Five Crossover Collaborations That Changed How We Look At Art And Music

We’re collaborating with Smirnoff on a series of articles exploring the world of international collaboration. Follow the journey #WhatWeBring

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Stanley Donwood and Radiohead 

Perhaps one history’s finest artistic bromances, Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke initially met as art students. When asked of their meeting in a Reddit AMA, Yorke said: “I met him first day at art college and he had a better hat and suit on than me. That pissed me off. So I figured I’d either end up really not liking this person at all, or working with him for the rest of my life.” The latter premonition has turned out to be fulfilled wonderfully, with Donwood creating all of Radiohead’s album and poster art since 1994.

It would be impossible to imagine Radiohead without the menacing beauty of Donwood’s work. Intricate and weighty at times, expressive always, Donwood takes on the Herculean task of providing a banner for the many different tones of a Radiohead album. This is made possible by the keen interest the band pays to the development of his work, with Donwood sitting in on early stages of their recordings.

Stanley Donwood’s Radiohead cover art.

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Salvador Dali and Alice Cooper

If Thom and Stanley are a bromance, then Salvador Dali and Alice Cooper are an opiate-fuelled blind date that degenerated into a three-week binge of love/art-making. This metaphor may also have actually been how it played out, too.

With Cooper’s tendency toward creating concerts that feature guillotines, electric chairs, a metric fuck-ton of fake blood, and Dali, y’know, being Dali, it’s little surprise they hooked up. This meeting of the minds occurred in New York in April 1973, where Dali gifted Cooper a plaster brain sculpture stuffed with a chocolate éclair covered in ants. Adorable.

From there it was hardly any leap at all to Dali’s work First Cylindric Chromo-Hologram of Alice Cooper’s Brain. While not as visually stunning as I imagine their sleepover parties to have been, it’s still one of the earliest explorations of holography, and gets bonus points for its subject matter – a cross-legged Cooper biting the head off of the Venus De Milo while wearing $2 million worth of diamond tiaras and necklaces. Naturally.

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Marina Abramovic and Jay Z

Not all collabs are blissful stories of mutual fulfilment, however. In 2013 Jay Z wanted to shoot a video for his song Picasso Baby, adapting Marina Abramović’s work, The Artist Is Present, where she sits at a table opposite members of the public and stares at them.

After the initial public hysteria at the thought of these two superstars colliding, it emerged that Jay Z apparently exploited Abramović by not donating money to her art museum, the Marina Abramovic Institute, like he said he would. “He came to my office and I gave him an entire PowerPoint presentation and said, ‘Okay, you can help me, because I really need help to build this thing,'”she explained to Spike magazine. And I mean, fair enough. Powerpoint is a pretty binding medium.

Then it emerged that he did in fact donate the cash, and Marina just hadn’t been informed. Everyone apologised, got a little more famous, and the whole saga was about as entertaining as Jay listlessly rap-strutting around in a circle while Abramović stares him down with her witch-summoning hands.

Some in the art world declared it “the day that performance art died”. Considering how many Vines it spawned, though, I’d say that both his donations and gifts to the art world are the same thing – according to artnet News, his contribution was “substantial.”

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Bjork and Chris Cunningham

You could do a ‘Six Degrees of Inspiration’ with any weird artist and you’d get to Bjork pretty quickly. She’s done video installations with Matthew Barney, costume design with Oscar-winning designer Eiko Ishioka and hangs out with Michel Gondry just sort of chucking paint at stuff on the reg.

However, for sheer beauty and robo-boners, her collaboration with Chris Cunningham in her video clip ‘All is Full of Love’ is my personal favourite. Irrespective of the fact that Bjork as a semi-naked android looks like a total babe, Cunningham is able to create in four minutes a more stirring love affair than several seasons of The L Word. The pacing, the shots, and the use of technology are all done with a tenderness that fits perfectly with the song.

This is an especially nice surprise, because Cunningham’s other musical collaborations range from the unsettling to the deeply unsettling. Soulless midget clones, desecrated housing estates, embryonic television monsters, tormented grannies (and this is just the single Aphex Twin song). I still vividly recall my classmates walking in on me as I sat in the media room watching the limousine orgy scene. It … was difficult to be my friend.

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Spike Jonze and Arcade Fire

Remember when Spike Jonze wasn’t a brilliant intense man-child? I do not, because there has been no such time. He came out of the womb convincing people to set fire to themselves and run through the streets listening to songs about California. In December 2000 he graduated the school of ‘Surreal Shit Set to Music’ when he convinced Christopher Walken to do a five-minute dance routine in an empty hotel. It won six MTV awards.

I would like to give Jonze this accolade for his work on Girl Yeah Right, which still contains one of the most beautiful scenes in a skateboard video, but that might be a little too esoteric. Instead his collaboration with Arcade Fire on the short film Scenes from the Suburbs is what takes the cake.

Set in a dystopian anywhere town, this short manages to capture the joy and destructiveness of the aimless youth we all wish we still were. Indiewire called it “absolutely fucking gorgeous” when it premiered in 2011. The only way it could be any more personal and moving would be if it was somehow set in your own home town.

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From making a track to mixing a drink, creativity revolves around collaboration. What we borrow, what we share, what we steal #WhatWeBring

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Rafael is a fiction and poetry writer.