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

notes to pages 202– 6
their work, it’s the methodology that’s most interesting, the process. And
I think most of the art world can’t deal with that here because they’re so
locked into this formalism.’ (Smith, interviewed by Stephan Dillemuth in
Sonsbeek 93, DVD, 1993.)
27 Aupetitallot, interviewed in Dillemuth, Project Unité, DVD.
28 By way of contrast, it is conspicuous that in ‘Kontext Kunst’ (1993), Peter
Weibel did not hesitate to argue for the social, although he understood
this to operate on the level of theme and process rather than as a diversifi
cation of art’s audience; the artists in his show, he writes, are part of a
longer tradition of artists ‘who intend to create reality through art and
not only its representation’, placing ‘the psychic and social constitution
of society and its institutions into the centre’. (Peter Weibel, ‘Vorwort’,
Kontext Kunst, Köln: DuMont, 1994, p. xiii, my translation.)
29 Mary Jane Jacob, Culture in Action, Seattle: Bay Press, 1995, p. 111.
According to Joe Scanlan, the cleaned- up clubhouse ‘had the eerie charm
of a 1950s high school chemistry lab’. (Scanlan, ‘Culture in Action’,
Frieze, 13, November–December 1993.)
30 Mark Dion, interview with the author, New York, 25 November 2009.
31 Dion also noted that Sonsbeek, which in his view was a much tighter and
more adventurous show than Firminy, was also criticised because people
had to work at fi nding and seeing the work; it was no longer a consumable
array of sculptural objects in the park.
32 Johanne Lamoureux, ‘The Museum Flat’, in Bruce Ferguson, Reesa
Greenberg, Sandy Nairne (eds.), Thinking about Exhibitions, London:
Routledge, 1996, p. 129.
33 ‘As to what visitors from out of town saw beyond the tours, the conference,
the launch event, the media and the publishing, I would have said
very little. Perhaps because it was simply impossible to do so, “Culture in
Action” didn’t attempt to frame disparate people, activities and parts of
the city as though they were displays in an exhibition, and I think for
some visitors expecting exhibition/ biennial protocol, this was challenging,
baffl ing, unfulfi lling or inadequate.’ (Simon Grennan, email to the
author, 7 April 2010.)
34 See Christian Philipp Müller, ‘Art and the Social: Exhibitions of Contemporary
Art in the 1990s’, conference at Tate Britain, 30 April 2010,
available at www.formerwest.org.
35 Valerie Smith, ‘Proposal Sonsbeek 93’, Sonsbeek 93, p. 9, my emphasis;
Mark Kremer, ‘Change is Possible: Interview with Valerie Smith’, Kunst
& Museumjournaal, 4:6, 1993, p. 9.
36 Neither publishing scheme was brought to closure: the last two volumes
of Project Unité were not realised, nor the second volume of Sonsbeek 93,
in which the fi nal projects would be documented.
37 Simon Grennan, email to the author, 7 April 2010. As several reviewers
of ‘Culture in Action’ noted, there was a continual tension between the
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