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

artificial hells
prioritise other terms (in the words of Thomas Hirschhorn, ‘Energy yes,
quality no!’). This book is predicated on the assumption that value judgements
are necessary, not as a means to reinforce elite culture and police the
boundaries of art and non- art, but as a way to understand and clarify our
shared values at a given historical moment. Some projects are indisputably
more rich, dense and inexhaustible than others, due to the artist’s talent for
conceiving a complex work and its location within a specifi c time, place and
situation. There is an urgent need to restore attention to the modes of
conceptual and affective complexity generated by socially oriented art
projects, particularly to those that claim to reject aesthetic quality, in order
to render them more powerful and grant them a place in history. After all,
aesthetic refusals have happened many times before. Just as we have come
to recognise Dada cabaret, Situationist détournement, or dematerialised
conceptual and performance art as having their own aesthetics of production
and circulation, so too do the often formless- looking photo- documents
of participatory projects have their own experiential regime. The point is
not to regard these anti- aesthetic visual phenomena (reading areas, self-
published newspapers, parades, demonstrations, ubiquitous plywood
platforms, endless photographs of people) as objects of a new formalism,
but to analyse how these contribute to and reinforce the social and artistic
experience being generated.
A secondary methodological point relates to the pragmatics of my
research. I have already mentioned the geographic purview of this book: it
is international but does not attempt to be global. To stay local is to risk
provincialism; to go global risks dilution. Language has been an ongoing
problem: in conducting my case studies, I was confronted with the unavoidable
reality that I do not have the language requirements to do original
archival work in so many different contexts. For better or worse, English is
the lingua franca of the art world, and is the language in which I have
undertaken the bulk of this research. And due to the experience- based
character of participatory art and its tangential relationship to the canon,
the bulk of this research has been discursive: seven years of conversations,
interviews and arguments with artists and curators, not to mention the
audiences to whom I have lectured, colleagues who were patient interlocutors,
and students at numerous institutions.
One of this book’s objectives is to generate a more nuanced (and honest)
critical vocabulary with which to address the vicissitudes of collaborative
authorship and spectatorship. At present, this discourse revolves far too
often around the unhelpful binary of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ spectatorship,
and – more recently – the false polarity of ‘bad’ singular authorship and
‘good’ collective authorship. These binaries need to be taken to task, and
with them the facile argument – heard at every public debate about this art
I have ever attended – that singular authorship serves primarily to glorify
the artist’s career and fame. This criticism is continually levelled at
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