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

introduction
education). Both of these chapters aim to take on board the methodological
implications of process- based participatory art, and to propose alternative
criteria for considering this work. The book ends with a consideration of
the changing identity of the audience across the twentieth century, and
suggests that artistic models of democracy have only a tenuous relationship
to actual forms of democracy.
The scope of this book is of course far from comprehensive. Many
important projects and recent tendencies have been left out. I have not, for
example, dealt with transdisciplinary, research- based, activist or interventionist
art, in part because these projects do not primarily involve people as
the medium or material of the work, and in part because they have their
own set of discursive problems that I would like to address as a separate
issue in the future. I have been similarly strict about the geographical scope
of this book, which is organised around the legacy of the historic avant-
garde – hence the decision to include Eastern Europe and South America,
but not Asia. 7 Readers may also wonder about the paucity of case studies
from North America. When I began this research, I was initially interested
in producing a counter- history, since the discussion around social engagement
has for too long been dominated by North American critics writing
on North American art – based on issues of new genre public art, site
specifi city, and dialogic practices. My desire to put these debates aside was
not intended to undermine their importance; on the contrary, the work of
these critic- historians has been central to the emergence of this fi eld and the
terms that we have available for its analysis. 8 As the research developed,
however, more focused political concerns replaced my naively anti- hegemonic
desire to avoid a re- rehearsal of North American art history, despite
my eventual inclusion of a few key US examples. One of the motivations
behind this book stems from a profound ambivalence about the instrumentalisation
of participatory art as it has developed in European cultural
policy in tandem with the dismantling of the welfare state. The UK context
under New Labour (1997– 2010) in particular embraced this type of art as a
form of soft social engineering. The US context, with its near total absence
of public funding, has a fundamentally different relationship to the question
of art’s instrumentalisation.
I will conclude this introduction with some methodological points
about researching art that engages with people and social processes. One
thing is clear: visual analyses fall short when confronted with the documentary
material through which we are given to understand many of
these practices. To grasp participatory art from images alone is almost
impossible: casual photographs of people talking, eating, attending a
workshop or screening or seminar tell us very little, almost nothing, about
the concept and context of a given project. They rarely provide more than
fragmentary evidence, and convey nothing of the affective dynamic that
propels artists to make these projects and people to participate in them. To
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