5.08/05/13
Thijs groot Wassink
'On collaboration, supposedly dumb questions
and how these have been applied in the production of artist books'.
"Why collaborate at all?... One big reason is to restrict one’s own freedom... There’s a joy and relief in being limited, restrained. For starters, to let someone else make half the decisions, or some big part of them, absolves one of the need to explore endless possibilities. The result is fewer agonizing decisions ... and sometimes, faster results.(David Byrne: Journal 03.15.10) WassinkLundgren is a meeting of two creatively mischievous minds: Thijs groot Wassink and Ruben Lundgren. As their conjoined name suggests, the pair work as a single, two-headed creative entity, looking at the world around them through the medium of photography, while simultaneously playing around with ideas of creativity and collaboration through that same medium. Each of their projects, to differing degrees, takes them on a tightrope walk of discovery where chance, accident and uncertainty often seem as important as the pursuit of a single governing idea". Sean O'Hagan 2013
Thijs groot Wassink
'On collaboration, supposedly dumb questions and how these have been applied in the production of artist books'.
"Why collaborate at all?... One big reason is to restrict one’s own freedom... There’s a joy and relief in being limited, restrained. For starters, to let someone else make half the decisions, or some big part of them, absolves one of the need to explore endless possibilities. The result is fewer agonizing decisions ... and sometimes, faster results.(David Byrne: Journal 03.15.10) WassinkLundgren is a meeting of two creatively mischievous minds: Thijs groot Wassink and Ruben Lundgren. As their conjoined name suggests, the pair work as a single, two-headed creative entity, looking at the world around them through the medium of photography, while simultaneously playing around with ideas of creativity and collaboration through that same medium. Each of their projects, to differing degrees, takes them on a tightrope walk of discovery where chance, accident and uncertainty often seem as important as the pursuit of a single governing idea". Sean O'Hagan 2013
The talk centred
around 3 books produced by WassinkLundren (Thijs groot Wassink and Ruben Lundgren) over the last few years. Tokyo Tokyo (2010), Empty Bottles (2007) and their latest book HITS (2013).
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| Image from Tokyo Tokyo © WassinkLundgren |
With the 2 artists living so far apart (Ruben lives in China)
Thijs there are obvious questions regarding authorship but these problems are quickly dismissed as uninteresting and do not appear to concern this artist collaboration, who operate as a kind of
two headed beast.
Thijs addressed
some of the practicalities of a long-distant collaboration as well as
discussing the use of play as a means of entering a new work.Often this initial
sense of fun remains central to their work but there
are projects, for example Empty Bottles, that flip this initial playfulness and
take on more sober subjects. Empty Bottles is a book of "photographs of full-time
scavengers, cleaners and other citizens of Beijing and Shanghai picking up
plastic bottles that were placed in front of the camera".
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| Image from Empty Bottles © WassinkLundgren |
And the cake was chocolate....
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