Collaborations showed 74 collaborative paintings and drawings by Richard Hamilton and Dieter Roth in the three weeks leading up to the exhibition.
Involvement in collaborative acts generates, for Roth, the conviction that two or more artists together can be more imaginative, daring, extreme and aggressive than working separately – one can shed responsibility and the glory and blame can be shared.
“Hamilton, anticipating Roth’s greater speed, prepared a number of works in advance for Roth to work on in the first week of the collaboration, at the same time as he was making his own for Hamilton to capture their collaboration. Roth’s intention was to produce images so bold and casual that their absurdity would demand maximum effort from both collaborator and audience, hence the grotesque horrors, the terrible sweetness and the studied naivety (inventive and in any case provocative) that makes them so difficult to assimilate. The results of these interactions (the paintings), the consequence of an ambition to make them as profound as they were hilarious, posed a problem of qualitative ambiguity. The solution to this problem of communication, proposed by Roth, was to produce a “certificate”, consisting of a separate painted or drawn version of each of the works, which supports the qualities (negative or otherwise) of the “original” in conventionally acceptable terms”.
For this exhibition they carried out an idea of Marcel Broodthaers, whose death had prevented him from carrying it out: to make an exhibition for dogs with themes suitable for dogs, hanging the images at the necessary height for possible canine inspection. This small group of images is also certified as “pictures for dogs”. This section also includes sculptures.
To continue with the homage to the dogs, the artists made a multiple: Canciones de Cadaqués, published by Galeria Cadaqués and edition hj. mayer – stuttgart. These are two 45rpm vinyls featuring the artists’ performance recordings in the studio (in the first one) and, in the second one, the performance of Chispas Luís, a dog from Cadaqués known for his peculiar barking, accompanied by the voice and guitar of both artists.
The following year a book-catalogue was published Collaborations of Ch. Rotham which includes reproductions of all the works exhibited in the gallery, texts by the artists, photographs by Rita Donagh and Maria Broodthaers. The gallery produced a deluxe edition of 30 copies, including 3 prints (one by each artist and the third in collaboration), the Rotham Certificates, a set of postcards with the 37 certificates and the Collaborations Posters.
See editions Canciones de Cadaqués , Collaborations of Ch.Rotham, Collaborations Posters
