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

notes to pages 214– 7
and close artistic collaboration (discussed in Chapter 5) continued to be a
hallmark of Russian art during and after the transition in 1991, key
moments of which included IRWIN’s discursive installation NSK
Embassy Moscow (1992) and Misiano’s Visual Anthropology Workshop
with the philosopher Valery Podoroga, held at the Centre for Contemporary
Art, Moscow, 1994– 95.
62 Misiano, ‘Interpol – An Apology of Defeat’, in Čufer and Misiano (eds),
Interpol, p. 47.
63 Ibid., Interpol, p. 56.
64 The only exception is Boris Groys, who – without actually defi ning the
project – argues that all artistic projects (by which he seems to mean
proposals) are visions of an alternative future, and thus the more successful
the more they maintain the gap between present and future. See
Groys, ‘The Loneliness of the Project’, in Going Public, Berlin: Sternberg
Press/ e- fl ux, 2010, pp. 70– 83.
65 Christian Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism,
London: Verso, 2005. The ‘spirit of capitalism’ is the ideological justifi cation
for engaging with capitalism internalised by each age. The fi rst spirit
of capitalism, characterised by the bourgeois family entrepreneur from
the end of the nineteenth century, relies on themes of utility, general
well- being and progress; the second refers to the organisation, headed by
a directorial class (1930s– 1960s), propelled by a spirit of social justice
(security, pensions, guaranteed careers).
66 In Chapter 2, they compare the projective city to a number of other value
systems, all of which co- exist (rather than succeeding each other chronologically),
including the reputational city, the inspirational city, the
domestic city and the commercial city. See Boltanski and Chiapello, The
New Spirit of Capitalism, p. 112.
67 Ibid., p. 312.
68 Boltanski and Chiapello are critical of this trend, since the valuation of
fl exibility privileges those without ties (familial, health or otherwise) and
exploits those who lack such social and geographical mobility.
69 This shift was already identifi ed by Andrea Fraser in 1997. See her
‘What’s Intangible, Transitory, Mediating, Participatory, and Rendered
in the Public Sphere?’, October, 80, Spring 1997, pp. 111– 16: ‘Whether
the shift to service provision . . . represents the failure of the critique of
the political economy of art, or the realisation of at least some of its goals,
would remain open to question’ (p. 116).
70 Parreno, in Hans- Ulrich Obrist, The Conversation Series: Philippe Parreno,
Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2009, p. 1; Huyghe,
conversation with the author, 2 December 2009.
71 This was corroborated by the exhibition catalogue for ‘theanyspacewhatever’
(New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2008), which offered essays not
only on the individual artists in the show (Parreno, Huyghe, Gillick,
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