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

artificial hells
Rirkrit Tiravanija, untitled 1993 (fl ädlesuppe), 1993
Troncy has repeatedly stressed that his curatorial experimentation
derived from the artists’ own interests in open- endedness. 52 The success of
this approach nevertheless relies on a group of artists who are loosely
sympathetic to each other’s work, who are already in dialogue with each
other, and among whom communication is relatively clear. When this
model of exhibition-making is imposed by a curator on a group of artists
who were not already in conversation, and for whom a refl ection on the
exhibition as medium was not a direct problematic in their work, the results
immediately become more fraught. The exhibition ‘Interpol’ (1996, Färgfabriken,
Stockholm), a curatorial collaboration between the Russian
curator Viktor Misiano and Swedish curator Jan Åman, provides an important
fi nal case study in considering the plight of spectatorship in
performative exhibitions, as well as highlighting the differences between
Western artists and those from the newly emergent former East. Like many
of Eric Troncy’s exhibitions, the entire structure of ‘Interpol’ consciously
attempted to be ‘performative’, in other words, to be made on site by the
artists in collaboration with each other: the curators aspired to ‘abandon the
rules of the old game and create a process that would set its own rules’. 53
Diplomatically, the project was an exercise in cultural politics: the aim was
to form ‘a new, collaborative and democratic model for the realisation of
the Russian- Western project at the international and Moscow scenes’. 54 To
achieve this, Åman and Misiano chose artists from Sweden and Russia
respectively, who could in turn select one or more co- authors from any
region. 55 However, the playfulness of this exhibition structure quickly hit
rocky ground: the different ideological contexts from which the participants
were drawn led to outright disagreements and eventually to a
complete breakdown of communication.
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