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

introduction
participatory art despite the fact that since the late 1960s, artists across all
media continually engage in dialogue and creative negotiation with other
people: technicians, fabricators, curators, public bodies, other artists, intellectuals,
participants, and so on. The worlds of music, fi lm, literature,
fashion and theatre have a rich vocabulary to describe co- existing authorial
positions (director, author, performer, editor, producer, casting agent,
sound engineer, stylist, photographer), all of which are regarded as essential
to the creative realisation of a given project. The lack of an equivalent
terminology in contemporary visual art has led to a reductive critical
framework, underpinned by moral indignation.
Academic research is no less subject to these valorising paradoxes of
single and collective authorship: single- authored monographic books have
more status than edited volumes, while the most reputable scholarship is
subjected to the collective monitoring called ‘peer review’. I am acutely
aware that the form of this research is conventional, resulting in a monographic
study – rather than exhibition, DVD, website, archive or more
collaborative form of output. 12 On the other hand, while a number of edited
anthologies and exhibition catalogues around this subject already exist, few
of them make a sustained argument. 13 We should bear in mind that there is
no fi xed recipe for good art or authorship. As Roland Barthes reminded us
in 1968, authorships (of all kinds) are multiple and continually indebted to
others. What matters are the ideas, experiences and possibilities that result
from these interactions. The central project of this book is to fi nd ways of
accounting for participatory art that focus on the meaning of what it
produces, rather than attending solely to process. This result – the mediating
object, concept, image or story – is the necessary link between the artist
and a secondary audience (you and I, and everyone else who didn’t participate);
the historical fact of our ineradicable presence requires an analysis
of the politics of spectatorship, even – and especially – when participatory
art wishes to disavow this.
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