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

notes to pages 206– 8
exhibition rhetoric (namely, its claims to concrete achievements) and the
often modest and elusive ambitions of the artists. See Joe Scanlan’s review
in Frieze, 13, November–December 1993.
38 Michael Gibbs, ‘Sonsbeek 93’, Art Monthly, Jul/ Aug 1993, p.25.
39 Lynne Cooke noted that ‘the two principal audiences’ for ‘Culture in
Action’ had quite different experiences: ‘the professional art world spectators,
who were bussed from site to site, quickly became conscious of
their status as voyeurs . . . By contrast, those who by reason of their residence
in a certain part of the city became associated with and/ or
participated in a project at a local level rarely seem to have visited those
projects located elsewhere. These two audiences . . . proved almost
mutually exclusive.’ (Lynne Cooke, ‘Arnhem and Chicago: Outdoor
Exhibitions of Contemporary Art’, The Burlington Magazine, 135,
November 1993, pp. 786– 7.)
40 See for example Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Presses du
Réel, 2002, p. 73; Peter Weibel, ‘Vorwort’, Kontext Kunst, p. 13. This is the
opposite of Smith at Sonsbeek hoping to send artists out into the community.
41 Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction, New York: Lukas and Sternberg,
2002, p. 65.
42 Conversation with Pierre Huyghe, 2 December 2009; conversation with
Dominique Gonzalez- Foerster, 7 April 2010.
43 Eric Troncy, ‘No Man’s Time’, Flash Art, July–September, 2008, p. 169;
Troncy, ‘Discourse on Method’, in Surface de Réparations, Dijon: FRAC
Bourgogne, 1994, p. 52.
44 Troncy, ‘Discourse on Method’, p. 52.
45 Ibid., p. 52. Troncy aligns his work with the precedent of ‘À Pierre et
Marie’ (p. 53), an exhibition en travaux held in an abandoned church in
Paris between January 1983 and October 1984. Devised by a team of fi ve
artists and curators (including Daniel Buren and Jean- Hubert Martin), the
exhibition involved over sixty- nine artists participating in a project whose
organising principle was the game of consequences: each artist could renew
and modify their contribution throughout the duration of the show.
46 See for example Nicolas Bourriaud: ‘social utopias and revolutionary
hopes have given way to everyday micro- utopias and imitative strategies,
any stance that is “directly” critical of society is futile . . .’ (Bourriaud,
Relational Aesthetics, p. 31.) In his essay on ‘No Man’s Time’ in Flash Art,
Troncy is at pains to differentiate his approach from 1970s models of
critical art: the works were not based on resistance to the museum system,
he claimed, and were barely concerned with the site or space.
47 Other performances included Karen Kilimnik’s Madonna and Backdraft
(‘a scene from a concert with music by Madonna and a boy dancer’) and
Dominique Gonzalez- Foerster’s Son esprit vert fi t autor d’elle un monde
vert, ‘a portrait in three stages of a woman at large wearing a green dress’.
(Troncy, ‘No Man’s Time’, p. 168.)
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