Combination and Collaboration As The Mirror of Creation, The Case of Jasper Johns | Peter Murphy

Summary: Collaborations in Modern and Postmodern Visual Arts | Peter Murphy All egos, not least of all artistic egos, have vulnerabilities. That is to be human. Collaborations of different kinds aid, boost and enable fragile egos. Artists who are starting out on their life’s work or who have a reached an impasse need support. The same applies to intellectuals, and to human beings in general. While there is some truth in the old existential view, summed up by Jean-Paul Sartre, that hell is other people, it is an indubitable truth that we need other people. But whatever anxieties and weaknesses haunt artists, collaborators and muses are not simply props for threatened egos or instruments for the ego gratification of great artists. There are plenty of examples of the monstrous or tyrannical artistic ego. But just as importantly, in fact more importantly, collaboration is a mirror of creation. Collaboration, which can take on an infinite range of forms, has structural features that are akin to the nature of creation itself. Collaboration therefore acts as a preparation and a foil for creation. It is a visible acting out of the inward creative process. Collaboration is an outward experimental test bed for a combinatory process that is intrinsic to the inner nature of creation. Through collaborative relations, the combinatory process of creation is started, re-started, adapted and evolved. The paper will discuss this in relation to the work of Jasper Johns and his history of collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, Bruce Naumann, Frank O’Hara and Samuel Beckett. Peter Murphy is Associate Professor of Communications and Director of the Social Aesthetics Research Unit, Monash University. He is co-author with Simon Marginson and Michael Peters of Creativity and the Global Knowledge Economy (Peter Lang, 2009), Global Creation (Peter Lang, 2010) and Imagination (Peter Lang, 2010). Other books by Murphy include Dialectic of Romanticism: A Critique of Modernism with David Roberts (Continuum, 2004) and Civic Justice: From Greek Antiquity to the Modern World (Prometheus/Humanity Books, 2001).