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

artificial hells
via negativa), what artist isn’t socially engaged? 1 This book is therefore
organised around a defi nition of participation in which people constitute
the central artistic medium and material, in the manner of theatre and
performance.
It should be stressed from the outset that the projects discussed in this
book have little to do with Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (1998/
2002), even though the rhetoric around this work appears, on a theoretical
level at least, to be somewhat similar. 2 In truth, however, many of the
projects that formed the impetus for this book have emerged in the wake of
Relational Aesthetics and the debates that it occasioned; the artists I discuss
below are less interested in a relational aesthetic than in the creative rewards
of participation as a politicised working process. One of the achievements
of Bourriaud’s book was to render discursive and dialogic projects more
amenable to museums and galleries; the critical reaction to his theory,
however, catalysed a more critically informed discussion around participatory
art. Up until the early 1990s, community- based art was confi ned to the
periphery of the art world; today it has become a genre in its own right,
with MFA courses on social practice and two dedicated prizes. 3
This orientation towards social context has since grown exponentially,
and, as my fi rst paragraph indicates, is now a near global phenomenon –
reaching across the Americas to South East Asia and Russia, but fl ourishing
most intensively in European countries with a strong tradition of public
funding for the arts. Although these practices have had, for the most part,
a relatively weak profi le in the commercial art world – collective projects
are more diffi cult to market than works by individual artists, and less likely
to be ‘works’ than a fragmented array of social events, publications, workshops
or performances – they nevertheless occupy a prominent place in
the public sector: in public commissions, biennials and politically themed
exhibitions. Although I will occasionally refer to contemporary examples
from non- Western contexts, the core of this study is the rise of this practice
in Europe, and its connection to the changing political imaginary of
that region (for reasons that I will explain below). But regardless of
geographical location, the hallmark of an artistic orientation towards the
social in the 1990s has been a shared set of desires to overturn the traditional
relationship between the art object, the artist and the audience. To
put it simply: the artist is conceived less as an individual producer of
discrete objects than as a collaborator and producer of situations; the work
of art as a fi nite, portable, commodifi able product is reconceived as an
ongoing or long- term project with an unclear beginning and end; while the
audience, previously conceived as a ‘viewer’ or ‘beholder’, is now repositioned
as a co- producer or participant. As the chapters that follow will make
clear, these shifts are often more powerful as ideals than as actualised realities,
but they all aim to place pressure on conventional modes of artistic
production and consumption under capitalism. As such, this discussion is
2