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

artificial hells
demands costly, heterogeneous and complex arrangements, an ability to
arrive at an understanding with distant, multiple actors who hold very
different positions . . . and whom he must interest, persuade, win over? 67
It is telling that in the projective city, a successful project is not one that has
intrinsic value, but one that allows the worker to integrate him/ herself into a
new project afterwards; in other words, a good project is one that is generative
of further projects through the connections he/ she has established. The
parallels with artistic practice are highly suggestive. Although the project is
introduced as a term in the 1990s to describe a more embedded and socially/
politically aware mode of artistic practice, it is equally a survival strategy for
creative individuals under the uncertain labour conditions of neoliberalism. 68
What is intended (in art) as a radical overhaul of the portable work of art and
its lack of social agency is at the same time an internalisation of the ’60s logic
of post- studio service- based art that, by the 1990s, comes to prioritise personal
qualities of interaction rather than the production of objects: personality
traits (such as adaptability, nimbleness, creativity and risk) replace the
production of visually resolved ‘works’ or ideas. When faced with a slew of
site- responsive projects in exhibitions, biennials and ‘project spaces’, it is
tempting to speculate that the most successful artists are those who can integrate,
collaborate, be fl exible, work with different audiences, and respond to
the exhibition’s thematic framework.
Today it is a familiar argument to say that fl exibility and indeterminacy
of labour are a direct consequence of the withdrawal of manual skills in
industry (and in art), and both result in long- term projects more akin to
services than commodities (visual objects). 69 When these new process-
based experiments are put into conjunction with old formats of display like
the exhibition, there is necessarily a confl ict between these models. Often,
for example, there is barely any object to look at, and the role of the audience
is severely limited, if not foreclosed altogether. As such, experimental
exhibitions like ‘Culture in Action’, while striving to democratise the
production and reception of art, are also in a certain sense profoundly
unequal (albeit in a completely different sense), since they privilege those
who do not need to be mobile: those who can participate in the project are
those who can spend the most time on site. Participation and spectatorship
seem to be mutually exclusive terms, mirrored in the incompatibility of the
project and the exhibition.
The connection between project- based art and neoliberalism is just one
side of the story, however. In the post- ’89 context, there is also the question
of artists’ own political allegiances and the extent to which these impact upon
their production. For the US/ Germans, project work seems to mark the
desire for a pre- existing political position to which the artists and audience
could subscribe, but for relational artists, it seems to denote an aversion to
such a position, since this led to didactic criticality in past art. Both approaches,
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