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

notes to pages 194– 8
4 In his introduction, Jan Hoet argued that ‘Artists do not investigate the
aesthetics of things: they revel in the hidden beauty, the essence, the
ecstasy.’ Hoet, ‘An Introduction’, Documenta IX, Stuttgart: Edition
Cantz, 1992, vol. 1, p. 17.
5 For a good discussion of transdisciplinarity in 1990s exhibition catalogues,
see Liz Donato, ‘The Disciplinary Shift in Contemporary Art
Exhibition Practices, 1990s–Today’, available at www.formerwest.org
6 In making this distinction I am indebted to Miwon Kwon’s history of
site- specifi city, One Place After Another: Site- Specifi c Art and Locational
Identity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. Kwon’s focus, however, is
North American rather than European, and revolves around questions of
judgement centered on the model of community proposed by site- specifi c
art in the 1980s and 1990s, rather than on the subject of curating and spectatorship.
In the US, a central frame of reference for site- specifi c curating
was the trial and removal of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc from Federal
Plaza in 1989.
7 Rather, Hoet frames the exhibition in poetic terms: it indicates a transformation
of the museum into ‘a metaphor of that quiet (today more
than ever), forgotten place, an almost inaccessible place, a mythical
place: the place of Mystery’. (Jan Hoet, ‘“Chambres d’Amis”: A
Museum Ventures Out’, in Chambres d’Amis, Ghent: Museum van
Hedendaagse Kunst, 1986, p. 350.) Pragmatically, the ambition was to
produce more support for the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst in
Ghent, of which Hoet was director, by increasing the city’s interest in
contemporary art.
8 Ibid., p. 345– 6.
9 In the catalogue, Geys’s contribution is illustrated with installation shots
of the artist standing next to the doors, while the six hosts are represented
by a short paragraph written by each of them, detailing their employment,
income and views (if any) of his project.
10 Joshua Decter, ‘Back to Babel: Project Unité’, Artforum, November 1993,
p. 92.
11 Mark Dion, interview with the author, New York, 25 November 2009.
12 Renée Green, ‘Scenes from a Group Show: “Project Unité” ’, in Alex
Coles (ed.), Site- Specifi city: The Ethnographic Turn, London: Black Dog,
2000, p. 121.
13 Aupetitallot, in Stephan Dillemuth, Project Unité, DVD, 1993.
14 The installation accelerated the ruination, creating a dystopian image of
the building as if left abandoned, surrounding a Le Corbusier bench with
walls covered in bird shit and piles of dead insects on the fl oor, in deliberate
contrast to the cleanliness of the architect’s imagined scheme.
15 ‘It can be said with confi dence that, of all the exhibits, Zobernig’s space
was the most visited and for the longest periods of time – or at least it was
until marauding bands of (presumably atypical) drunken Unité residents
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