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

notes to pages 257– 65
Zeyfang (eds.), 1, 2, 3... Avant- Gardes: Film/ Art between Experiment
and Archive, Warsaw and Berlin: CCA Uzajdowski Castle and Sternberg
Press, 2007, p. 91. Aside from being an infl uential teacher in his
own right, Hansen constructed one of Poland’s largest social housing
projects and undertook numerous ‘humanisation studies’ with a view to
improving existing urban environments built on the principle of ‘closed
form’.
40 Ibid., p. 92.
41 ‘I would like to invite you to take part in a game that we are organising with
our artist friends’, says Althamer to a group of children. ‘You are artists and
we would also like to invite you. You are, aren’t you?’ Bemused, they
chorus back, ‘Yes’ (Artur Żmijewski, [S]election.pl, DVD, 2006).
42 Kowalski, invited by CCA to have a show in parallel to [S]election.pl,
preferred to represent his teaching practice through more conventional
photographic documentation of his workshops, which were installed in a
separate gallery.
43 The strength of Żmijewski’s [S]election.pl (which is clearly the precursor
for his solo project Them [2007], discussed in Chapter 8) shows up the
weak conventionality of Krzysztof Visconti’s Einstein Class, 2006.
44 The ‘Child’s Play’ workshops were devised by curator Guillaume
Désanges, but led by a local teacher, Muriel Monsels. Désanges had
previously used this format of re- enactment in a workshop for eightyear-olds
in Iasi, Romania.
45 To one Surinamese performer in her twenties, I asked: ‘What do you
think of us, sitting there listening to this play that we don’t understand?’
She replied: ‘I’m thinking, what do they think of us, performing this play
we don’t understand!’
46 Hirschhorn, email to the author, 7 March 2009.
47 ‘“The students are secondary?” – Yes, absolutely, the students are
secondary! The students are secondary – but not the audience – not the
non- exclusive audience! . . . So this is the fi rst distinction: “non- exclusive
audience” vs “students” and following this, I do not take the non- exclusive
audience for students! (my mission is to work always for the
non- exclusive audience). . . . To do a lecture, a workshop or a seminar in
my projects is not a gesture of education or a pedagogic- attitude, to me
it’s a gift – an aggressive gift. It’s a Form. And it’s the assertion that Art
– because it’s Art – can transform each human being.’ (Hirschhorn, email
to the author, 7 March 2009.)
48 Vidokle describes Night School as ‘an informal, free university type series of
seminars, conferences, lectures, fi lm screenings and occasional performances
with a focus on contemporary art, that continues for one year’. Lectures
were open to the public, while at the same time a core group of twenty-fi ve
students had extra seminars with the visiting speaker. Anton Vidokle, ‘Night
School opening remarks, January 2008’, available at www.newmuseum.org.
358