcomes of the “collaborative turn” within the Czech fine art in the last fifteen years. An analysis of the general discourse on collaborative and participatory art and a survey on the paradigm of collaborative art in the contemporary Czech art were defined as the aims of the project – and were successfully achieved. There was another aim too, to research the field of interactions between collaborative and particiapatory art and education. This aim was only partially fulfilled, since during a work on the project it became clear that extensive research into the field of education would require broadening of both research field and methodology. Yet the results of the present research leave a way open to an eventual ongoing research that goes in this direction.

Publications