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THE CREATIVE ASSEMBLAGE

Theorizing contemporary forms of arts-based

collaboration

Phillip Mar and Kay Anderson

This paper contributes to theorizing contemporary art collaborations in the context of the

mediatory labour required of artists, and the complexity of the collaborative contexts in which

aesthetic production is now enmeshed. In order to account for this complexity without reducing its

analysis to ‘structured fields’ or ‘systems’, we use elements of assemblage theory in a quite specific

way: drawing on DeLanda’s work on social and organizational forms; and Law’s ‘method

assemblage’ to analyse the specificity of working interfaces that craft new boundaries and

working relations. We develop a case study of C3West, an Australian initiative encompassing arts

institutions, businesses, and communities. The analysis traces assemblage processes that generate

dispersed working arrangements (partnerships, intersectoral, and interdisciplinary working

interfaces) across apparently incommensurable domains, yet without forming overarching

structures or requiring common rationales for cooperation. To demonstrate the work of

assemblage, we discuss the practices of French artist Sylvie Blocher and the multidisciplinary

collective, Campement Urbain, who employ aesthetic and performative means to forge new

institutional practices and alliances for intervening in urban planning processes in regional

Sydney.

KEYWORDS: assemblage theory; collaboration; contemporary art; creativity; business-arts

partnerships; urban planning

1. Contemporary Visual Arts and Collaborative Contexts

Many things have changed in the past thirty years in the visual arts ‘scene’:

prevailing styles of art work, ways of working, institutional and market contexts.

Contemporary art work increasingly relies on ‘temporary and episodic’ patterns

of collaboration (Grabher 2004, p. 104). Multiple relationships with galleries and museums,

curators, funding bodies, agents and other mediators, educational institutions, other

artists, critics, writers and technical advisers, are integral (not merely secondary) to the

work.

Hal Foster conceived of the changes in the contemporary visual arts as a shift from a

vertical to a horizontal way of working. The artist’s perspective of the picture as window

shifted to picture as text, a movement ‘from a ‘‘natural’’ paradigm of image as framed

landscape to a ‘‘cultural’’ paradigm of image as informational network’ (Foster 1996,

p. 199). Artists now engage in many more discursive and textual tasks � proposal

development, theorization, research, writing, and communication with audiences and

Journal of Cultural Economy, Vol. 3, No. 1, March 2010ISSN 1753-0350 print/1753-0369 online/10/010035-17

– 2010 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/17530351003617560

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other participants. This horizontality implies collaborative relationships on many levels and

stages. Art theorists have attempted to include these elements � whether labelled as

social, relational, connective, dialogical or collaborative (Larsen 2006[1999]; Bourriaud

2002; Gablik 1995; Kester 2004) � in new ways of evaluating the aesthetic and formal

outcomes. Aesthetic evaluation is complicated when the individual artist is no longer the

primary locus of the ‘work’, where they are part of a team, or where institutional actors,

curators, clients, audiences, a variety of interlocutors and other participants contribute to

aesthetic outcomes.

Aesthetic evaluation of specific work is not our task here: our concern is with what

enables complex ‘horizontal’ engagements that occur across the boundaries of everyday

practice. How are complex collaborative networks brought together? How do these

engagements affect aesthetic practices? In sections 3 and 4 we will examine C3West, a

project based in Sydney, Australia that attempts to extend contemporary art beyond the

conventional domains.1 From 2003, a partnership of art galleries began to develop to foster

engagements with business enterprises in Sydney’s western suburbs. The establishment of

new kinds of partnerships with commercial entities in western Sydney is central to C3West.

At the time of writing this piece, arts-based projects are being developed with two

commercial partners: Penrith Panthers and SITA Environmental Solutions. The collaborative

engagement between partners involves many processes, including brokering connections

with host businesses; placing artists who develop aesthetic proposals that can contribute to

core business activities; negotiating projects; and engaging with participant communities

connected to the company or its activities. All these activities are expected to contribute in

some way to the depth of artistic outcomes, including, significantly, the generation of new

kinds of relations. Indeed it is this sense of ‘creativity’, conceived in terms that exceed its

conventional alignment with aesthetic output in various art forms, which we wish to

emphasize in this account of arts-based practice. The capacities that are brought into being

in new kinds of collaborative relations are themselves ‘creative’ and worthy of attention.

C3West is very much a venture in process and uncertain in terms of outcomes. In

what follows, we will analyse the conditions for arts-based collaboration as an emergent

phenomenon arising from new organizational relations between entities of quite different

kinds, as with C3West. But firstly we will outline our usage of what has come to be called

‘assemblage theory’ � an analytical toolkit whose theoretical coherence, methodological

specificity and narrative strategy, are continuing to gel in the humanities and social sciences

(see the special issue vol. 2, nos 1�2 of this journal titled ‘Assembling Cultures’). We draw on

its ability to support the investigation of many possibilities of interconnecting hetero-

geneous elements that would not ordinarily be placed together, and in ways that resist the

invocation of an overarching normative or organicist framework or that relies on an ideal of

an accomplished or finished object. Following Yudice’s call to conceive of collaboration as a

process involving ‘all aspects of the development of projects, and of the larger event in

which they are included’ (Yudice 2003, p. 328), we use elements of the assemblage

problematic to amplify the complexity and contingency of such ‘aspects’ in an Australian

example.

2. Assemblage Theory and Collaborative Practice

The analysis of the C3West’s still-developing partnerships between artists, busi-

nesses and local communities requires a theoretical emphasis on process and new forms

36 PHILLIP MAR AND KAY ANDERSON

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in the making, rather than pre-ordained structural categories. The idea of ‘assemblage’ has

largely been filtered through the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze (often in collaboration

with Felix Guattari) who developed it as part of a materialist and realist ontology along

with other metaphorical conceptions � such as rhizomes, strata, and bodies without

organs � that emphasize the specificity of topological forms. Assemblage theory as

variously elaborated from the writings of Deleuze has provided a means for social and

cultural analysts to identify new formations and phenomena proliferating on the edges of

historically structured institutions, to focus on the ‘always-emergent conditions of the

present’ (Marcus & Saka 2006, pp. 101�102).

In our analysis we will utilize two differing trajectories of assemblage theory: firstly to

apprehend the dynamics of C3West’s complex partnerships and working connections

through a more ‘topological’ rather than structural account, and secondly to mobilize an

analysis of collaborative creativity grounded in and acting on ‘in-between’ interfaces

within the assemblage.

For the purpose of examining the organizational topologies of C3West we draw

from Manuel DeLanda’s attempt to insinuate assemblage theory into the sociological

analysis of social formations in A New Philosophy of Society.2 DeLanda prioritizes the

concrete dynamics of ‘topological’ forms over generalizations based on logics of the whole

(developed structures, systems, fields), with their assumptions of structural stability and

linear causality.

Assemblages are defined as ‘wholes whose properties emerge from the interactions

between parts’, which can be used analytically to model ‘intermediate entities’ such as

organizations, social movements, or urban forms (DeLanda 2006, p. 5). Assemblages form

‘wholes’ in the sense of being distinct and singular entities in themselves, without

dissolving the singular qualities of the participating elements. Rather than regarding these

participating elements as integrated within a tightly linked system of relations constituting

a whole, an assemblage approach privileges ‘relations of exteriority’, elements of symbiotic

connection between components which may be otherwise quite unrelated, and which

maintain their singularity and (to some degree) their causal autonomy. For Deleuze, ‘the

assemblage’s only unity is that of co-functioning’ (Deleuze & Parnet 1987, p. 69). Olds and

Thrift (2005, p. 271) succinctly express this collaborative actualization whereby elements

working together may in the process alter the configuration of assemblages: ‘Assemblages

differ from structures in that they consist of cofunctioning ‘‘symbiotic elements’’, which

may be quite unalike (but have ‘‘agreements of convenience’’) and coevolve with other

assemblages, mutating into something else, which both parties have built.’3

Assemblages are not completed or stable constructions: rather than thinking in

terms of systems or ‘organic totalities’, they are better conceived as temporary and

provisional connective arrangements whose elements could be ‘detached from it

and plugged into different assemblages in which their interactions are different’ (DeLanda

2006, p. 10). That is, possibilities always exist, not only for the failure of elements to come

into alignment, but for the formation of other assemblages. This is more likely to be the

case where organizational entities are not strongly defined, lacking clear boundaries;

where network elements are dispersed; where decision-making is decentralized, and tasks

and identities are not sharply defined. Elsewhere, DeLanda uses the term ‘meshworks’ to

indicate such ‘self-consistent structures’ (DeLanda 1997, p. 500) that differ from hierarchies

that have more vertical than horizontal relations. In practice, as shall be seen in the case of

C3West, collaborative networks will often have a mix of horizontally and vertically

CONTEMPORARY FORMS OF ARTS-BASED COLLABORATION 37

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organized elements, of sub-entities that are more or less hierarchically organized. In newly

forming collaborative relations such as C3West, the heterogeneity of entities results in a

‘lumpy’ mix of more hierarchical formal organizations and more ‘flexible’ entities such as

artists and mediators. A network of entities that function in different ways in terms of

organization, command and communication will generate different kinds of interfaces at

which creative activity can be generated.

This resonates with other theories of creativity that go beyond the actions of

individual creators in favour of co-operative activity between domains. For instance

Csikszentmihalyi, although using the language of ‘systems properties’, described creativity

as ‘a process that can be observed only in the intersection where individuals, domains and

fields interact’ (cited in Pope 2005, p. 67). Clearly the extent to which such an amalgam of

entities is able to viably generate creative activity is not only an effect of modes of

‘organization’. DeLanda’s more ‘organizational’ emphasis in A New Philosophy of Society

tends to be concerned with the building up, or ‘processes of assembly’ of larger scale

wholes or collectivities (such as cities and states) from interacting parts, which must be

continuously maintained by recurrent interactions between parts (DeLanda 2006, p. 16).

This emphasis is less useful in apprehending creative practices that emerge from

unpredictable interactions between collaborative elements. More relevant for this purpose

is Deleuze’s conception of creativity as a rhizomatic activity occurring at in-between

points: ‘Creative functions . . . proceed by intersections, crossings of lines, points of

encounter in the middle: there is no subject, but instead collective assemblages of

enunciation: there are no specificities, but instead populations, music-writing-sciences-

audio-visual, with their relays, their echoes, their working interactions’ (Deleuze & Parnet

1987, p. 28).

In order to conceive of creativity in terms of the working interactions between many

parts of the collaborative assemblage (not just artists), we want to evoke a more active

sense of a ‘creative assemblage’ as something facilitative � a way of doing, of working

between heterogenous entities. This resonates strongly with Law’s notion of ‘method

assemblage’ which emphasizes ‘between’ relations; not so much attending to ‘whole’

entities, but to what happens in the ‘crafting’ of boundaries between different entities

(Law 2004, p. 42). This is consonant with writers on collaborative and interdisciplinary arts

practice who have invoked ‘craft’ metaphors of creativity as ‘weaving’ (Carter 2004, p.2) or

‘braiding’ (Sullivan 2005, p. 103) quite different forms of knowledge, ways of working,

habits of different disciplines, and ‘sectors’. Likewise for Law, productive action is

frequently generated out of non-coherence, conflicting rationales, or what he succinctly

calls ‘mess’.

Creativity, seen through this lens, includes but significantly exceeds its familiar

alignment in popular and policy circles, in Australia and elsewhere, with the arts and

cultural industries (see Throsby 2008). In the following analysis, we conceive of C3West, a

contemporary arts-based model, as a practice whose creative viability depends on the

interlacing of many different assemblage elements, and on what can be made to happen

at the intersections of these diverse elements. The analysis will draw together these

strands of assemblage thinking, the assembly of organizational entities and the creative

possibility of crafting new boundaries and configurations between elements. The paper’s

conclusion will assess some of the limitations of our deployment of assemblage theory for

the conceptualization of arts-based collaborations such as C3West.

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3. Sydney’s C3West as Assemblage

C3West is a collaborative network connecting an unlikely amalgam of art museums

and galleries; a number of business enterprises including a rugby league club, a waste

management corporation, and a care facility for the aged; a pool of international and

Australian artists; and various participant groups located in the suburbs of western Sydney.

C3West is literally in an emergent state: while lengthy exchanges have taken place

between commercial partners, art institutions and artists, thus far only a small number of

aesthetic projects have been developed to completion. We will firstly outline the elements

of the C3West assemblage, and then in Section 4, present a case study of a particular

C3West engagement � between French artist Sylvie Blocher and rugby league club Penrith

Panthers � to give a richer sense of the singular development of an assemblage and its

creative possibilities.

C3West is conceived as a strategy for developing art practices through negotiated

partnerships with commercial firms who act as full participants to develop projects, as well

as supply some funding and in-kind resources. The name C3West codifies the sectors of

engagement � culture, commerce, community � and a specific locale, western Sydney.

C3West presents the ideal ‘diagram’ of the assemblage, designating the elements that are

interfaced to facilitate generative effects on populations and identities, territories and

place, through a symbiotic engagement utilizing art processes.

For much of the time, C3West does not ‘exist’ as an organizational entity. It comes

into being as a public entity only ‘after the fact’, when engagement activity has generated

visible partnerships, profile, and recognizable ‘productivity’ that can be displayed. Its

working existence is spasmodic, relying on intermittent exchanges between arts

institutions, commercial partners, cultural broker, artists, and groups of people constituted

as communities through engagement. In this sense, C3West becomes a ‘potential space’

for collaborative arts-based projects to form. The elements brought together in temporary

amalgamations are organizationally heterogenous in nature. Art museums and commer-

cial firms within C3West have bureaucratic structures and chains of command, while other

components are less hierarchically organized, being smaller, more flexible, mobile and

decentred (see discussion below).

An emergent entity not clearly located in any one structure or organization, C3West

is a suitable subject for an analysis as assemblage, drawing together a multiplicity of

phenomena which may not be in clearly determinate relations. Our aim is to elicit some of

the multiplicity of cofunctioning or collaborating components of C3West, without treating

them as fully resolved entities or ‘organic totalities’ that exist apart from their context of

becoming. This means treating various component assemblages within C3West as having

an ‘individual singularity’ which cannot be reduced to any particular relation (Clough et al.

2007, p. 389). We group the principal components of C3West as ‘sub-assemblages’ in

themselves: 1) arts institutions; 2) commercial firms operating as partners to the arts

institutions and hosts to artists; 3) artists; and 4) ‘community assemblages’ (groups having

some relation to the commercial partners, constituted through active engagements with

artists and others through C3West). Attempting to oversee interactions between the

various sub-assemblages mentioned above, are 5) coordinating elements, the C3West

‘steering committee’ and various agents operating in the name of C3West to develop and

maintain connections, including the cultural broker.

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The sum of these component entities does not form a whole as elements of a

system: neither is C3West a central activity for each entity. There may be overlaps and

doublings in function, and elements that split off from assemblages and possibly re-attach

themselves. In what follows, we will describe the component elements in terms of the

broad categories mentioned above.

Arts Institutions

The idea of C3West emerges within the art world. It was first developed in

discussions around 2003 between Brisbane-based cultural broker Jock McQueenie, an

artist, arts consultant, and former Arts Officer with the Tasmanian Trades and Labor

Council, and Elizabeth Ann Macgregor, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art

(hereafter called MCA) in Sydney. Jock McQueenie, while working as Arts Officer for the

Tasmanian Trades and Labor Council, had developed a singularly professional approach to

custom-designing arts projects, bringing together businesses, artists and communities. He

coined this approach the ‘3Cs � Community, Culture, Commerce’. Macgregor, as director of

one of Australia’s foremost metropolitan contemporary art museums, contributed

organizational savvy, international profile, and the institutional power of the MCA. This

first assemblage, linking particular backgrounds and symbiotic ideas about art, ultimately

brought together resources, access to funding, and links with other institutions.

Further expansion of networks led to a partnership between the MCA and regional

galleries in western Sydney (Penrith Regional Gallery and Lewers Bequest, and Casula

Powerhouse in Liverpool). This geographically distributed network connects a metropo-

litan institution located on the Sydney Harbour foreshore at Circular Quay with ‘distant’

regional galleries in western Sydney. The MCA provides legitimacy in the art world,

institutional resources, and funding clout, while the suburban galleries in western Sydney

provide flexibility, contacts on the ground, and local credibility. The partnership has

stimulated connections between Sydney’s ‘high’ cultural centre and its ‘periphery’.

Commercial Partnerships

Each of the business entities involved have singular sets of organizational relation-

ships, directions and capacities. These companies have no special infrastructure for

mediating and supporting cultural activity (unlike many public or educational institutions).

C3West activities take place in an ‘excess’ space beyond their explicit business, their

everyday work routines, as well as the normal public presentation of the business. The

people initially allocated responsibility for C3West in the two most prominent partnerships

were marketing/media managers, the business function most concerned with the

company’s profile and image in the community.

Each commercial partner is itself an assemblage best understood as a singularity,

with distinct commercial operations, orientation to a specific industry, clientele,

geographical locale and market scale. In the C3West approach, a link with existing

commercial activities is negotiated as a basis for developing proposals by the artist

selected as appropriate to work with the partner. The artists then link to a ‘public’ through

participatory activity with a communal grouping. The idea is for activity to occur within a

space opened up between everyday commercial imperatives, the aesthetic project devised

by an artist, and publics drawn into the engagement around the aesthetic project. Ideally

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the work produced through this engagement would not resemble a traditional

commissioning of a work by a customer � a key principle for C3West. The aim is that, in

spite of differences and contentions between differing domains (culture, commerce,

community), creative engagement can generate work that is not merely functional to

commercial or institutional drives and can develop its own singularity.

To illustrate the specific nature of each commercial partner we will briefly describe

the characteristics of two participating businesses: Panthers and SITA Environmental

Solutions.4

Panthers is both a football club, operating a National Rugby League (NRL) team

based in Penrith, a large area of western Sydney, and a hospitality operator, through

Panthers Entertainment Group. The two functions of sport and hospitality are connected

by communal identification generated through loyalty to the football team and a regional

sense of place. Panthers is also an important player in the region’s planning and

environment, particularly through its role as a stakeholder developer of a substantial

section of riverine land linking the club to the Penrith city centre, known as the Riverlink

Precinct Plan. These elements � the Panthers community, the environment of the club, and

the development and planning interventions � have been identified as activities around

which art-based engagements can be generated.

SITA Environmental Solutions is one of the largest recycling and waste management

companies operating in Australia. A subsidiary of the multinational company, Suez

Environnement, SITA promotes itself as a world leader in waste management and recycling

technologies for an environmentally sustainable future (SITA website 2008). SITA operates

three waste management facilities in western Sydney. Its strategy is to generate a strong

sense of local involvement in environmental management concerns, particularly in relation

to the two waste management sites in the Penrith and Liverpool areas of western Sydney.

Initial negotiations with C3West led to the submission of three artists’ proposals in 2007.

By mid-2008, there seemed to be a stalemate, as none of the proposals had been

approved for implementation by SITA’s management, whose perception was that the

proposals did not address SITA’s strategy of providing community education and

complementing the development of the two waste management facilities specifically

enough. At the time of writing, renewed negotiations had resulted in the development of

additional artist proposals, one of which has been realized: Ash Keating’s ‘Activate 2750’

took place in Penrith in March 2009.5

Comparing Panthers and SITA suggests that specific properties of each commercial

assemblage, condition � without determining � the possibilities for engagement between

entities. Panthers has a strong grounding in the local community and an ongoing

investment in maintaining loyalty and local support. This provides the collaboration with a

clearer focus for community engagement. So far, the Panthers collaboration has seemed

the most promising of the C3West partnerships in generating viable artist projects. Its

strong orientation to its locality and its membership constituency grounds the manage-

ment at Panthers who have been prepared to rethink ways of working with others (see

Section 4). SITA is less ‘organically’ anchored in a sense of community and local

‘ownership’, and must generate loyalty in the region through a more abstract projection

of corporate citizenship. Panthers is the more organizationally accessible: C3West could

readily negotiate directly with Panthers’ CEO and senior managers, whereas SITA, which is

embedded in a multinational context, requires more complex dealings with ‘head office’.

The gap between the contemporary arts strategies and the business objectives of the

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commercial partner seems to have been greater in the SITA case. (For the arts institutions

the conception of the artwork seemed too strictly tied to corporate function.) In the early

phase of the engagement with SITA symbiotic processes could not be negotiated.

Nevertheless Activate 2750 presented an opportunity for the players to work together

while retaining an autonomy and singularity of purpose.

Establishing relations between the art institutions and businesses is carried out

largely by the cultural broker, Jock McQueenie. McQueenie makes initial contacts with

businesses and identifies ‘champions’ who seem able to support specific projects within

the organizations. McQueenie could be considered an arts institution player, but at a

remove, institutionally and ideologically: he sees himself as separate from major arts

institutions; having specific characteristics as a cultural broker (not shared by other arts

players), such as the ability to ‘front up to the board’, to play off differing expectations,

sometimes using strategies such as ‘holding back’, and ‘seeding’ ideas (John McQueenie

interview 4 September 2008, Sydney). Other mediating roles have been undertaken and

curators from the MCA and regional gallery directors, who draw on personal and

professional connections, negotiate with commercial partners, and maintain relations with

artists.

Artists

Some 15 artists (including two two-person teams) have thus far participated in

C3West projects in some capacity. Nine of these artists have produced proposals for

specific partners. C3West artists have been selected according to a range of criteria,

including: ‘the aesthetic quality of their work, originality and innovation of their work and

its underlying concepts, experience engaging with communities and working outside the

gallery, ability to work within a corporate context’, and compatibility of concerns and

methodologies with the activities of the corporate partners (Yonetani et al. 2007, p. 2).

Artists are contracted as relatively short term cultural suppliers to work with a

particular partner. Artists appear to be the least ‘territorialized’ component in C3West, the

least tied to physical routines, locales or constituencies. However, successful artists can

become a kind of ‘jet-set proletariat’, as C3West artist Jeanne van Heeswijk put it (interview

22 October 2007, Sydney), pursuing a demanding circuit of projects and residencies. In

spite of C3West’s emphasis on depth of engagement, artists are often subject to tightly

constrained schedules which make it difficult to find breathing space to establish strong

connections with local environments and communities.6

It is useful to consider each artist as a singular assemblage entity. Artists pursuing a

‘relational art’ trajectory develop continuities of approach and methods of engagement

that are specific to their history, mode of working, and conceptualization of projects. At

the same time they are required to maintain sensitivity and flexibility in engaging with

non-art worlds of which they have limited knowledge and experience. Artists may plug

into singular cultural, political and intellectual networks, or ‘creative ecologies’ (Grabher

2004). We will later relate the artist Sylvie Blocher’s enlistment of the multidisciplinary

collective, Campement Urbain for her engagement with Panthers.

Artist engagements are conduits for new community assemblages, interacting with or

even bringing into being new populations. For instance, Regina Walter’s proposal for

Penrith Panthers revolved around the phenomenon of Panther sightings in the surround-

ing Nepean-Hawkesbury area and involved an engagement with a ‘cryptozoological’

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network of Panther spotters who claim to have made many observations of panthers and

other ‘big cats’. This community � connected with Panthers by name and mythology �

could easily be dismissed as ‘loony’. Work such as Walter’s foregrounds dialogue with less

legitimated groups, and acts to ‘challenge dominant representations of a given community

and create a more complex understanding of, and empathy for, that community among

a broader public’ (Kester 2004, p. 115).7

Coordinating Elements

Whatever it is that enables ‘coordination’ of actions within C3West is dispersed and

submerged. The most concrete administrative entity is the C3West steering committee

which meets on a fairly regular basis, usually every six weeks. The committee’s

membership is comprised of art institution personnel including directors, curators, and

the cultural broker, but not artists or representatives of commercial partners; that is, it is

entirely contained within the art institutional assemblage. The fact that these meetings are

nearly always held at the MCA perhaps points to its pre-eminent status within the arts

institution partnership, and to a degree of ‘vertical’ power in the otherwise ‘horizontal’

network that makes up C3West. However, as mentioned earlier, we wish to emphasize the

possibilities of interfaces rather than the hierarchical character of relationships. As we have

argued, a generative assemblage dynamic is located in the mediation and informational

flow between assemblage elements, a role taken on by many actors (e.g. cultural broker,

curators, artists, corporate managers), often in unpredictable ways.

Many of the creative relations take place in dispersed ‘action nets’ (Czarniawska

2004) whose work and strategic calculations are at a considerable distance from the

steering committee. While the steering committee meetings provide a degree of

continuity and stability, they do not necessarily produce consistent and ‘linear’ directions

in terms of project coordination, management activities, informational flows and

communication strategies linking partners and cultural suppliers (artists), as would be

expected from a ‘management’ model. In practice there is little of the temporal linearity of

procedural ‘steps’ and causal chains. While the C3West committee initiates a series of flows

(ideas, people, resources, etc.) to set each project in motion, each interacting node tends

to develop its own symbiotic dynamics ‘in between’ the interacting entities, creating

dispersed creative engagements within C3West: for instance, between arts institution and

business partner; between institution and state funding body; between artist and partner;

between artist and arts institution; between artist and community stakeholder; and

between partner and community stakeholder.

One of the major tasks of the steering committee is to administer funding grants.

C3West began receiving government funding from 2006 from Arts NSW and the Australia

Council for the Arts. Government funding generates a further interface between funder

and funded: along with the provision of money comes agreement to deliver certain

outcomes, which in turn entails timescales, protocols, and reporting requirements.

Funding anchors flows of resources and administrative actions within a framework of

bureaucratic accountability.

Nevertheless, although such functions imply a degree of administrative centrality,

the steering committee cannot be said to ‘manage’ C3West. C3West as a particular

collaborative context is very much constituted by interdependencies and a strategic

interplay of dispersed events. Consistent with our analysis in ‘assemblage’ terms, C3West

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momentarily stabilizes itself in relationships and artistic proposals that can variously come

to fruition or fail to coalesce, and are always open to the creative irruption of the

unexpected. Partners in complex collaborative ventures are likely to adopt different

interpretations concerning agreements and directions, and may seek forms of ‘collabora-

tive advantage’ (Huxham & Vangen 2000, p. 772). In the case of C3West, there are multiple

and shifting ‘centres of calculation’ (Latour 2005, p. 178; Czarniawska 2004, p. 777) which

either support or constrain intensities of activity between elements. As Castells (2004, p. 3)

remarked about informational networks, ‘a network has no center, just nodes’. C3West as

assemblage is dependent on nodal activity to constitute the many engagements that will

bring it into being, to help it to become C3West.

We have described in schematic terms the assemblage elements that are placed

together to generate the possibilities and symbiotic situations for C3West to ‘become

itself’. It is clear that each assemblage component has particular properties that influence

the potential for creative engagement. However, we have not conveyed a sense of

the process occurring between these entities generating artistic proposals. Rather than

attempting to summarize all the separate projects, which might create a false sense of

C3West as having a larger coherence between parts, we now present a case study of the

French artist Sylvie Blocher and her engagement with Panthers as an example of a creative

assemblage that has expanded beyond predictable boundaries. We will examine the

heterogeneous elements being brought into play and the way they are able to act

together through a series of events that are redefining the connective arrangements

between entities to open up new collaborative possibilities.

4. C3West in Formation: Sylvie Blocher’s Engagement withPenrith Panthers

So it’s why we make this group together, because we have this interest about otherness,

singularity, and how to try to find entrances, and we use the art space. (Sylvie Blocher,

interview 7 March 2008, Sydney)

Penrith Panthers was first licensed as a Rugby League club in 1956. It is one of nine

National Rugby League (NRL) clubs based in Sydney. Panthers’ hospitality wing, Panthers

Entertainment Group, runs a local club with some 55,000 members (Panthers CEO, Glenn

Matthews, 16 June 2008, Sydney). In recent years, Panthers Entertainment Group has

expanded to include 14 clubs in New South Wales, and claims to be the largest such

organization in the southern hemisphere (‘Panthers Portal’ 2006). In December 2006,

Panthers Entertainment Group established a partnership venture to jointly manage and

develop its property assets along with ING Real Estate Australia. A proposal ensued to

redevelop Panthers’ Penrith property in conjunction with a larger development scheme of

Penrith City Council connecting it to the city centre. The challenge for Panthers is to

maintain loyalties based on ‘community’ and ‘place’ forged in the region over many years

while pursuing expansive business and development strategies.

C3West’s partnership with Panthers has been developing since an initial meeting in

March 2005. Artists began visiting the site and the first artist proposals were submitted in

April 2007. Brisbane artist Craig Walsh completed Heads Up, the first of his three proposed

projects, in September 2008.

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Sylvie Blocher is an international multimedia artist whose work has a strong critical

and political intent while resisting easy positioning. Her Living Pictures video series,

commenced in 1992, proceeds from a specific question asked of strangers in a particular

place or situation. As Blocher expressed it, ‘Usually it’s a question you can’t answer, but

after a while, sometime one question opens something, and it begins to be like a tube.

Things come out.’ This is hardly a conventional documentary method: its aim is to access

unconscious desire, to get people to ‘do something they wouldn’t do in their real life’

(Blocher interview, 7 March 2008).

Blocher’s first site visit to Panthers took place in September 2006. This brief visit

sparked strong reactions that were both positive and critical. While Blocher found aspects

of the club environment depressing, she was entranced by marketing manager Max

Cowan telling the story of Panthers’ striving to establish a strong community in Penrith: in

Panthers enterprise she detected a utopian potentiality. She was interested in extending

this perceived utopian vision to Panthers’ interventions in planning and development in

Penrith. This led to her developing a strategy of direct involvement in planning the future

for the club and Penrith.

Blocher’s proposal, entitled The Panthers of the Future: the Future of the Panthers, was

submitted in April 2007. This proposal presents itself in a strongly experiential voice,

characteristic of Blocher’s style. She conveys her impression of Panthers gaming rooms �

their sadness and solitude, as well as her strong sense of the presence of utopian ideals in

Max Cowan’s account of the club and its commitment to the Penrith community. ‘I felt the

importance of what a utopian idea like the one promoted by the Panthers could represent

in Australia, but also in a more global context’ (Blocher interview, 7 March 2008). Her

reading of the Penrith environment was critical, presenting a picture of suburban

uniformity not unlike the French banlieues she knows, only more sprawling. The Panthers

of the Future sets out two elements of her proposal: firstly, a video built around the

question ‘What do you miss?’ which would augment her Living Pictures series; and

secondly, ‘Panthers of the Future’ which would analyse the ‘urban territory’ of both

Panthers and Penrith, making architectural, as well as cultural and social ‘suggestions’

about the community.

Although originally contracted by C3West as a solo artist, Blocher proposed working

with Campement Urbain, a multidisciplinary collaborative group with a floating member-

ship comprised of French artists, architects, sociologists etc., including Blocher’s partner,

Francois Daune. Campement Urbain is itself a cross-disciplinary assemblage, a shifting

‘project ecology’. Campement Urbain has extensive experience of collaborative work in

urban settings, such as their 2002 project Je et nous produced about Sevran, an area close

to where Blocher and Duane live in St-Denis (see campementurbain.org/cuv3/).

Panthers, a major business presence in Penrith, is also a major stakeholder in the

planning and development of Penrith City. Panthers had long had plans to develop the 68

hectare property surrounding the original club on the banks of the Nepean River. Panthers

(with its partner ING) is the largest landholder in an ambitious urban planning scheme

coordinated by the Penrith City Council, the Riverlink Precinct Plan. This major project �

still at the concept stage � entails the redevelopment of some 160 hectares of land linking

the Penrith City Centre to the Nepean River. The proposal aims to enhance the

connectivity of the area through improved transport access and river walks, generating

a ‘local identity and sense of place’, and creating a ‘highly desirable visitor destination’

which would include a ‘core of entertainment, leisure and lifestyle uses’ around the

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Panthers club (see Penrith City Council 2007, pp. 10, 12, 24). This larger plan and vision for

Penrith would become the core activity for engagement by Blocher and Campement

Urbain.

In May 2008, Blocher filmed What is missing? as part of her Living Pictures series.

Using interviews of volunteers from the Penrith area, the material informs Blocher’s vision

of Penrith in her C3West work. She uses the freedom of the artist from ‘elsewhere’ � and a

flamboyant personality that may be quite ‘other’ to many suburban Australians � to ask

impertinent questions; questions which might otherwise seem impolite, unconventional,

even naıve. Her questioning is designed to unsettle people, to generate reflections beyond

their comfort zones, and to make them (and us) aware of the depth of ‘what is missing’.

Clearly this is a different kind of ‘community engagement’ to the more common empathic

representation of solidarity with a given group. As one commentator remarked, Blocher’s

strategy is an unsettling one, which aims ‘to insinuate, to infiltrate, if not intervene’ (Ien

Ang, personal communication). However we might describe Blocher’s methods, or

question whether her strategy allows for sustained engagement with local participants,

her approach registered strongly with Panthers: in May 2008, Campement Urbain was

approved to carry out the first stage of their proposal.

The presentation of the artists’ proposal took place in July 2008 at Penrith (Joan

Sutherland Performing Arts Centre) before an audience from Panthers, Penrith Council and

ING. The video and accompanying verbal performance by Sylvie Blocher and Francois

Daune was both a ‘report’ and an aesthetic experience using three narrative devices. The

opening ‘Fairy Tale for Adults’ is a dialogue between a woman and a child written by

Blocher conveying her experience of Penrith during her residencies and the shooting of

‘What is Missing’? ‘Urban Scenario’, the second part, is an analysis and critique of the

existing urban space and a proposal to rethink the Riverlink development in Penrith.

Finally, ‘A Think-Tank of Possibilities’ presents a visual montage of utopian architectural

images, organized around the following architectural categories � roofing, sheltering,

planning, landscaping, infrastructure, living, working, events, lighting, towers.

This event fell somewhere between cinema, performance art, and lecture. It at once

critiqued the planning proposals while seeking to ‘lift the bar’ and inspire hope in the

possibilities at hand. The agenda of the performance was to persuade Panthers, ING and

Penrith Council to include Campement Urbain in a collaborative planning alliance by

demonstrating that the potential collaborative assemblage would greatly enhance the

usual process of planning and architecture. Campement Urbain’s highly performative

mediation brought into play the artists’ prerogative to use fiction or ‘artificial myths’

(Carter 2004, p.11) to bring out ‘difficult truths’. This was done in a way that strategically

blurred boundaries between disciplines (visual art, architecture, planning) in an attempt to

reconfigure them. At the same time the performance undermined the technocratic,

bureaucratic and procedural norms of planning processes, with their privileging of

objectivity and evidence, by aestheticizing these conventional disciplinary procedures, in

order to participate in new ways with them.

Panthers and Penrith Council are currently preparing a brief on the continuing role

for Campement Urbain in a combined planning vision for the Riverlink project. On the one

hand, there is strong support for the collaboration from a number of key consultants and

technocrats, while on the other there is concern about the collaboration producing

impractical or uneconomical results. At the time of writing, the future of the proposed

assemblage is undecided.8

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Whether or not this trajectory is pursued, we can make the following points on

the basis of what has transpired so far, and in light of this article’s conceptual focus. The

project is C3West’s most expansive engagement to date with a commercial partner, one

that potentially both supports and engages critically with a wide spectrum of Panthers’

activities. The process draws in an existing assemblage (Campement Urbain), and opens

up possibilities for a much broader collaborative assemblage, bringing together urban

development, financial, governmental and aesthetic entities and ‘disciplines’. Sylvie

Blocher and Campement Urbain’s intervention demonstrates the potentials of this kind

of aesthetic engagement to work at reconfiguring boundaries and interfaces to change

the way that things are done. In this regard, it is highly suggestive of our interest in

assemblage ‘interfaces’ for conceptualizing arts practice in fresh ways. Out of relations

forged in the interstices of the C3West model � of culture, community and commerce � a

conversation is convened across the boundaries of constituencies, specialist knowledge

and rhetorics, and standard procedures and ways of doing things.

It could appear from this account that creative activity was generated by, and

analytically devolves to, the artist (and her cultural assemblage). But this reading would

neglect the capacities of many players among the partners, especially the management of

Panthers and staff at Penrith Council, who had the courage to court a novel process, to

temporarily abandon the conventional procedures and approaches to problem-solving

and urban design, and to pursue a dialogue across differences. Blocher’s ‘method

assemblage’ opened up possibilities to extend aesthetic and social engagement by

engaging in interdisciplinary knowledge, weaving forms of presentation not usually placed

together, employing a performative and affective mode that utilized the ambiguous figure

of the artist as naıf or fool who does not respect boundaries or local hierarchies. To craft

new boundaries requires a certain affective reciprocity between very different players. We

could say there was a kind of ‘enchantment’ with the artist and the possibilities of art (on

the part of managers and bureaucrats), and with local utopian aspirations in Penrith (on

the part of the artist), which provided a mutual affective resonance which could drive the

engagement. As for the arts institutions, negotiations with the MCA generated more

resources that enabled a larger and more ambitious scale of engagement, while support

from arts institutions in western Sydney helped to sustain the project’s local grounding

and legitimacy.

5. Conclusion: The Creative Assemblage

Accounts of collaborative ventures from within the arts field typically elide the

crucial processes of assembling the very elements that make them possible. Hence George

Yudice (2003, p. 328) noted that not one of some 650 published reviews of inSITE,

the major bi-national contemporary art event taking place across the US-Mexican border,

dealt with the extensive preparations, negotiations with many public private and

community organizations, gaining permissions and so on. Generally the understanding

of ‘collaboration’ was reduced to the encounter between two groups � the (falsely

homogenized) poor and racialized Mexican public, and the artists as creators. Yudice’s

(p. 328) call for a more thoroughgoing analysis of ‘collaboration’ � emphasizing the

manifold forms of labour entailed in this ‘multipurpose, multiaudience, multilabored

event’ � suggests the need for a theoretical approach attuned to complicated and

sometimes conflicted engagements. We employ elements of assemblage theory as a way

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of articulating C3West’s complex and emergent collaborative settings, with two main

emphases: on relations of exteriority as productive of C3West’s emergent components;

and on the creative practices themselves as ways of working across the interfaces of

assemblage elements.

Nevertheless there is a tension in the way we first outline the elements of the

evolving C3West assemblage and then attempt to isolate ‘creative’ activities and events

occurring in between these elements in the case study of Sylvie Blocher. This locates the

‘creative assemblage’ as a working zone (or method assemblage) where specific aesthetic

solutions can be generated, possibly affecting the configuration of boundaries within the

assemblage. We run the risk of splitting apart the analysis of C3West’s organizational

emergence and aesthetic creativity when both are closely intertwined.

Part of the problem may lie in the unwieldiness of assemblage theory itself, which

can be applied it seems across an infinity of scales and registers. Potentially a toolkit for

the analysis of anything from cell division, or Francis Bacon’s painting method, to nation

state formation, assemblage theory itself does not provide the means for relating scales

and causalities between scalar levels. This is both a strength and a weakness: for empirical

research examining many assemblage elements and processes, assemblage theory can be

both powerfully suggestive of a multiplicity of interfaces, while also (and on the other

hand) being methodologically daunting.

There are limits to which elements of C3West we could analyse. For instance we

have not always been able to detail what happens at the ‘micro’ level of creative practice

occurring between artists and administrators. The detailed data was often unavailable to

us: in our defence we could say there are few close studies of collaborative art situations

that detail the whole interactive context of aesthetic practice. As such our use of

assemblage framework in the analysis is indicative, pointing to the potentials for creative

interface, whether actualized or not.

A driving purpose in this paper has been to reposition the overworked term of

‘creativity’ in ways that register the generative capacities of emergent forms of

collaborative practice in contemporary art. In John Law’s book on method assemblage

there is barely a mention of creativity, yet the index entry on creativity directs the reader

to ‘see method assemblage’. Creativity is something of a black box for theorists of

assemblage: it can be directly equated with ‘emergence’. Creativity is also an immensely

overdetermined concept: its contemporary popular and specialist uses remain caught

between the equation with an individual creator such as an artist, actually a relatively

recent historical meaning deriving from the nineteenth century (Pope 2005, p. 39), and the

managerial invocations of collective or corporate innovation in ‘creative class’ and ‘creative

industries’ discourses. As the case of Sylvie Blocher shows, the figure of the artist as creator

can (still) be powerfully performative. However, this artist ‘role’ cannot be presumed, it

must be negotiated as an emergent element affecting the configuration of assemblage

relations.

Examining C3West’s approach to arts-based practice as it has been emerging

through the convening of relationships across the specific domains of culture, community

and commerce, we have demonstrated that creativity is neither an individual achievement

nor a property of social entities (whether artists, or a creative class, or a form of labour in

the so-called cultural industries). More fundamentally, creativity is a ‘way of doing’ that is

made to happen in the interaction of ideas, partnerships, material works and (in the case

of C3West) regions and localities. C3West is enacted in the ‘in between’ spaces where

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disparate discourses, things and places (from Penrith to St-Denis) are brought into

juxtaposition. C3West is manifest more in processes than outputs. And it derives its

provisional unity not from any determinative structure (such as capital), or overarching

causality (culture), or governing impulse (aesthetics), or governmental authority (steering

committee or funding agency) that ‘acts on’ parts whose relations to a whole are ones of

interiority. Instead, C3West comes into momentary coordination from a co-assembly of

(detachable) parts whose interactions, in turn, can bring into being new things and

relations of varying intensities and durations.

Conceived in this enlarged sense, and within the conceptual framework of

assemblage theory, creativity is an ‘affordance’ that is materialized not only in productively

positive relations and outputs. It may also register in apparent stalemates and ‘failures’

(such as the initial SITA proposals). These seeming failures do not imply a disintegration of

an organizational ‘whole’, but can themselves be generative of new directions and liaisons.

It is quite apparent that creativity, whether in the crafting of institutional entities or

arrangements or in specifically aesthetic productions, is fragile and risky in contexts such

as C3West where there is no clear ‘template’ or procedure. At this moment, the fate of

Sylvie Blocher and Campement Urbain’s proposal for further engagement with Riverlink is

unknown, possibly due to financial difficulties on the part of a parent company of the

lender associated with the recent economic crisis. Perhaps this marks the limits of an

assemblage theory that is insufficiently attuned to the scale of wider political economies

and power relations in which ‘entities’ come into contact.

Nevertheless we believe that the use of assemblage theory along these lines

contributes a more powerful way to understand the interfaces of organizational and

aesthetic work as reciprocal forms of labour. Artists, arts institutions, governments and

corporations are seeking � in their different ways � to extend the reach of art in the form of

new kinds of collaborative arrangements and modes of participating in arts practice. With

the resulting heterogeneity of engagements with art, we believe our approach to the

‘creative assemblage’ offers a promising optic with which to explore the complexities and

contingencies of contemporary arts-based ventures, and perhaps to other kinds of

collaborative engagement.

NOTES

1. The Art of Engagement research team has been tracking C3West. Research for this paper

was funded by the Australian Research Council Linkage Projects scheme, and our

research partners, Museum of Contemporary Art, Penrith Regional Gallery and Lewers

Bequest, and the Casula Powerhouse Arts. We wish to thank Michelle Kelly for research

support, and Elaine Lally, Ien Angt and two anonymous reviewers for suggestions about

the direction of this paper.

2. Clough et al. (2007, p. 387) note that DeLanda pursues the construction of an

‘ontological’ account of social formations based on relations of exteriority, in contrast

to the work of many Deleuzian theorists engaging in a more overtly political critique of

societal discipline and control.

3. Cofunctioning elements of assemblages are not limited to human actors and social

entities � they can equally be objects, materials technologies, discourses and ideas, and

documents, such as the skulls, archives, instruments, and paintings that figure in

Bennett’s study which uses assemblage theory to analyse the ‘exhibitionary complex’ of

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two French colonial museums (Bennett 2008, p. 6). Curiously, in A New Philosophy of

Society, DeLanda chooses to delineate the human individual as the smallest element of a

social assemblage (DeLanda 2006, p. 47; Clough et al. 2007, p. 389). In the following

analysis, given the space constraints, we do not pursue non-human flows as constituents

of assemblages, although it would be possible in a separate discussion to include flows

of objects, documents, emails, artists’ proposals etc.

4. C3West also entered into a partnership with HammondCare, a charity specializing in

aged and dementia care, although this partnership is not currently active. In 2007, a

sensory garden was developed along with staff and residents of a HammondCare

residential care facility by C3West artists Hossein and Angela Valamanesh.

5. This event occurred too late to be included in this analysis. Activate 2750 was a public art

performance focusing on the politics of waste. It was comprised of an installation made

of some ten tonnes of waste material normally destined for landfill in a prominent public

square in Penrith, and a series of processions and performances in commercial spaces

throughout Penrith city (see Activate 2750 Catalogue 2009).

6. The arrangements made for inserting artists in relation to a commercial or institutional

setting is particularly crucial for the possibilities of detailed or sustained engagement.

C3West’s practice of negotiation around artist proposals differs from a formal artist-in-

residence arrangement, or the model developed by the Artist Placement Group from the

1960s where artists were (at least theoretically) cast as direct participants in the everyday

running of the organization (Kester 2004, pp. 61�63).

7. At the time of writing, Regina Walter had withdrawn her proposals.

8. Unlike, say, Latour’s or Callon’s actor-network analyses of scientific processes, rather than

working together as flows of translations (Latour 2005, p. 132), the assemblage dynamics in

this case are frequently dispersed and episodic: one entity makes a move that causes an

effect on the other who then makes a move. Delays occur as flows are negotiated through

organizational processes that are more ‘vertical’ in nature. This is magnified by the spatially

distanciated nature of assemblage relations: for instance Blocher’s location in France.

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