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

notes to pages 251– 7
de Aizpuru in Madrid (Tatlin’s Whisper #3, 2006) and asking mounted
policemen to deploy their range of crowd control techniques on visitors
to Tate Modern (Tatlin’s Whisper #5, 2008).
26 Paul Chan, Night School, Public Seminar 7, New Museum, New York, 11
September 2008. All further quotes by Chan are from this lecture unless
otherwise stated.
27 The Classical Theatre of Harlem had already staged a production of
Godot in 2006 in response to Hurricane Katrina, with a fl ooded stage and
the action taking place on the roof. Wendell Pierce, the main actor in this
production, who also performed for Chan, is originally from New
Orleans.
28 Paul Chan, ‘Next Day, Same Place: After Godot in New Orleans’, TDR,
Winter 2008, p. 3.
29 The aim had been to equal the production costs of the play, but in fact this
fell short as costs ballooned. Eventually $53,000 was raised for a selection
of community organisations in the neighbourhoods in which the artist
worked.
30 See for example Tim Griffi n, ‘Waiting for Godot’, Artforum, December
2007.
31 Syllabi for both this and the Xavier University course are available online
at Chan’s website: www.nationalphilistine.com.
32 Chan, in conversation with the author, 22 September 2008.
33 Althamer, in Claire Bishop and Silvia Tramontana (eds.), Double Agent,
London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 2009, p.10.
34 See Claire Bishop, ‘Something for Everyone’, Artforum, February 2011,
pp. 175– 81.
35 This expedient approach is frequently adopted by Althamer. When he
received the Vincent Prize in 2004, Althamer took his teenage son Bruno
and friends to hang out in the exhibition space, ostensibly done to shift
their horizons of the world by experiencing another country, while giving
them a holiday he couldn’t himself afford. The work is known as Bad
Kids, 2004.
36 ‘What Have I Done to Deserve This?’, Cubitt Gallery, London, 2006.
37 ‘Each of the participants had at his/ her disposal “a space of their own” . . .
where they could build elements of their own visual language, and the
“common space” open to everyone, where they could conduct simultaneous
dialogues with the other participants. All without using words.’
(Grzegorz Kowalski, in Maryla Sitkowska [ed.], Grzegorz Kowalski: Prace
Dawne I Nowe, Bydgoszcz: Muzeum Okręgowe w Bydgoszczy im. Leona
Wyczółkowskiego w Bydgoszczy, 2002, p. 266.)
38 See Oskar Hansen, Towards Open Form, Warsaw: Foksal Gallery Foundation,
2004, p. 121.
39 Łukasz Ronduda, ‘Games, Actions and Interactions: Film and the Tradition
of Oskar Hansen’s Open Form’, in Łukasz Ronduda and Florian
357