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

incidental people
Main hall of the Cedric Price building in Kentish Town, London, undated
premised on undoing such cultural hierarchies. This situation fi nds an
uncomfortable parallel in the relationship of participatory and socially
engaged art to New Labour cultural funding policy in England (1997–
2010), discussed in Chapter 1.
In short, the 1974 report seemed to backfi re since its vagueness gave the
Arts Council the tools to redevelop community arts for its own ends, i.e. as
‘social provision’ (face painting for deprived children, getting teenagers to
paint the walls of community centres) rather than community empowerment
fomenting and supporting campaigns for social justice. One could
argue that the original impetus of community arts – as a dehierarchised,
participatory mode of art making – found its popular legacy in the 1980s in
an emergent rave culture, through groups such as the Survival Research
Lab and the Mutoid Waste Company making large- scale temporary installations
from recycled materials at outdoor festivals. 98 Its ‘high art’ legacy is
the softly- softly approach of present- day socially engaged art, where situations
of negation, disruption and antagonism (the hallmarks of the historic
avant- garde) are no longer perceived as viable methods. Sean Cubitt has
articulated this convention as follows:
The problem with art undertaken in the public sphere, with its faint aura
of social therapy and social work, is that though it may develop expressive
powers in participants, we are always reluctant to tear down the
fragile unity of the self that is being expressed. That is the kind of risk it
is perhaps fair to ask of yourself, but not of others, relative strangers. 99
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