ARTIFICIAL HELLS

former west
(building, residents, artist residencies, installations) was more important
than a final exhibition of ‘works’. It carries connotations (which would
accelerate in the 1990s) of art overlapping and engaging with the social
sphere, rather than being at one remove from it – more akin to an architectural
project, a particularly apt point of reference for Firminy. Secondly,
art was put into direct confrontation with an ‘authentic’ everyday audience.
This encounter, however, was accompanied by manifold anxieties about
the artists’ authenticity of response. 16 The confrontation between artists
and locals made the question of patronage and intervention particularly
acute. Renée Green recalled that the opening was awkward: artists and
residents were all invited to a party on the top floor of the building, but
‘there was a palpable tension in the air. The artists stayed in groups with
other artists and art world infrastructural personnel, the tenants stayed in
groups with their friends and neighbours. No speech was made. What
could have been said?’ A fight broke out as an inebriated male tenant began
punching in all directions. 17 This tension became one of the central arguments
in Hal Foster’s influential essay ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, in
which he argued that inviting artists to work site- specifically, particularly
in areas with lower- income residents, shifted the discursive frame from
class to cultural alterity, from an economic discrepancy to questions of
cultural identity. 18 Alluding to Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Author as
Producer’ – in which Benjamin criticised an artistic attitude of benevolent
‘patronage’ towards the working class by merely representing the latter in
art and literature – Foster argues that contemporary artists of the kind
exhibiting at Firminy operated on a similar basis of ‘sociological condescension’.
19 In the light of Benjamin’s article, which famously advocates
collaborative authorship and the development of an ‘apparatus’ that allows
as many people to collaborate as possible, it seems striking that Foster
nevertheless dismisses as ‘facilitated self- representation’ those artists who
tried to produce a participatory apparatus (such as Clegg & Guttmann).
Foster’s argument highlights the widening gap between North American
criteria for social engagement and European approaches to this problem
in the 1990s. It is telling, for example, that ‘Project Unité’ included French
artists who would later be associated with relational aesthetics (Dominique
Gonzalez- Foerster and Philippe Parreno) who produced works that have
only an oblique engagement with context; rather than addressing the environment
with a theoretical or critical framework, they created a fictional,
literary, imaginative correlate within the space of the exhibition. 20 The
German/ US artists, by contrast, have a more pragmatic and critical
approach (exemplified in Rosler’s sociological documentary, or Müller’s
investigation into the building’s acoustics). This separation between the
French ‘relationality’ and German/ North American ‘criticality’ becomes
more marked as the 1990s progress; ‘Project Unité’ is one of the last
moments when this generation of artists appear alongside each other. The
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