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

notes to pages 185– 8
limited, and tended to revolve around whether Sanctuary was good
theatre or not. A point that participants repeatedly brought up was the
high degree of participation expected of them, and that they had not
behaved as they would do in real life. At the same time, the tenants of the
middle- and upper- class housing had been far more apathetic than Box
Street, all of which seemed to correspond to their behaviour in reality.
The report concludes: ‘those who claimed that they were not aware of the
role they were to play were during the show undergoing an inward struggle
about whether to participate or not, which refl ected the dilemma they
live with in real life’.
86 Bill Harpe, ‘Notes: Towards a Common Language – exhibition – Walker
Art Gallery’, October 1973, The Blackie Archive.
87 Starting in 1965, for example, Medalla is regularly reviewed or featured
in art magazines, which tend to position him as a kinetic artist.
88 Guy Brett refers to this work as a ‘game’, and draws a connection between
Medalla’s use of colour and materials and that of Brazilian artists Lygia
Clark and Hélio Oiticica, whom he had showed (alongside Medalla) at
Signals Gallery. See Guy Brett, Exploding Galaxies: The Art of David
Medalla, London: Kala Press, 1995, Chapter 6, ‘Any Number of People’.
89 Ed Berman left Inter- Action in 1984, but others continued with the project,
today known as InterChange and based in Hampstead Town Hall.
90 Ed Berman, interview with the author, London, 8 January 2010. In 1981–
82, Berman was invited by Michael Heseltine (Secretary of State for the
Environment in Thatcher’s cabinet) to be special advisor on inner city
problems and the voluntary sector. Berman also courted the Royal
Family: Princess Anne opened the Inter- Action Centre (designed by
Cedric Price) in 1977, while Prince Charles presented a BBC TV
programme on Inter- Action in 1979.
91 An exception to this is London, where from 1981 onwards the left- wing
Greater London Council (GLC) funded a wide range of alternative
popular arts across poorer boroughs of the city, in deliberate opposition
to central government. Prior to this, cultural funding had been
dedicated only to a handful of high cultural institutions (National
Theatre, Royal Ballet, etc.). One of the main instigators of GLC
community arts policy was Alan Tompkins, an Open University
faculty member infl uenced by Stuart Hall and E. P. Thompson. Tompkins
recalls with pleasure his experiences of sitting on various funding
panels and allocating money to gay and lesbian theatre groups, marching
bands for teenage girls in Peckham, and other forms of identitarian
and/ or popular culture. (Tompkins, interview with the author,
London, 4 August 2009.)
92 Landry, What a Way to Run a Railroad, Chapter IV, pp. 38– 48.
93 Kelly, Community, Art and the State, p. 1.
94 Ibid., pp. 30– 1.
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