ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the politics of collaboration, but less the poetics of democratic action than the frictions of cross-cultural collaborations, and the especially anxious model of influence that attends it. It explores a joint venture between South Afrian artist Robin Rhode and Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes titled Pictures Reframed, swerves away from ruling notions of collaboration, evincing little interest in spurring audience participation, or in galvanizing any social effort whatsoever. What began as the gentle dismemberment of an errant wire or two culminates in premeditated, watery murder that reframes collaboration not only as a struggle to manage the influence of other creative partners, both present and past, but also as a politics of influence. Throughout his collaboration with Andsnes, Rhode used these analogical linkages to cycle back to the power dynamics that have historically subtended relations between north and south, replacing the politics of difference with a poetics of likeness.
