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

the social turn
assignment of bodies to their good ‘communal’ place – an ethical regime of
images, rather than an aesthetic regime of art.
Yet in any art that uses people as a medium, ethics will never retreat
entirely. The task is to relate this concern more closely to aesthesis. Some
key terms that emerge here are enjoyment and disruption, and the way these
converge in psychoanalytic accounts of making and viewing art. It has
become unfashionable to import psychoanalysis into readings of art and
artists, but the discipline provides a useful vocabulary for diagnosing the
heightened ethical scrutiny that so much participatory art engenders. In his
seventh Seminar, on the ethics of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan connects
the latter to aesthetics via a discussion of sublimation, proposing an ethics
founded on a Sadeian reading of Kant. 87 Setting individual jouissance
against the application of a universal maxim, Lacan argues that it is more
ethical for the subject to act in accordance with his or her (unconscious)
desire than to modify his or her behaviour for the eyes of the Big Other
(society, family, law, expected norms). Such a focus on individual needs
does not denote a foreclosure of the social; on the contrary, individual analysis
always takes place against the backdrop of society’s norms and
pressures. Lacan links this ethical position to the ‘beautiful’ in his discussion
of Antigone who, when her brother dies, breaks the law to sit with his
body outside the city walls. Antigone is an instance of a subject who does
not relinquish her desire: she persists in what she has to do, however
uncomfortable or diffi cult this task may be (the key phrase here is from
Beckett’s The Unnameable: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’). Lacan connects this
ethical position to an art that causes disruption by suspending and disarming
desire (as opposed to extinguishing and tempering it). In his schema,
art that gives full rein to desire provides access to subjective ‘good’.
One could extend Lacan’s argument to suggest that the most urgent
forms of artistic practice today stem from a necessity to rethink the connections
between the individual and collective along these lines of painful
pleasure – rather than conforming to a self- suppressing sense of social obligation.
Instead of obeying a super- egoic injunction to make ameliorative
art, the most striking, moving and memorable forms of participation are
produced when artists act upon a gnawing social curiosity without the
incapacitating restrictions of guilt. This fi delity to singularised desire –
rather than to social consensus – enables this work to join a tradition of
highly authored situations that fuse reality with carefully calculated artifi ce
(some of which will be discussed in the chapters that follow). In these
projects, intersubjective relations are not an end in themselves, but serve to
explore and disentangle a more complex knot of social concerns about
political engagement, affect, inequality, narcissism, class, and behavioural
protocols.
At present, the discursive criteria of participatory and socially engaged
art is drawn from a tacit analogy between anti- capitalism and the Christian
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