Five Ways to Effectively Collaborate with Teams by Stephanie Sauer

1. Get everyone on the same page.

We exchanged eighty-seven emails in the first chain, sixty-two in the second, spaced about a day apart. I took the bus to my studio, made coffee, wrote, worked on a piece in progress, walked to the self-service cafeteria for lunch, ate alone, returned to the studio, worked on collaboration, alone again, answered email from collaborator, closed laptop, made changes to the mock-up, read, took notes, packed up, walked to the bus stop, waited.

“Co,” we learn, means “with,” so it follows that the word collaboration is defined as both the action of working with someone to produce or create something, and traitorous cooperation with the enemy. 

Your name is listed, but not those of the others without whom the work would not be possible.

Your name is not the printed one, yet the work could not have been done without you.  

Your name is not the printed one, yet the work could not have been done without you.  

Your name is listed, but not those of the others without whom the work would not be possible.

The middle-aged man in the United States who wears Hawaiian shirts tells me I need to be more independent as an artist, points out that even my press is named “Copilot” –notice the “Co,” he says, “as in doing with others.” He says I could be more like…who are those famous women artists? There have been some. Like that woman who paints the flowers. Yes, like her! It’s simple, really. 

Where do I unravel this? Where do I even begin? What are middle-aged men who wear Hawaiian shirts in the mainland United States if not repositories of pop cultural dander? I would have to educate an entire population in the history of grassroots, collectivity-driven art to even begin a real dialogue. And I am tired of being the one who must explain, must educate. How great would it be if my work could simply be read in its own context and not always against some outworn dominant standard? How fucking great that would be.

2. Set expectations.

A friend tells me she does not entirely understand competition. She and her sister, both artists, were raised with the understanding that the accomplishments one made did not diminish the other. Instead, good news served as good news for everyone in the family, and love was not saved only for the times one accomplished good things. My family did not see accomplishments this way. Siblings were taught to rival one another, that it was natural and that competition served to spur one toward accomplishing more. These teachings had disastrous effects on the relationships between siblings, but no one seemed interested in changing, only in accomplishing more things.  

3. Use tech tools.

The power of collaboration is, of course, not a new notion. One fairly recent impulse in the Western canon started with the Dadaists who, partly in response to a culture that led to the ravages of a world war, “believed that the value of art lay not in the work produced,” so says the Museum of Modern Art, which houses a collection of those works, “but in the act of making and collaborating with others to create new visions of the world.” The Museum of Modern Art acknowledges this subversive strain of Modernism. 

Emerging theories in evolutionary biology posit that Darwin was wrong, that humans did not survive and develop through competition, but rather by cooperation. They insist that it was true what David Hume said: “Your corn is ripe today; mine will be so tomorrow. ‘Tis profitable for us both, that I should labour with you today, and that you should aid me tomorrow.” Sharing, not hoarding, was how we humans survived winters and raids and bad hunts and droughts and famines. The cultural norms that we have inherited from the Victorians, then, need updating.

As if as a result of these emerging theories, collaboration has caught on. It is idolized in the tech world, made manifest by the open floor plans and centralized gaming tables in startups everywhere. College composition instructors, who once only offered private feedback in the margins and during office hours, are now encouraged to treat expository essay writing like an art school crit panel. No one is safe to learn or to work without exposure.

Several years into this fetishization of the collaborative effort and extroversion, Susan Cain responded with a strong case for introversion and solitude, saying: “Many visual artists and serious writers find it necessary to spend most of the time they devote to any given project working alone.” Solitude, she argues, allows us to “gestate” ideas. Collaboration is no good without reflection.  

4. Be open about everything.

Where is the balance? Because we need both the…. Blah. Bored with my own self in that sentence. 

My father likes to remind me that, when I was ten, I told him that when I grew up I wanted to play basketball, but did not want to play on a team. I came to embracing collaboration late in life, like many North Americans. Other writers I knew did the same, so late that we failed to question the tropes of genius and islands. It wasn’t until graduate school when my roommate’s class was assigned a writing collaboration project that the notion even felt like a notion at all. It had been so embedded as to be unseen. All the collaborating I’d done to date had been either in just-for-fun exquisite corpse assignments (another Dadaist invention) at the end of a semester of workshopping oh-so-serious poems, or with visual artists whose disciplines seemed to give them some kind of inherent license to collaborate. Editing was a collaborative process, yes, but it was seldom considered such. Only the poet, the one true author, got to sign their name when the work was done. And if they were kind, they would acknowledge all those who had helped them on a single sheet in the back of their book. (I make a game of trying to guess into which gender the author was socialized by examining the length of this list.) Raymond Carver’s famous sparseness, we learned, was the result of his editor’s steadying hand. The drafts he submitted were steeped in the emotional displays his loyalists despised. It was his editor who cut the fat, but this was not widely considered collaboration.  

That same year of graduate school, I left my seminar on Michigan Avenue and headed up the steps of the Chicago Art Institute. I flashed my student ID for free admission and filed into the enormous, packed hall that was hosting Jonathan Letham for a discussion of his highly controversial Harper’s essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism.” Composed in prose borrowed from other writers across time and geographies, the essay asserted that all artmaking is a collaboration with other artmakers and with the world around us. Shifting uncomfortably in his seat, Letham admitted that authoring this essay had turned him into an unwitting critic of the music industry’s fervent pursuit of tighter copyright restrictions in the face of an uncertain financial future as CD sales morphed into online downloads. The process of making, he went on to describe, defied copyright law by its very nature as an ongoing cultural conversation, and that conversation was always a form of collaboration with other makers. All conversations, after all, have more than one participant. Otherwise, they would be monologues. So, he proposed, if we want to continue the collective cultural conversation that we call art, we have to lessen the reigns of capitalism and give more space to the riffing off and borrowing that are inherent to cultural production. We have to give more space to the gift economy. Little did we all know in that hall in 2007 that we were teetering on the precipice of one of the most ruinous economic recessions of the past century, on our way to returning to the inequities of The Gilded Age. When we did hit it one year later, discussions of uncertainty and ownership began taking on a new hue. Conversations about survival were then streaked with talk of collaboration and alternative economies and lessons about Civil Rights era collectivism. And it was in the spring of this year the recession began that I founded Copilot Press by publishing the work of an artist who had co-founded a Civil Rights era art collective.

A more recent wave of popular articles has taken on the theme of collaboration in a positive light, citing many teams of male artists. From Walt Disney and Salvador Dalí to Jackson Pollack and Lee Krasner, David Byrne and Brian Eno to Rothko and Philip Johnson, Warhol and Basquiat to Robert Rauschenberg and Jean Tinguely, discussions of the benefits of collaboration surfaced for a time across the pages of glossy magazines. One highly praised essay in The Atlantic even looked at the benefits of blurring the lines between collaboration and competition among artistic teams like John Lenin and Paul McCartney, and the incredible output such tenuous unions produced. With this wave also came revaluations of famous male-female teams like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, Zelda Fitzgerald and Scott, Bjork and Matthew Barney, Lee Miller and Man Ray. In a pre-#MeToo era Flavorwire article, Reid Signers wrote that “Lee Miller is regularly described in back-of-the-envelope art historical stubs as a ‘Muse’ of Man Ray’s, which is a shame, since it sells short the tremendous influence she had on the surrealist school of contemporary photography.” See the revelation of this story repeat in article after article over the next few years. 

Largely left out of the popular press are stories about teams of women and gender queer folx like Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Pietilä, Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, Barbara Smith and Cherrie Moraga and Hattie Gossett and Myrna Bain and Audre Lorde, Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich, Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, Carrie Moyer and Sue Schaffner. Jansson left us clues about the inner workings of such creative pairings, about true equity, in her book, Fair Play, but we have yet to learn more about what might distinguish these constellations from the often-touted models of all-male artistic teams or the subsuming of female contribution by male “collaborators.” 

What exactly do we lose when we do not learn about the inner workings of female- and queer-centered collaborations? What exactly do we lose when we do not teach the inner workings of other collaboration-led artist collectives, activist groups, publishing operations, and independent spaces? What do we lose when we do not learn about groups like Tia Chucha press, the Royal Chicano Air Force, Asco, Collab, Woman’s Zapatista Embroidery Collective, The Pocho Research Society, and so many others? When their stories are not part of our popular story? What happens when we teach the stories of MLK Jr. and Rosa Parks as the stories of brave individuals and not stories of the collective action of widely-rooted strategizing teams? What happens when we learn of Cesar Chavez without Dolores Huerta? Collective action has proven to be a strong antidote to the crush of isolation and capitalism, and so it seems likely that their lack only leads to the stronger hold of the latter. 

5. Hold effective team meetings.

Collaboration, as failure and becoming: I attempt to collaborate for the first time in writing. I bind a tiny notebook by hand and begin to take notes for a child’s story. I give this notebook to my lover, who writes and who adds a gorilla into the story that, so far, stars only otherworldly, genderless creatures. I get the notebook back from my lover and find that the gorilla doesn’t fit but I write in some responses anyway, leaving out the gorilla. The sex seizes my breath and is all the time, though, and I find I want to share everything, even this story. I pass the notebook back and she continues her play, the writing lighthearted, like mine, but when I am given the notebook again, there is still that gorilla. Again, that gorilla. But the sex is beyond all language and I am trying to open to new ways of being, of writing, so I try now to incorporate the gorilla, adapt the story to welcome this new character. The sex is still seizing my body and the intimacy is growing, so when I pass the notebook back to her I ask bluntly about the gorilla and how important it is. It is important but we both laugh at my aversion to it. Then, more seizing of bodies and breath. Days later, the notebook returns to me with no more appearances of the gorilla. I am touched by this gesture and I try to write a response story, a scene inspired by a dream I just had. But it doesn’t function as a response. I read back through the notes and realize that this is becoming not one story by two authors but two stories by two authors. And I am puzzled by this because how could the breath seize like it does and the intimacy grow while the two of us aren’t able to write one single story. I do not pass the notebook back. I keep it on me at all times and take more notes toward an otherworldly, genderless creature. I continue to seize the breath of my lover who will later become my spouse, and the two of us realize that it is better for us to become two authors, together. 

Collaboration, as correspondence: have finished tweaking the book ms completely now. fixed some errors, added some work so i will be bringing the final version of this with me on thursday. there are a few more pages/photos. and i rewrote some passages but the essence of everything is the same. looking forward to seeing you. i will need directions of course. so glad you came up. was a magical day. can’t say much else except this at the moment: slightly overwhelmed by the workload. you just need to know that. but deeply, deeply excited by the whole of it. i am really glad that i finally came up. an inspiring day. and to be working with you on this book and to have you coming to me with so many ideas. i love your ideas, the depth the design will add to the book. this is the kind of book i have always dreamed of doing that i simply thought would be impossible. a draft for you. your page ideas, your ideas of running a sentence across a page to other pages and the blank pages, the creating of stillness and the slowing down of time and the creating of a visceral experience of this book, and the text that becomes a mirrored reflection, all of this is wonderful. the fact that you devoted time in your life to thinking about and reflecting on my writing and my work is such an honor…i do not even know what to say to you aside from this deep hearted thank you from the places of real origins…home. i am honored to be doing this work. your work (and you) are just shimmering (yep, shimmering) with this big kind of fullness and vulnerability and heart and intensity. and these words and images you’ve been making, these ones i’ll be laying upon pages, i will be treating them with this care. letting them do the speaking and the moving. i have been working in the book all morning. working through the mock-up with cut-outs and pasting and will be putting it into layout this week. then printing a second mock up hopefully by the end of the week. man i am swamped. but i am more excited than swamped now hearing that you are nearing having the proof ready soon. working like mad to finish the layout. the cut and paste handmade one is done, but finishing up the computer mock-up. glad to hear you are working on more books. other books. moving your words forth. i’m awed by all this making. i am so excited simply so happy to hear about your process and working with my words and images. this kind of collaborative intimacy. such wonder. i can’t really put into words what this means to me. just laughed aloud. was getting ready to start a write-up for your book – at least an informal one – and realized that we haven’t done a contract yet. and it seems to fit. this doesn’t feel like a business deal but purely a collaboration, an arts project that i’ve been too far inside to look up from. that said, we’ll need to do that. but it makes me smile that this has been the furthest thing from my mind. that is, if i were anywhere in my mind these days when it comes to your book. for the first time since i’ve given up photography for what became a 5-year lent, i’m having fun exploring all these different facets of exposure and reverse imaging and light/absence of light contrasts, photo album ephemera, etc. etc. all this texture and dripping from the words held taut with the tension that has come from putting these elements in dialogue with a sans serif font and straight lines and crevices. it just hums. i swear to god it is making sound. it was so good to see you. amazing and always inspiring. i am attaching the one photo that i re-photo-shopped to pull the background image forward more clearly. H and i have not worked on the other photo, so i think we should move ahead with it just cropped a bit. i was surprised that H would want to collaborate and photograph me in different ways. so we have begun to imagine what that would be like and the kinds of photos and so on. my heart has never opened in this way. i think it is the first time i am just going to let go and see. there is so much wonder in it. and i will work on handwitten note tomorrow. can you proof this when you get a chance? it’s the final layout for the new spread. moved the words around. and again, without the border. ideally, i would have added another 2-page spread after it with the final sentence, but it’s too late to adjust the book for that at this point. and maybe it’s better without. let me know what you think or if you have any other ideas… this is wonderful , exactly right. thank you. when i was in albany i spoke of collaboration as a way to replace publishing. i spoke of trust and belief in the making of new books and new ideas…. i have good news: your press release is ready (pending your approval, of course). it’s half sheet size and will be included with all the books sent for review. i love that you spoke of publishing as collaboration, as future. i’m a big supporter of this idea.

Collaboration, as improvisation: We meet at the release party for a book on which I collaborated with another artist, an artist she has spent almost a decade interviewing for her dissertation. We begin by speaking of maps and monuments, of public memory and alterations and erasures. We begin by sharing resources and commenting on one another’s writings. We begin by offering critiques and perspectives. We begin by drinking too many drinks and smoking too many smokes and siting on a balcony over the midtown grid speaking of stories and demons and dreams. We begin when I land the grant for a filmed urban intervention. We begin with her conceptualizing and recommending readings. We begin with talking shop over too many smokes. We begin when she accepts the invitation to become a character. We begin when I write her into the script and we build our costumes together. We begin by working with a videographer in the city park. We begin when she suggests an addition to the script and we all trot off to the new location. We begin with an artist who makes a cameo adds his own input. We begin when the videographer speaks up and adds a scene. We begin when the park authority comes to inspect our play and we decide altogether to incorporate the unexpected. We begin by discussing how this unexpected fits so perfectly. We begin laughing over the slips. We begin when we let go of the script.

Stephanie Sauer is an interdisciplinary artist and author of Almonds Are Members of the Peach Family (Noemi Press) and The Accidental Archives of the Royal Chicano Air Force (University of Texas Press). She manages Copilot Press and teaches prose writing in Stetson University’s MFA of the Americas program. [www.stephaniesauer.com] 

Many thanks to Doug Rice for allowing the use of his words to be included in red as part of this essay.