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

notes to pages 18– 23
28 I say schizophrenically, since Benjamin advocates new technology and
mass audiences, while Debord scathingly critiques a society of mass
consumption.
29 Reinaldo Laddaga, ‘From Forcing to Gathering: On Liisa Robert’s
“What’s the Time in Vyborg?” ’, unpublished manuscript, p. 1.
30 Projects sharing similar values to contemporary art can be found the
world over, from a travelling cinema in a lorry that tours the Outer
Hebrides (The Screen Machine), to the ‘ethical capitalism’ of the microfi -
nance movement in India, to Slim Peace (a network of Arab- Israeli
self- help weight- loss groups for women in Israel).
31 Oda Projesi in Claire Bishop, ‘What We Made Together’, Untitled, 33,
Spring 2005, p. 22.
32 Ibid.
33 Maria Lind, ‘Actualisation of Space’, in Claire Doherty (ed.), Contemporary
Art: From Studio to Situation, London: Black Dog, 2004, pp. 109– 21.
34 For a detailed discussion of Bataille Monument, see Thomas Hirschhorn’s
article in Resistancia/ Resistance, Third International Symposium on Contemporary
Art Theory (SITAC), Mexico City, 2004, pp. 224– 44, and my
‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, 110, Fall 2004, pp. 51– 79.
35 Lind, ‘Actualisation of Space’, this and all subsequent quotes from pp.
114– 15.
36 Suzanne Lacy, ‘Introduction’, in Lacy (ed.), Mapping the Terrain: New
Genre Public Art, Seattle: Bay Press, 1995. Of all the essays in this collection,
Suzi Gablik’s ‘Connective Aesthetics: Art After Individualism’
offers the most far- reaching denunciation of modernism as solipsistic:
‘With its focus on radical individualism and its mandate of keeping art
separate from life, modern aesthetics circumscribed the role of the audience
to that of a detached spectator- observer. Such art can never build
community. For this we need interactive and dialogic practices that
draw others into the process . . .’ (Gablik, in Lacy, Mapping the Terrain,
p. 86.)
37 Lucy Lippard, ‘Entering the Bigger Picture’, in Lippard, The Lure of the
Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society, New York: New Press,
1997, pp. 286– 90. See especially her eight- point ‘ethic of place’, pp. 286– 7.
38 Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 151.
39 Erik Hagoort, Good Intentions: Judging the Art of Encounter, Amsterdam:
Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, 2005,
pp. 54– 5.
40 See for example: ‘The standards Superfl ex have adopted for evaluating
their work completely transcend the rewards to which most artists aspire.
Since most of their contemporaries, given the choice between fi ghting
world poverty and getting a positive review in a magazine, would most
likely choose the latter, perhaps Superfl ex’s most meaningful contribution
to date has been to demonstrate to the international art community
291