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

introduction
and troubling forms of participatory art and criticism. Breton’s analysis
also suggests that work perceived by its makers to be an experimental failure
in its own time (like the Dada Season of 1921) may nevertheless have
resonance in the future, under new conditions. This model of delayed reaction
has been foundational to my selection of examples, whose inclusion is
based on their relevance to the present day, rather than for their signifi -
cance at the time of their making.
From a disciplinary perspective, any art engaging with society and the
people in it demands a methodological reading that is, at least in part, sociological.
By this I mean that an analysis of this art must necessarily engage
with concepts that have traditionally had more currency within the social
sciences than in the humanities: community, society, empowerment,
agency. As a result of artists’ expanding curiosity in participation, specifi c
vocabularies of social organisation and models of democracy have come to
assume a new relevance for the analysis of contemporary art. But since
participatory art is not only a social activity but also a symbolic one, both
embedded in the world and at one remove from it, the positivist social
sciences are ultimately less useful in this regard than the abstract refl ections
of political philosophy. This methodological aspect of the ‘social turn’ is
one of the challenges faced by art historians and critics when dealing with
contemporary art’s expanded fi eld. Participatory art demands that we fi nd
new ways of analysing art that are no longer linked solely to visuality, even
though form remains a crucial vessel for communicating meaning. In order
to analyse the works discussed in this book, theories and terms have been
imported from political philosophy, but also from theatre history and
performance studies, cultural policy and architecture. 10 This combination
differs from other interdisciplinary moments in art history (such as the use
of Marxism, psychoanalysis and linguistics in the 1970s). Today, it is no
longer a question of employing these methods to rewrite art history from
an invested political position – although this certainly plays a role – so
much as the acknowledgment that it is impossible adequately to address a
socially oriented art without turning to these disciplines, and that this interdisciplinarity
parallels (and stems from) the ambitions and content of the
art itself. 11
At the same time, it must be emphasised that one of the goals of this
book is to show the inadequacy of a positivist sociological approach to
participatory art (as proposed, for example, by cultural policy think- tank
studies that focus on demonstrable outcomes) and to reinforce the need to
keep alive the constitutively undefi nitive refl ections on quality that characterise
the humanities. In the fi eld of participatory art, quality is often a
contested word: rejected by many politicised artists and curators as serving
the interests of the market and powerful elites, ‘quality’ has been further
marred by its association with connoisseurial art history. More radical
options have tended to advocate a confusion of high/ low boundaries or to
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