Cream pages: the dialogues of Tania Koswycz and Richard Layzell.

The dialogues of Tania Koswycz and Richard Layzell - 28 global dialogues and Afterword by Joshua Sofaer. These dialogues with a fictional collaborator originated from her invention and subsequent web dialogues for ResCen, dating back to 2002. This carefully designed volume is based on the Penguin Great Ideas series and was designed by Prof Phil Baines, who also designed the Penguin series. Cream Pages prints edited transcripts of the conversations between artist Richard Layzell and his (invented) interlocutor and collaborator, Tania Koswycz. It is edited by Joshua Sofaer. Responding to a commission from the firstsite gallery in Colchester to create an installation that would ‘reveal artists’ practices’, Richard Layzell invented a group of four artists and made their work for them. In this way Richard deconstructed the creative process through the creative process, a kind of making while being detached. Back in his studio after the exhibition had closed, Richard found himself missing the method and ease of producing the work of one in particular of those four invented artists: Tania Koswycz. He decided to continue fabricating work as Tania. This process gave rise to a relationship of creative provocation in which Richard and Tania sparked each other precisely because they had differing points of view. Richard would ask Tania what she thought about something and found her advice useful. These ‘process’ conversations eventually became an integral part of Richard’s ‘product’. In performances Richard began to speak directly to Tania, later their conversations were published. One of the solutions that Richard found to answer the challenge of making artistic decisions was to dramatise his creative thought through the creation of a dialogue with his invented collaborator, Tania. The dialogues published in Cream Pages give us a glimpse of the working life of an artist. Sometimes it is humorous and poetic, sometimes esoteric, often refreshingly banal – enabling us to see the role of the artist as one constrained by diurnal practicalities, rather than some mystical process of divine inspiration.