TEST SPECIMENS

How do you rethink collaboration? It's true to say that Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood have never worked together in an obvious fashion. Instead, they designed an alternative way of thinking about creativity: two people producing in tandem, working concurrently, continually bouncing images and ideas off each other. Their drawings - which often fed into record covers, Radiohead's expanded website and other visual material - are more like diptychs than duets.

This exhibition brings together 60 works on paper created by the pair over the course of 1999 and 2000. Neither imagined that the pages torn from their sketchbooks would one day be seen in any formal way. "It was a sort of a form of communicating to be honest," Yorke recalls. "We were thoroughly obsessed with fax machines at the time. I don't think either of us particularly like the telephone." In 1999, the internet and emails were still in their infancy and sharing images online was a long-winded process. Yorke and Donwood would send scrawled faxes instead. "With headed notepaper from fancy hotels, which is always nice experiencing the life of the international jet set vicariously," recalls Donwood wryly. "Loads of expletives and scribblings," Yorke concurs. Over time, the fax imagery disappeared due to the deterioration of the thermal fax paper. "They seemed to fade into nothing," Thom notes.

This fax exchange grew. Both had carried notebooks with them since art school. "Mine was usually the same lyrics repeated page after page after page, with slight alterations. Stan's seemed to be Mickey Mouse turned upside down or something hurting it," Yorke recalls. Eventually, these books became their way to save ideas to share. Each saw something in the other: Donwood was emerging from a visual art language and beginning to experiment with writing prose. Yorke was moving away from focusing on lyrics to drawing. Both were grappling with an energy that existed between text and image.

Fragments of text and unfinished images are continuing tropes in both artist's work: scrawled attempts at capturing energy, emotion and thought. "I think we both try to loosen each other up in different ways," Yorke observes. "There was just a lot of work. A lot of toing and froing. A lot of sifting around the same things again and again until something spoke." While Radiohead's website had become a hub for different ways to use this material, both Yorke and Donwood had also begun to think about text in a different way - somewhere between slogan, lyric, poem and prose. They namecheck Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer as strong influences, two artists who use text in bold and demanding ways.

"I collect one-liners like the ground collects autumn leaves. It just happens all the time. I just hear things all the time, and I'm making notes about them. Stan is much better in the story mode than me," Yorke points out. "Somewhere in the middle of all that, Stan could see value in what I was doing as a coherent thing. I'm a lyricist, so in a way I'm only looking for what works musically: whatever actually fits with the movement of the vowel sounds and syntax of the song and the rest of it is just left. Then suddenly, I wasn't, because we were contemplating it as part of the general output."

Stanley would sift through Thom's work and vice versa. Both had been extremely prolific and Donwood compares it to pinning the tail on the donkey, "If you're not going to get the tail exactly where it needs to be, it's going to be somewhere interesting." The fragmentary nature of their approach brings to mind the ideas of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin around 'cut up' as a methodology for creation, also the work of Dadaist poet Tristan Tzara: meaning created through disorder and reworking.

These drawings are largely black and white, a style that shifted noticeably when the pair worked on album imagery. They were works in progress, moments in time. "They were more like states of mind," Yorke considers. "Music had all this weird baggage to it. And I needed a form of expression. I was doing landscapes just for the therapy of observing something." Many of the drawings came from their respective dreams. "You'd wake up in the morning and try to capture something before it faded away," Stanley explains. "The dream thing was a key communication between both of us back then. It was like a way in, for want of anything," Thom agrees. "It was really just a nice place to start on stuff."

The work was created in the period just after the release of Radiohead's album OK Computer and while Kid A was being recorded, which was a time of personal upheaval. Cue images such as Self-portrait with Spiders or depictions of stalagmites and stalactites in a hallway or vampiric bears or war in the Balkans; the aim was to draw things to make them go away and, as a consequence, there's something deeply intimate about peering into the artists' minds.

The pair have avariety of aesthetic approaches also evident in their own work. At this time, Donwood was fusing influences from Robert Crumb and underground 1960s' comics with Piranesi and architectural drawing while Yorke was fascinated with the irreverence of the Chapman Brothers and the collage approach of The Beta Band. Both were interested in playing with new technical possibilities through scanning and photoshop, very expensive technology back then. "It was still quite unusual to be able to just draw something, scan it and then do stuff with it," Donwood explains. "I learned very quickly you could scan a drawing and if you just invert it, it becomes white on black. It's instantly 10 times better." They were turning up the texture of the paper, cranking up the levels in drop down menus. There was a freedom in their approach. 

Music - or rather the expanded audience and spaces where music was promoted and experienced - was another way for Yorke and Donwood to communicate their ideas. Both were against the pretensions of the art world and preferred to focus on a very different mass audience. "What I was wanting to do at the time was utilize Radiohead's fame as a canvas to put our ideas as big as possible in as many people's faces as possible. Using the record shop as a democratic Art Gallery and advertising hoardings as basically propaganda spaces," Donwood explains. Music was a Trojan Horse for both of them to do whatever they wanted. "We were being completely indiscriminate. I think we still are to be perfectly honest," Yorke says.

Much of this work is violent and scratchy, fed by nightmares, mental unrest, politics and discomfort. Yet it also contains elements of humour, cuteness and beauty which is what makes the drawings stand up 20 years later. The tension between pleasure and discomfort endures.