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

the social turn
artist- facilitator, and has had to counter criticisms that he exploits his various
collaborators. 79 Instead he is a directorial instigator, working in
collaboration with a production agency (Artangel), a fi lm director (Figgis),
a battle re- enactment specialist (Howard Giles), and hundreds of participants.
His authorial role is a trigger for (rather than the fi nal word on) an
event that would otherwise have no existence, since its conceptualisation is
too idiosyncratic and controversial ever to be initiated by socially responsible
institutions. In short, The Battle of Orgreave’s potency derives from its
singularity, rather than from its exemplarity as a replicable model.
V. Emancipated Spectators
It should be stressed that such an extended discussion of Orgreave is only
possible because the work takes into account the apparatus of mediation in
relation to a live performance. The Battle of Orgreave’s multiple identity
allows it to reach different circuits of audience: fi rst- hand participants of
the event in 2001, and those watching them from the fi eld (primarily Yorkshire
locals); those who saw the television broadcast of Figgis’s fi lm of this
work (Channel 4, 20 October 2002) or who bought the DVD; those who
read the book and listen to the CD of interviews; and those who view the
archive/ installation in the Tate’s collection. In these diverse forms, The
Battle of Orgreave multiplies and redistributes the art historical categories
of history painting, performance, documentary and archive, putting them
into dialogue with community theatre and historical re- enactment. 80
Of course, at this point there is usually the objection that artists who end
up exhibiting their work in galleries and museums compromise their
projects’ social and political aspirations; the purer position is not to engage
in the commercial fi eld at all, even if this means losing audiences. 81 Not
only is the gallery thought to invite a passive mode of reception (compared
to the active co- production of collaborative art), but it also reinforces the
hierarchies of elite culture. Even if art engages with ‘real people’, this art is
ultimately produced for, and consumed by, a middle- class gallery audience
and wealthy collectors. This argument can be challenged in several ways.
Firstly, the idea that performance documentation (video, archive, photography)
is a betrayal of the authentic, unmediated event has been questioned
by numerous theorists in the wake of Peggy Phelan’s polemic Unmarked:
The Politics of Performance (1993). 82 Secondly, the binary of active versus
passive hovers over any discussion of participatory art and theatre, to the
point where participation becomes an end in itself: as Rancière so pithily
observes, ‘Even when the dramaturge or the performer does not know
what he wants the spectator to do, he knows at least that the spectator has
to do something: switch from passivity to activity.’ 83 This injunction to
activate is pitched both as a counter to false consciousness and as a realisation
of the essence of art and theatre as real life. But the binary of active/
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