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

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however, result in a formal indeterminacy in which duration and process are
privileged over formal resolution, be this staged in relationship to the artists’
own community or to lower- income/ marginalised social constituencies.
The reason why it is exhibitions (rather than individual works) that
frame this discussion of art’s renewed interest in the social in the early
1990s becomes clearer in this light. It is striking that the most forceful statements
of this period are by curators rather than artists: in all of the examples
I have discussed, the curatorial framework is tighter and stronger than the
projects by individual artists, which are open- ended, unframed, and moreover
made in response to a curatorial proposition. It is also striking that
artists embrace the exhibition as a medium at this time (‘Sonsbeek 93’, for
example, even included an entire exhibition, The Uncanny, curated by Mike
Kelley); they argue that an exhibition is a signifying ‘series’ (Parreno) or a
‘chain’ (Huyghe) and that the spaces between the objects are as important
as the objects themselves. 70 In paying attention to relationships, rather to
individual objects, it is the conceptualisation of the ensemble that seems to
gain strength while the individual works recede. 71
Recent writing on the exhibition has tended to celebrate it as a place of
assembly – as a forum that exhibits us as viewers as much as the objects, and
which thereby compels us to refl ect on our own position and perspective. 72
Yet all of the exhibitions discussed in this chapter place the idea of the exhibition
as a unifi ed assembly under pressure, since they multiply and
fragment its publics. Their open- endedness – whether on the curatorial
level of abdicating decisions about content to the artists, or on the artistic
level of creating an open space for participants – is frequently experienced
by the viewing public as a loss, since the process that forms the central
meaning of this work is rarely made visible and explicit.
The parallels with community arts here are manifold. Although the
logical conclusion of participatory art is to foreclose a secondary audience
(everyone is a producer; the audience no longer exists), for these actions to
be meaningful, for the stakes to be high, there need to be ways of communicating
these activities to those who succeed the participants. Subsequent
experiments in the 2000s have given rise to more vivid ways of conveying
such projects to secondary audiences. The implications of this reconciliation
between dematerialised social process and the object (together with its
inevitable circulation on the market) is one of the themes of the next chapter,
which addresses contemporary art performance.
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