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Collaboration has been a component of art making for centuries—from ancient Greek potters and painters to nineteenth-century photographers Hill and Adamson to the contemporary Raqs Media Collective—yet it remains a complex topic for art historians of all periods. Taking its cue from Sigmund Freud’s 1929 publication, Civilization and its Discontents, in which the psychoanalyst wrestled with tensions between the individual and society, Collaboration and its (Dis)Contents: Art, Architecture, and Photography since 1950 asks what it means to produce work together as individuals and why this might matter for the creation of art and scholarship in the twenty-first century.

This volume stems from The Courtauld Research Forum’s 2013 flagship research initiative, led by Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow Meredith A. Brown, which brought together a group of early career scholars based in London and New York who spent the year engaged in transatlantic conversations about collaboration and its influence on the histories of modern and contemporary art, architecture, and photography. The resulting collaboratively written essays and artists’ projects are timely contributions to the growing art historical debates around collaboration and collectivity and their relationship to modernism, feminism, Marxism, and contemporary practice. Collaboration and its (Dis)Contents explores not only what constitutes collaboration in recent art globally but also opens up possibilities created by collaborative historical and artistic research in a field that historically has privileged the traditional single-author text.

Edited by Meredith A. Brown and Michelle Millar Fisher

Fiona Anderson; Claire Bishop; Meredith A. Brown; Andrianna Campbell; Sara Catenacci; Marci Muhlestein Clark; David Kennedy Cutler; Michelle Millar Fisher; Oriana Fox; Jacopo Galimberti; Andrea Geyer; Sofia Gotti; Sharon Hayes; Marko Ilic; Frances Jacobus-Parker; Liz Magic Laser; Simone Leigh; Richard Meyer; Alexander Nemerov; Sara Greenberger Rafferty; Ileana L. Selejan; Amy Tobin.