Team works

Canadian artist Jillian Mcdonald, working out of a storefront in downtown Manhattan, invites passers-by to tell her their fears, then sews a protective mantra in gold thread into a garment for them.

"Without participation, there's no art - it depends on interaction," Ms. Mcdonald says. "There's nothing like communicating with other people," she adds. "It's more rewarding than working alone."

Ray Kass, founder and director of the Mountain Lake Workshop at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in Blacksburg, Va., has invited visiting artists to work with the local community since 1983. John Cage, folk artist Howard Finster, and French artist Jackie Matisse are a few who've worked alongside students and Appalachian residents.

Two hundred locals attended kitemaking day with Ms. Matisse. More than 700 viewed her artwork, "Kites Soaring In and Out of Space," in a virtual-reality cave. Focusing on a discipline-centered activity to get rural residents involved, Mr. Kass says, "has had the phenomenal effect of creating a kind of local culture."

Such sharing and exchanging ideas in workshops "is an idea whose time has come," according to Kass." It "brings people to life."

At Lafayette College, Professor Kerns designed the studio art curriculum around collaborating with professionals, including such visiting art stars as Frank Stella, Elizabeth Murray, and Faith Ringgold. Art majors as well as students from local schools and city residents participate.

"The community aspect is terrific," Kerns says. Participants learn "art is an experiential moment" - not the exclusive purview of the elite.

Participatory workshops, according to Kass, aid the community by bringing people into art and opening them to abstraction - especially those who wouldn't go to a museum, which he calls a "necropolis setting."

Collaboration expands professional artists' horizons, too.

Without input from other minds, Kerns, an abstract painter, says, "My art always looks like me. In a collaborative moment, you see more possibilities. You can be less egotistical."

Many "eureka" moments result. "Instead of calcifying," Kass, a painter and art professor, says, "you have courage to develop in new directions."

But there are potential hazards to the team approach - such as the clash of strong wills, and the possibility of producing - not ground-breaking art, but a diluted, made-by-committee work.

"If you try to please everyone, you please no one," Professor Yood warns. He raises the question: "Is working collectively homogenizing or enhancing the art?"

The New York-based artist AA Bronson worked for 25 years as a member of the Canadian collective General Idea, until his two partners died of AIDS in 1994. Now working solo, he much prefers the joint approach.

General Idea's process, he says, "was totally collaborative. We became more and more like a group mind, working in unison."

In Mr. Bronson's view, the virtue of collaboration was "the companionship and support and rigor of two other minds checking everything you do. It was a weaving together of all our visions, all so different, each extremely strong-minded."

What about disputes over authorship or reluctance to relinquish individual control? "When you collaborate, you have to accept and often love other people's ideas," Kollwitz admits. "If you're a maniac, crazy artist, that's not easy."

And a desire for personal recognition isn't easy to renounce. "After all this time, you wouldn't mind a little credit," Kahlo acknowledges.

"Collaborating has all the difficulties of a marriage," Rinder says. "There are fights, they break up, the work can get bad. But the upsides are unique to the method."

Cary Loren, a member of the radical art collective and noise band Destroy All Monsters, which originated in Detroit in 1974, says, "Working together is a blast, not drudgery, but it can become restricting."

His partners, the well-known artists Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, have diverse slants, Mr. Loren says. "We come at different angles to it, but we all bring passion."

Destroy All Monsters creates not only visual art but music, an adaptation of the band model and a trend among collectives.

For Bill Viola, whose glossy video art requires a huge crew of technicians, "Creative vision lives in a community. If it stays within the individual, it doesn't go anywhere; it's just self-reflective mirrors. Collaboration becomes bigger than you are."

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