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

notes to pages 37– 43
79 ‘This kind of work is open to such accusations that are often knee- jerk
when any interaction with the general public is involved, and its subtext
is that the general public is not intelligent enough to understand the
context of or ideas behind the work. The fact that not only do they understand
the process but they enjoy it and then “make” the work almost
makes the critics’ role redundant. People aren’t stupid. I think any miner
who has been effectively at war with the government for a year can handle
himself working with an artist.’ (Deller, cited in Slyce, ‘Jeremy Deller:
Fables of the Reconstruction’, p. 77.)
80 A precedent for this multiple ontology would be Robert Smithson’s
Spiral Jetty (1970– 72), which exists as an earthwork, an essay and a
film.
81 ‘It is simply no longer possible to disconnect the intention of an artist’s
work, even when the content is deeply social or an institutional critique,
from the marketplace in which even hedge fund investors now partake.’
(Gregory Sholette, ‘Response to Questionnaire’, October, 123, Winter
2008, p. 138.)
82 See for example Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized
Culture, London: Routledge, 1999; Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics
of Performance, London: Routledge, 1993.
83 Rancière, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, p. 277. ‘The less the dramaturge
knows what the spectators must do as a collective, the more he knows
that they must become a collective, turn their mere agglomeration into
the community that they virtually are’ (p. 278).
84 See Jacques Rancière, interview with François Ewald, ‘Qu’est- ce que la
classe ouvrière?’, in Magazine Littéraire, 175, July–August 1981, cited in
Kristin Ross’s introduction to Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster,
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991, p. xviii.
85 Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor, Durham, NC and
London: Duke University Press, 2003, p. 188.
86 Ibid., p. 189.
87 Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959– 1960, London: Routledge,
1992, p. 80.
88 Rancière, ‘The Aesthetic Revolution and its Outcomes’, p. 150.
Chapter Two Artifi cial Hells
1 The centrality of Futurism to histories of performance art has been put
forward most classically in RoseLee Goldberg’s Performance Art: From
Futurism to the Present, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1988. Goldberg
reads Futurism through the lens of visual art, while this chapter will
argue for its indebtedness to theatrical models.
2 An exception to this general rule would be the performances of Oskar
Kokoschka, such as his shadow play The Speckled Egg (1907), and the
295