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

notes to pages 188– 94
95 Martha Rosler points to a similar situation in the US when she notes that ‘art
institutions and art- makers adapt their offerings to the tastes of grant- givers
(that is, to the current ideological demands of the system)’. See Martha
Rosler, ‘Theses on Defunding’ (1980), in Rosler, Decoys and Disruptions:
Selected Writings 1975– 2001, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004, p. 330.
96 Here I am paraphrasing Kelly, Community, Art and the State, p. 17.
97 Community Arts: The Report of the Community Arts Working Party, June
1974, p. 7.
98 In the US, the equivalent would be various temporary installations
produced at the Burning Man festival in Nevada, from 1986 onwards.
99 Sean Cubitt, ‘Public/ Media/ Arts’, in Dickson (ed.), Art with People,
p. 100.
100 The argument that social networking is a form of mass conceptual art is
put forward by Boris Groys in ‘Comrades of Time’, e- fl ux journal, 11,
December 2009, available at www.e- fl ux.com.
101 New communications technology haunts the pages of Bourriaud’s Relational
Aesthetics: ‘we feel meagre and helpless when faced with the
electronic media, theme parks, user- friendly places, and the spread of
compatible forms of sociability, like the laboratory rat doomed to an
inexorable itinerary in its cage . . . The general mechanisation of social
functions gradually reduces the relational space.’ (Nicolas Bourriaud,
Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Presses du Réel, 2002, p. 8, p. 17.)
Chapter 7 Former West
1 This chapter was written as a contribution to Former West, a European
research project whose title inverts the familiar shorthand ‘former East’
as a label for those countries that underwent the transition from communism
from 1989 to 1991. The project investigates the impact of the fall of
communism on the production and reception of art in Europe since 1989,
arguing that this upheaval also affected the political and cultural imaginary
of Western Europe. See www.formerwest.org.
2 Further defi nitions of the ‘project’ (compared to the work of art), amassed
during a workshop at Arte de Conducta, Havana (2007), include presentness,
possibility, openness to change and contamination, a space of
production, unlimited time and space, and a dialogue with the social to
reach audiences beyond art.
3 Art Since 1900, for example, identifi es the following three themes as key to the
1990s: identity politics, women artists and the body; large- scale video projection
(Viola); large- scale fi gurative photography (Gursky, Wall). Only the
last section (on 2003) makes reference to experimental curating via a discussion
of ‘Utopia Station’ and to the emergent theme of ‘precarity’ in the work
of Thomas Hirschhorn. See Hal Foster et al., Art Since 1900: Modernism,
Antimodernism, Postmodernism, London: Thames and Hudson, 2004.
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