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

artificial hells
Irene and Christine Hohenbüchler, untitled project for ‘Sonsbeek 93’
subsequent projects in two psychiatric clinics in Germany, but the sisters
recall the Sonsbeek residency as particularly stressful.
Given the current vogue for referring to this kind of work as ‘social’ and
‘political’, it seems surprising that Smith was reluctant to label her show as
such. 26 It is striking that Yves Aupetitallot expresses the same sentiments when
interviewed by Dillemuth about ‘Project Unité’: ‘the starting point of this
project was and is’, he says, ‘the relation between art and society, but society
in a very large sense, it’s not only social art or public art’. 27 Later, Aupetitallot
explains that, for him, the social denotes ‘national responsibility’ rather than
‘specifi c social groups’, and he alludes to the Le Corbusier building as cultural
patrimony. That both curators are reluctant to call their shows ‘social’, despite
this being an important aspect of their curatorial agendas, indicates the degree
of conservatism that was then dominant in the art world (no better image of
which was the press’s hostile response to the 1993 Whitney Biennial, which
opened in March that year and embraced a critical identity politics); it also
points to the lack of vocabulary for describing this work. Prior to the institutionalisation
of participatory art in the wake of relational aesthetics there was
simply no adequate language for dealing with works of art in the social sphere
that were not reducible to activism or community art. 28
If Smith and Aupetitallot show a reluctance to name their exhibitions as
shows of ‘social art’, then the community- based work being formulated in
the US at this time – which was about to be framed by the artist Suzanne
Lacy as ‘new genre public art’ – showed no shortage of faith in such a
mission. There, an artistic project dovetailed with a social conscience, if
not exactly an explicitly leftist political project. Lacy was one of eight
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