Participatory art is not only a social activity but also a symbolic one, both embedded in the world and at one remove from it

“From a disciplinary perspective, any art engaging with society and the people in it demands a methodological reading that is, at least in part, sociological. By this I mean that an analysis of this art must necessarily engage with concepts that have traditionally had more currency within the social sciences than in the humanities: community, society, empowerment, agency. As a result of artists’ expanding curiosity in participation, specific vocabularies of social organisation and models of democracy have come to assume a new relevance for the analysis of contemporary art. But since participatory art is not only a social activity but also a symbolic one, both embedded in the world and at one remove from it, the positivist social sciences are ultimately less useful in this regard than the abstract reflections of political philosophy. This methodological aspect of the ‘social turn’ is one of the challenges faced by art historians and critics when dealing with contemporary art’s expanded field. Participatory art demands that we find new ways of analysing art that are no longer linked solely to visuality, even though form remains a crucial vessel for communicating meaning. In order to analyse the works discussed in this book, theories and terms have been imported from political philosophy, but also from theatre history and performance studies, cultural policy and architecture. This combination differs from other interdisciplinary moments in art history (such as the use of Marxism, psychoanalysis and linguistics in the 1970s). Today, it is no longer a question of employing these methods to rewrite art history from an invested political position – although this certainly plays a role – so much as the acknowledgement that it is impossible adequately to address a socially oriented art without turning to these disciplines, and that this interdisciplinarity parallels (and stems from) the ambitions and content of the art itself.”

(page 7)

Claire Bishop. Artificial Hells:Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012.

We are dealing with an event

“Instead of creating works of art, artists increasingly produce events which involve not just themselves but also the observers, listeners, and spectators. Thus, the conditions for art production and reception changed in a crucial aspect. The pivotal point of these processes is no longer the work of art, detached from and independent of its creator and the recipient, which arises as an object from the activities of the creator-subject and is intrusted to the perception and interpretation of the recipient-subject. Instead, we are dealing with an event, set in motion and terminated by the actions of all the subjects involved – artists and spectators. Thus the relationship between the material and semiotic status of objects in performance and their use in it has changed. The material status does not merge with the signifier status; rather, the former severs itself from the latter to claim a life of its own. In effect, objects and actions are no longer dependent on the meanings attributed to them. As events that reveal these special characteristics, artistic performance opens up the possibility for all participants to experience a metamorphosis.”

(page 22)

Erika Fischer-Lichte. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans.: Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge, 2008.

It tends to value what is invisible: a group dynamic, a social situation, a change of energy, a raised consciousness.

“[T]oday’s participatory art is often at pains to emphasise process over a definitive image, concept or object. It tends to value what is invisible: a group dynamic, a social situation, a change of energy, a raised consciousness. As a result, it is an art dependent on first-hand experience, and preferably over a long duration (days, months or even years). Very few observers are in a position to take such an overview of long-term participatory projects: students and researchers are usually reliant on accounts provided by the artist, the curator, a handful of assistants, and if they are lucky, maybe some of the participants. Many of the contemporary case studies in this book were gleaned through hit-and-miss field trips, which led me to understand that all of this work demands more on-site time commitment than I was habitually used to as a critic of installation art, performance and exhibitions. Ideally several site visits were necessary, preferably spread out over time – a luxury not always available to the underpaid critic and tightly scheduled academic. The complexity of each context and the characters involved is one reason why the dominant narratives around participatory art have frequently come to lie in the hands of those curators responsible for each project and who are often the only ones to witness its full unfolding – at times present even more so than the artist. An important motivation for this study was my frustration at the foreclosure of critical distance in these curatorial narratives, although I have come to realise that in staging multiple visits to a given project, this fate also befalls the critic. The more one becomes involved, the harder it is to be objective – especially when a central component of a project concerns the formation of personal relationships, which inevitably proceed to impact on one’s research. The hidden narrative of this book is therefore a journey from sceptical distance to imbrication: as relationships with producers were consolidated, my comfortable outsider status (impotent but secure in my critical superiority) had to be recalibrated along more constructive lines.”

(page 6)

Claire Bishop. Artificial Hells:Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012.

It was crucial that something happened between the participants

 

“Theatre was no longer conceived of as a representation of a fictive world, which the audience, in turn, was expected to observe, interpret, and understand. Something was to occur between the actors and the spectators and that constituted theatre. It was crucial that something happened between the participants and less important what exactly this was.”

(page 20-21)

Erika Fischer-Lichte. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans.: Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge, 2008.

The tensions between quality and equality, singular and collective authorship, and the ongoing struggle to find artistic equivalents for these political positions

“Some of the key themes to emerge throughout these chapters are the tensions between quality and equality, singular and collective authorship, and the ongoing struggle to find artistic equivalents for these political positions. Theatre and performance are crucial to many of these case studies, since participatory engagement tends to be expressed most forcefully in the live encounter between embodied actors in particular contexts. It is hoped that these chapters might give momentum to rethinking the history of twentieth-century art through the lens of theatre rather than painting (in the Greenbergian narrative) or the ready-made) as in Krauss, Bois, Buchloh and Foster’s Art Since 1900, 2005). Further sub-themes include education and therapy: both are process-based experiences that rely on intersubjectivity exchange, and indeed they converge with theatre and performance at several moments in the chapters that follow.”

(page 3)

Claire Bishop. Artificial Hells:Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012.

The shifting relationships between subject/object and materiality/semioticity

“For one, the shifting relationships between subject/object and materiality/semioticity generated by Abramovi´c’s Lips of Thomas realigns the connection between feeling, thinking, and acting, which will be further explored later on. In all events, the spectators here were admitted not merely as feeling and thinking but also as acting subjects – as actors.

Moreover, these shifts make the traditional distinction between the aesthetics of production, work, and reception as three heuristic categories seem questionable, if not obsolete. There no longer exists a work of art, independent of its creator and recipient; instead, we are dealing with an event that involves everybody – albeit to different degrees and in different capacities. If “production” and “reception” occur at the same time and place, this renders the parameters developed for a distinct aesthetics of production, work, and reception ineffectual. At the very least we should reexamine their suitability.”

(page 18)

Erika Fischer-Lichte. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans.: Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge, 2008.

The audience, previously conceived as a ‘viewer’ or ‘beholder’, is now repositioned as a co-producer or participant

“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 considered less as an individual producer of discrete objects than as a collaborator and producer of situations; the work of art as a finite, portable, commodifiable 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.”

(page 2)

Claire Bishop. Artificial Hells:Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012.

 

When laws are suspended as of their own accord

“Madness, then, was not merely one of the possibilities afforded by the union of soul and body; it was not just one of the consequences of passion. Instituted by the unity of soul and body, madness turned against that unity and once again put it in question. Madness, made possible by passion, threatened by a movement proper to itself what had made passion itself possible. Madness was one of those unities in which laws were compromised, perverted, distorted – thereby manifesting such unity as evident and established, but also as fragile and already doomed to destruction.

There comes a moment in the course of passion when laws are suspended as of their own accord, when movement either abruptly stops, without collision or absorption of any kind of active force, or is propagated, the action ceasing only at the climax of the paroxysm.”

(page 83)

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization.

Borrowed in digital form from the Vancouver Public Library while living in Berlin.

You must abandon intellect

“If you have to work alone, you must sacrifice your desire for results to the experience of causes. Although intelligence is needed to understand the exercises, you must abandon intellect when doing them in favour of feelings and sensory impressions. You must not jump to conclusions as to what is right or wrong, because you are already a well-developed censor of self. Nor can you trust your judgement, since it is biased by habitual ideas of good and bad and wary of new experiences.”

(page 5)

Kristin Linklater, Freeing the Natural Voice. New York: Drama Publishers, 1976.

Borrowed from the library of the Universität der Künste, Berlin, and from the Bibliothèques de Montréal, succursale Mile End.