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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

ARTISTIC COLLABORATION, in all disciplines, is — and has ever been — the exception In its unmitigated form — taking place between two or more individuals working to one end, and with the particulars of responsibility dissolved in consensus — collaboration has proven to be a versatile and available mode of artistic production   So why is collaboration given so wide a berth? That, historically, so large a proportion of collaborative works come over apologetic — mollifying their collaborative character — would suggest that it is in the understanding of collaborative art, and not the undertaking, where lies the issue And for this reason: collaborative art overturns our perception of ‘the artist’, to which we hold fast, even if we don’t know it   It is important to clarify what I mean by collaboration There are media that necessarily utilise a workforce, the craftsmanship of others, that are inherently ‘collaborative’ but to which, for the purposes of this article, we will not apply the term collaboration A big-scale beehive of a collaborative endeavour, a film congregates large numbers of individuals, each a satellite contributor and specialist — in cinematography, animation, sound or wardrobe design But if a film’s achievement may be credited to individuals in titled, subsidiary roles, it cannot satisfactorily be called a collaboration How far can a film’s scriptwriter be said to have collaborated with its stunt man? There is no transaction of ideas, no arbitration; they are connected indirectly by an intermediary in the form or forms of director and producer Collaboration in film, and to the same degree, theatre, is contingent upon a selection or hiring process; ‘collaborators’ are delegated to and in most circumstances work apart In the critical theory of François Truffaut and other contributors to Cahiers du Cinéma, the success (or failure) of a film is attributable only to its director, Truffaut’s apiculturist ‘auteur’ If I am inclined to disagree with Truffaut’s solo-project take on the film industry, I am also unable to name his cameramen, his editors, his supporting casts Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds is a similar instance of the figure-headed or curated ‘collective’ artwork The Beijing artist employed over a thousand

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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feature

Issue No. 10

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism

David Harvey

feature

Issue No. 10

Prospects for a Happy but Contested Future: The Promise of Revolutionary Humanism   From time immemorial there have been...

Interview

Issue No. 5

Interview with Ivan Vladislavić

Jan Steyn

Interview

Issue No. 5

Ivan Vladislavić is one of a handful of writers working in South Africa after apartheid whose work will still...

Interview

March 2017

Interview with Rodrigo Hasbún

Enea Zaramella

Rodrigo Hasbún

TR. Sophie Hughes

Interview

March 2017

Rodrigo Hasbún (born Cochabamba, Bolivia, 1981) has published two novels and a collection of short stories; he was selected...

 

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