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

former west
As Dion indicates, this change of approach to exhibition-making –
embedding artists in the social fi eld, with the request that they work with
specifi c constituencies – not only changed the artists’ relationship to the
work of art (which became a set of more or less fi nely tuned social relationships,
rather than a portable or even visible object), it also changed the
viewer’s relationship to seeing art. Johanne Lamoureux has noted how site-
specifi c exhibitions turn the viewer into a fl âneur or tourist: ‘the traditional
exhibition, complete with its clashes and joys in the placing of works, yields
to the journey. As the map substitutes for the picture, the city replaces the
museum.’ 32 With ‘Culture in Action’, even the city ceded and dissolved into
social constituencies. As a consequence, the demands placed upon the
viewer were even tougher, to the point where spectatorship became an
almost impossible position. Christian Philipp Müller recalls the anti-
climactic nature of the offi cial bus tour: hours of traffi c had to be negotiated
in order to see the eight projects, but there was barely anything to view at
each site. The artists Grennan and Sperandio, who had collaborated with
unionised members of a confectionary plant to design and produce their
own candy bar called We Got It!, recall that their stop ‘took in a display in
a supermarket retailing the chocolate, with a meet and greet and free gift’. 33
Müller’s memory of this was even more fl eeting: being driven at high speed
past a billboard advertising We Got It! with Mary Jane Jacob exclaiming
‘There it is! There it is! . . . Oh, you missed it.’ 34
The emergence of the term ‘project’ to describe the new social orientation
of art emerges with full force at this juncture. ‘Project Unité’
self- evidently references this shift by referring to its entire enterprise as a
‘project’, with all the connotations of an architectural project that organises
social relations. In the catalogue for ‘Sonsbeek 93’, Valerie Smith
states that she would like to include ‘collaborative projects, which would
directly question the idea of a single artistic identity and celebrate collective
creativity’: ‘In “Sonsbeek 93” artists are penetrating institutions.
They take on another role, like . . . working in a prison, making a radio
narrative, making a work where you have to eat a meal in a restaurant.’ 35
Although Mary Jane Jacob doesn’t defi ne the term ‘project’, it is her
systematic word of choice for the eight practices she presented in ‘Culture
in Action’: all are embedded in real social systems and involve participation
with lower class or marginalised communities. On a formal level they
are uncertain in their beginnings and endings, and impossible to represent
visually through photographic documentation. In terms of a social goal,
the projects in ‘Culture in Action’ are also somewhat contradictory: on the
one hand, they express an activist desire to be interacting directly with
new audiences and accomplishing concrete goals; on the other, they do
this through an embrace of open- endedness, in which the artist is reconfi
gured as a facilitator of others’ creativity. The inadequacy of the
traditional catalogue format to convey this confl icting agenda is painfully
205