collaborating

Murtha Baca and I co-wrote a chapter on FRBR for cultural objects in Arlene Taylor's book Understanding FRBR. We lost track, in a good way, of who originated which words. I remember some of the words and definitely the examples but the flow of the article became OURS, not hers or mine. There's an article in the Times from June 10th on the Rolex program to pair developing artists with masters. Alejandro Cesarco and John Baldessari are one of the pairs; Cesarco has long been a favorite, for his made-up indexes and other wordy art. Baldessari has of course been doing conceptual stuff with words for years and years. In the article, Cesarco is quoted thus:

The most gratifying thing about this program was working together with him on a work that became a synthesis of our practices. It's not recognizable who did what, which is what's nice about collaborating, because you are trying to work outside your comfort zone and pushing your collaborator to work outside his.

Of course, that makes the metadata more difficult but then Leonardo and Verrocchio have been making that hard for art historians for centuries.

When I went to go fetch a link for John Baldessari, I found his "JB_new" page and it has a groovy graphic tree. Oh my gosh, it's Baldessari's birthday!