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

artificial hells
In other words, community arts today tends to self- censor out of fear that
underprivileged collaborators will not be able to understand more disruptive
modes of artistic production.
Aesthetic quality, which had been deliberately left off the agenda of the
Association of Community Artists (founded in 1972), forms the most
fraught core of this debate. It is important to remember that the community
arts movement rejected this question as synonymous with cultural hierarchy
because at the time (the ’70s and ’80s) the idea of funding culture by
and for the marginalised (the working classes, ethnic minorities, women,
LGBT, etc.) was automatically dismissed by the establishment as risible
and necessarily void of quality. On the other hand, advocating process
over product did nothing to rethink the problem of devising alternative
criteria by which to reframe evaluation. By avoiding questions of artistic
criteria, the community arts movement unwittingly perpetuated the impression
that it was full of good intentions and compassion, but ultimately not
talented enough to be of broader interest. One of the key problems here –
which has many parallels with socially engaged art today – is the fact that
community arts has no secondary audience: it has no discursive framing
nor an elaborated culture of reception to facilitate comparison and analysis
with similar projects, because community art is not produced with such a
critical audience in mind. Comparison and evaluation create hierarchy,
which is inimical to the principle of equality underlying the community
arts project. This prioritisation of individual expression over critical self-
examination is, ironically, one of the main reasons for community arts’
ghettoisation by the 1980s: a lack of public critical discourse ensured that
the stakes were kept low, rendering community art harmless and unthreatening
to social and cultural stability.
In the late 1960s, community arts was highly oppositional, since funding
for culture was in the hands of the upper classes, who evaluated
aesthetic quality on the basis of established culture. Today, when the
majority of people in the West have the means to be a producer of their
own images and to upload them to a global audience via Flickr, Facebook,
and so on, such a dehierarchising agenda arguably has less urgency
– even while the bases of these networks are unquestionably commercial,
and access to technology is also a class issue. A levelling of access to
cultural production nevertheless calls into question the difference
between a work of art and social networking. Contemporary art has
arguably become a mass- cultural practice, but art requires a spectator:
who today is possibly able to view the immeasurable amount of mass
contemporary art that exists online? Perhaps, as Boris Groys notes, there
is no more society of the spectacle, only a ‘spectacle without spectators’.
100 Yet at the same time as virtual communities proliferated in the
1990s, the lure of face- to- face interactions seemed to grow stronger
amongst professional artists. 101 Long- term, process- based projects with
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