Our names are Ian Pollock and Janet Silk.

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

the pair of us were influenced by means of 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 on philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard. There was a critical stance toward modernist avant-garde philosophies of art as an expiration in itself and for the art market (this was parallel to the big art bound in the '80s). Working in collaboration was a way to lay into practice some of these be of importance tos What initially drove us into the collaborative proces has changed. It has shifted from a conscious political decision--a way to be in the world--to a personal relationship of an depth.

Brion Gysin and William Burroughs's work The Third Mind (1978) describes the significance in a collaboration when a recently made known entity emerges (what they bourn the "Third Mind") that is the culmination of the manliness between the collaborators. The Third Mind was an image that explained the phenomenon of collaboration in bounds of how we thought of it. It recured to our thinking at the expiration of graduate school when we cogitateed on the psychodynamics of our experience. We curiosityed why our experience was likewise different from that of other graduate observers We had not bonded with faculty and match students to the same quality as the other students. We analyzed it by the agency of an analogy to travel. When traveling alone a human frame is forced to interact with other travelers or locals. formerly the traveler attaches him- or herself to a partner this forced interaction becomes les critical and is ofttimes virtually absent. For example, a human frame is less likely to learn a novel language when the opportunity exists to speak their native language with a t raveling companion. The Third Mind is not predictable and attends to be much different in character from any of the individuals within the collaboration. It is the sprouting and manifestation of our Third Mind that continually inspires us.

In duo collaborations Janet has worked with the couple 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. of that kind 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 indicate This was interesting because the interviewer talked to one as well as the other of us but referred to us as a singular woman. From this experience we learned that our Third Mind could appear as a gendered entity, depending forward the agenda of the individual or institution we work with. Authorship is an important issue. If a arrange is actually able to gain something done as a team, then the bulk of mankind want to know who did what. In our working proces there has been a blurring of task-origination. Whether generating ideas, writing proposals or executing a devise we take turns manipulating the medium, shaping it and passing it back and forth until there is no line of demarcation by way of which to locate either of us. There is really no evidence of individual origin. Of course each of us has soliditys and weaknesses with regard to different skills, further we are learning from each other, a proces that brings us back to the emerging see the verb 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 affected our graduate drill 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 mainly inflexible bureaucracy. We were disapproveed as a collaborative team through most institutions which simply could not comprehend the situation. We oftentimes have to compromise in order to accommodate bureaucratic distresss 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 upon the check. This adds to a paper trail establishing the existence of common of us as an artist (according to the funding organization), at the cost of the other. In the business of art, these economic records can advise that one of us has more validity. Opportunities like as residencies are not usually realistic because many programs stipulate they can barely award or accommodate one of us. This is similar to what we faced when applying to graduate instruct Most programs had a limited number of graduate bookish mans they could accept, so to fill couple "slots" with one body of work did not present the appearance like a good deal. We realize this is part of a larger enigma of limited resources (and are extremely grateful for whatever we have been given), yet it does foreshadow what kind of career and educational opportunities you might have if you endeavor to maintain your collaboration within institutional contexts