The Painted Canvas
The 2000s: Accidental Collaborations on the Painted Canvas
One day in the year 2000 or 2001 during Reza Farkhondeh’s long convalescence, Ghada Amer returned to her studio to discover that, in her absence and without warning, her companion had taken the liberty to paint over parts of a canvas she had begun to work on.
Ghada Amer describes a number of conflicting emotions at the time:
- Surprised of course since Farkhondeh had spent such a long time forcefully avoiding art;
- Relieved that he had actually returned (albeit in roundabout ways) to it;
- Upset that he had used a canvas she had carefully prepared for herself;
- Intrigued by the beauty of what Farkhondeh had added to her own work.
But that unexpected moment turned out to offer equally unexpected enriching artistic results.
This early artistic collaboration started by chance and mostly in silence. It evolved organically and slowly at first. Neither artist considered it or named it as such.
Through his unannounced but regular interventions on Amer’s canvas, Farkhondeh was relieved and energized to rediscover his creativity. He continued to blame art for his depression and thus to reject the idea he was doing art when he painted over Ghada Amer’s canvases. In fact, he refused to “own” his participation in Amer’s paintings and declined to sign his name alongside hers.
For Ghada Amer, Farkhondeh’s earliest interventions, like his continued unnamed interventions on her work, seemed like a game that helped her companion heal and emerge from his depression. She thus welcomed the game and encouraged it. And she continued to paint on the same canvas, even after Farkhondeh’s intervention on her work.
Neither of them discussed the process. They worked silently and independently.
Reza Farkhondeh’s interventions on Ghada Amer’s canvases consisted at the time of large abstract gestures without forethought or planning, as he often points out.
With time, the artistic collaboration began taking new forms. Rather than just intervening on Ghada Amer’s canvases, Farkhondeh began developing a series of watercolors which Amer kept for some eight months and to which she added her own artistic stamp. When she shared them with Farkhondeh, he was pleased to see how her stamp had enriched his watercolors.
This set-up soon became their main modus operandi: They worked as individuals, freely, silently, and alone on each other’s works. One of them would start a canvas or a painting, and once s/he felt satisfied with it, s/he gave it to the other who freely and independently added any element of her/his choosing until s/he was satisfied, then returned it to the other for further development. The work was not deemed complete and finished until both artists agreed on the product. Each step of the way, each of the two artists was in turns both observer and creator.
It took four full years for Reza Farkhondeh to acknowledge the fact that art did not make him sick, that it, in fact, helped him become healthy again. He began to engage more enthusiastically in this new form of collaborative artistic practice.
It also took Ghada Amer almost as long to become acutely aware that the works they had been producing were truly the result of an artistic collaboration.
Ghada Amer explains:
“In 2002, as I was working on the painting entitled Colored Strokes on White Diane (RFGA), Reza’s silent intervention on my work consisted in the addition of masking tape on my canvas. At the time, the use of masking tape was a new technique Reza was developing in his own work on landscape painting. By leaving a mark coming from his own artistic vocabulary on my canvas, Reza’s intervention made me realize that we were in fact engaged in a veritable collaboration. I never sold that painting for this very reason. This was a very important moment and an equally significant painting.”
Collaboration vs. independently produced works
Both Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh agree that their artistic practice of collaboration is much more demanding than independently produced works.
In fact, Ghada Amer points to the intensity of the collaboration with Reza Farkhondeh:
I don’t know how to explain this energy, but I know that I am much more tired after two days of collaboration than after one month of working all alone, at my own pace, in my studio.
Reza Farkhondeh speaks of the mystery and unpredictability of the process:
This particular energy consists of not knowing in advance what is going to happen during the project. It’s about taking an esthetic and artistic responsibility. That energy is a mechanism that, once it is set in motion, requires us to adapt. It’s a permanent complication.
How to sign works produced collaboratively?
RFGA
Beginning in 2003, Ghada Amer decided it was time to systematically add Reza Farkhondeh’s name to the works they were producing collaboratively. She invented the acronym RFGA (the combined initials of both their first and last names) to sign the collaborative works produced during this period. The invention of the acronym officially recognizes Reza Farkhondeh’s very real contribution to the works they were producing together.
Since then, the two artists began to have a dialogue about their practice and developed a new language of collaboration.
Branding
Even with the introduction of the acronym “RFGA”, both Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh continued to discuss (and struggle with) the meaning of collaboration and also the very complicated question of branding. How to sign collaborative works? How to brand collaborative works in an arts market that recognizes single authors and that so far had only celebrated Ghada Amer as the sole author of her painted canvases? How to convince galleries of the value of collaboration? Because, it must be said that Ghada Amer’s and Reza Farkhondeh’s own recognition of their collaborative production and their decision to sign them officially as RFGA was at first faced with resistance from galleries and curators.
To whom does the decision of how to sign a work belong: To the artists themselves? Or to the galleries and curators who promote and sell the works?
Collaboration: One or Two Authors?
In Ghada Amer’s and Reza Farkhondeh’s collaborative practice, the collaborative exchange takes precedence over the individual mark. The plural evinces the singular. At the same time, the singular is enriched by the plural, by the collaborative engagement.
Experimentation, exchange, and the absolute liberty to play with each other’s signature motifs, techniques, and pigments are at the very heart of their collaborative practice. Looking at any of their RFGA paintings, the viewer cannot make any assumption about who drew or painted what. Ghada Amer felt emboldened to paint the natural world, a trope largely associated with Farkhondeh’s artistic language, while he began painting naked women, Ghada Amer’s signature trope.
Ghada Amer observes:
“This collaboration has extended my horizons: I now feel free to paint landscapes. I love this opportunity to go out of my routine and explore someone’s else’s territory. It gives me a sense of total freedom, of doing things I might not otherwise do.”
Reza Farkhondeh marvels:
“It is amazing how tracing and working with the lines and gestures of another artist teaches you a great deal about their process. I suddenly discovered that Ghada had a very particular way of painting that I had not noticed in all the years we have worked side by side. Collaboration opened my mind on how she draws.”
Nothing is straightforward in Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh’s collaboration. The artists at times purposefully and playfully exchange their signature artistic roles. Some RFGA canvases feature Ghada Amer painting the landscape while Reza Farkhondeh traces the ladies who traditionally have been Amer’s signature subjects. This role reversal render all expectations fluid and interpretation slippery. Surprise is paramount to both the artistic and viewer’s experience.
Other RFGAs may be entirely produced by only one of the artists endeavoring to work, draw and paint entirely from the other’s perspective. These works are not passed back and forth between the two artists. And yet, they are still signed RFGA because the ultimate goal of collaboration is to fully take on and explore the other person’s role. These works blur the strict boundaries of the “I” and the “you” and highlight the intersection of two individual “I”s coming together and producing a third “I” that is the collaboration.
This is how Reza Farkhondeh describes this type of collaboration:
It is important to challenge the notion that a given work has just one author. It is in fact more productive to stress instead that RFGA works are a product of us coming together as individuals to produce collaborative works. We get a lot of questions of who does what, who projects what, who see what. These questions miss the essential point that all these “whats” are precisely what allow collaboration to take place.
Ghada Amer adds:
A collaborative work goes beyond us as gendered individuals. It is about defying set boundaries and definitions.