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

artificial hells
on the fl oor, for the artists’ former colleagues who watched their efforts
cruelly incinerated, and for the museum itself, as seen in Żmijewski’s curt
exchange with one of the lady invigilators. Yet at the same time it also
suggests that education is a closed process of social exchange, undertaken
with mutual commitment, over a long duration, rather the performance of
acts to be observed by others. It takes an artist with an eye for painfully
telling detail to give a compelling structure and narrative to such a formless
and invisible exchange. 43
IV. What Functions, Produces
My fi nal example is the Paris- based sculptor Thomas Hirschhorn (b.1957),
who at regular intervals in the last decade has organised large- scale social
projects in the form of a ‘monument’, often dedicated to a philosopher and
produced in collaboration with residents who live near the site of its
making, usually on the outskirts of a city. Since 2004, a pedagogic component
has become increasingly important to these works. Musée Précaire
Albinet (2004), located in the Aubervilliers district of north- east Paris near
Hirschhorn’s studio, involved the collaboration and training of local residents
to install seven weekly exhibitions of works loaned from the
Pompidou Centre collection (Beuys, Warhol, Duchamp, Malevich, Léger,
Mondrian and Dalí). These were supported by a weekly timetable of
events: an atelier pour enfants on Wednesdays, a writing workshop for
adults on Thursdays, a general debate on Fridays, and a discussion with an
art historian or critic on Saturdays. This timetable continued with a dinner,
made by a family or group (using funds from the project) on Sundays; the
de-installation and installation of work on Mondays; and the vernissage and
party on Tuesdays.
As can be imagined, the primary audience for the Musée Précaire Albinet
was the local and regularly returning inhabitants, rather than a general
public of art enthusiasts. In 2009 Hirschhorn addressed the problem of this
division in a large- scale project located in a suburb of Amsterdam called
the Bijlmer. Its title, The Bijlmer- Spinoza Festival, was deliberately misleading:
the project was not so much a festival as a large installation environment
for hosting a programme of daily lectures and workshops. The construction
was topped with an oversized sculpture of a book (Spinoza’s Ethics),
decorated with bunting, and framed by the residential tower blocks, a
running track and an elevated railway line. A noticeboard and pile of free
newspapers were positioned by the nearest path to entice passers-by, along
with a car covered in brightly coloured votive objects for Spinoza. Entering
the structure, one passed an unlicensed bar. The rest of the installation took
its layout from the aerial view of an open book: the ‘pages’ were walls, and
the spaces in between were rooms with different functions: a library of
books by and about Spinoza, a newspaper offi ce, an archival display about
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