Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

artificial hells
what extent is this a new problem? Some of the best conceptual and
performance art in the 1960s and ’70s similarly sought to refute the
commodity- object in favour of an elusive experience. Yet visuality always
remained important to this task: however ‘deskilled’ or desubjectivised,
conceptual and performance art nevertheless manage to prompt a wide
range of affective responses, and their photo- documentation is capable of
provoking deadpan amusement, wry embarrassment, iconic reverence or
appalled disgust. By contrast, today’s participatory art is often at pains to
emphasise process over a defi nitive image, concept or object. It tends to
value what is invisible: a group dynamic, a social situation, a change of
energy, a raised consciousness. As a result, it is an art dependent on fi rst-
hand experience, and preferably over a long duration (days, months or
even years). Very few observers are in a position to take such an overview
of long- term participatory projects: students and researchers are usually
reliant on accounts provided by the artist, the curator, a handful of assistants,
and if they are lucky, maybe some of the participants. Many of the
contemporary case studies in this book were gleaned through hit- and- miss
fi eld trips, which led me to understand that all of this work demands more
on- site time commitment than I was habitually used to as a critic of installation
art, performance and exhibitions. Ideally several site visits were
necessary, preferably spread out over time – a luxury not always available
to the underpaid critic and tightly scheduled academic. The complexity of
each context and the characters involved is one reason why the dominant
narratives around participatory art have frequently come to lie in the hands
of those curators responsible for each project and who are often the only
ones to witness its full unfolding – at times present even more so than the
artist. 9 An important motivation for this study was my frustration at the
foreclosure of critical distance in these curatorial narratives, although I
have come to realise that in staging multiple visits to a given project, this
fate increasingly also befalls the critic. The more one becomes involved,
the harder it is to be objective – especially when a central component of a
project concerns the formation of personal relationships, which inevitably
proceed to impact on one’s research. The hidden narrative of this book is
therefore a journey from sceptical distance to imbrication: as relationships
with producers were consolidated, my comfortable outsider status (impotent
but secure in my critical superiority) had to be recalibrated along more
constructive lines.
This trajectory is refl ected in this book: readers may note the shift
between the polemic in Chapter 1 – fi rst published (in shorter form) in 2006
– and the conclusion from 2011. The book’s title, Artifi cial Hells, is intended
to serve both as a positive and negative descriptor of participatory art.
Taken from André Breton’s eponymous post- mortem of the Grande Saison
Dada in Spring 1921, in which he argues for the exquisite potential of social
disruption in the public sphere, the title appeals for more bold, affective
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