Zu Zweit nach vorn
/11
- Getting Ahead Together
- Zu Zweit nach vorn
- 1996
- b&w photograph, video, documentation of the performance; 21 x 29,7 cm, 23 min 35 sec
The performance “Zu Zweit nach Vorn” [Getting Ahead Together] was mounted by Linda Bilda and Ariane Müller at the b_books store in Berlin in 1995. The two were working together on the zine “ArtFan” at the time, and that evening saw them discuss their collaboration in a witty and humorous manner. The performance begins with a spoofed lecture in which Bilda and Müller, parodically reading off of pieces of paper, both expound upon what it means to collaborate professionally—which doesn’t always necessarily entail friendship. They first speak about the positive aspects of working together as a team and the strength to be derived from doing so. They then begin contemplating the negatives along with the precarious working conditions that they’d had to endure just prior to the rise of the Internet and the victory march of global capital, with one type of experience that they relate in this slapstick event being sharing a room or an apartment key. The two also start a contest that involves each of them using scissors to cut open the jacket of the other and eventually culminates in a pie fight. They ultimately leave the room—whose bookshelves had been covered with plastic wrap as a precautionary measure—with pie-smeared faces. Rivalry and the necessity of discursive processes characterized the collaborative work that went into designing, editing, and publishing their zine, which ultimately came to embody an important document concerning the art world of the 1990s. W.S.