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

artificial hells
Thomas Hirschhorn, The Bijlmer-Spinoza Festival, 2009, The Spinoza Play
Bijlmer- Spinoza Festival was the ostensible content given to us to be
analysed in a straightforward manner. The project was more akin to a
machine, whose meaning lay in everyone’s continual production and
collective presence, and only secondarily in the content of what was
being produced; it was not unlike endurance- based performance art –
which is why the ‘Child’s Play’ workshops seemed so apt an inclusion.
Hirschhorn frequently asserts that he is not interested in ‘participation’
or ‘community art’ or ‘relational aesthetics’ as labels for his work, preferring
the phrase ‘Presence and Production’ to describe his approach to
public space:
I want to work out an alternative to this lazy, lousy ‘democratic’ and
demagogic term ‘Participation’. I am not for ‘Participative- art’, it’s so
stupid because every old painting makes you more ‘participating’ than
today’s ‘Participative- art’, because fi rst of all real participation is the
participation of thinking! Participation is only another word for
‘Consumption’! 46
Hirschhorn’s conjunction of art, theatre and education in The Bijlmer-
Spinoza Festival was so memorable because it avoided the pitfalls of so
much participatory art, in which there is no space for critical refl ection,
nor for a spectatorial position. Several audiences were addressed simultaneously
and equally: both visitors to the ‘Straat van Sculpturen’ exhibition
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