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

the social turn
mode of dissemination in the form of the installation The Battle of Orgreave
Archive (An Injury to One Is an Injury to All), which comprises a timeline of
events leading up to and after the riot at Orgreave, displayed on the gallery
walls alongside objects (badges, posters, a jacket, a riot shield, and a painting
entitled I am a Miner’s Son made in a Young Offenders Institution in
2004); a number of vitrines presenting archival information about the
National Union of Mineworkers and copies of letters sent to Deller’s
participants; a small collection of books on the strike available for viewing;
a collection of accounts of the strike on CD (with headphones); and two
videos on monitors (one of police riot training and one of a re- enactment
society ‘Festival of History’). The Battle of Orgreave Archive is therefore a
double archive: a record of the riot in 1984 and the strike leading up to it,
but also of the artist’s reinterpretation of these events in a performance
seventeen years later.
The reason why Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave has become such a
locus classicus of recent participatory art therefore seems to be because it
is ethically commendable (the artist worked closely in collaboration with
former miners) as well as irrefutably political: using a participatory
performance and mass media to bring back into popular consciousness
‘an unfi nished messy history’ of the state crushing the working class and
turning it against itself. 70 And yet I would like to suggest that The Battle
of Orgreave also problematises what we mean today when we refer to a
work of art as ‘political’. It is noticeable that a number of reviewers
perceived the event to be politically non- committal, particularly when
compared to the overt partiality of Figgis’s documentary and Deller’s
collection of oral histories, which privilege the picket position. 71 Others,
such as Alice Correia, maintain that the event was biased: ‘the casting of
the striking miners as “right” and the anti- strike policemen as “wrong”
in Orgreave avoids some of the complexity of how to position non- striking
miners’. 72 The Marxist critic Dave Beech argues that although Deller’s
aims were ‘political’ (to rewrite history from below), the involvement of
re- enactment societies compromised this intention: The Battle of Orgreave
became a ‘picturing’ of politics, rather than political art, and despite
Deller’s good intentions, the use of battle re- enactment societies meant
that the work ultimately took sides ‘with the police, the state and Thatcher’s
government’. 73 For other critics, it was the very performativity of
Orgreave that allowed it to be more than just a work ‘about’ the miners’
strike, since performance was a way to sustain awareness of history by
re- living it as experience. 74 For the artists Cummings and Lewandowska,
it was ‘a rich, profound, and provocative contemporary art work that
uses the legacy of a Marxist cultural critique to bring one strand of this
ideological text explosively into the present’. 75 For the artist, Orgreave ‘is
a political work without a doubt’, even though it had to be pitched in a
neutral way to secure the collaboration of the battle re- enactment
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