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

This expanded field of post-studio practices currently goes under a variety of names: socially engaged art, community-based art, experimental communities, dialogic art, littoral art, interventionist art, participatory art, collaborative art, contextual art and (most recently) social practice. (1)

[…] to the extent that art always responds to its environment (even via negativa), what artist isn’t socially engaged? (1-2)

But regardless of the 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 world of art as a finite, portable, commodifiable product is reconceived as an ongoing or long-term project with an unclear beginning or end; while the audience, previously conceived as a ‘viewer’ or ‘beholder’, is now repositioned as a co-producer or participant. (2)

“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.” (2)

From a Western European perspective, the social turn in contemporary art can be contextualised by two previous historical moments, both synonymous with political upheaval and movements for social change: the historic avant-garde in Europe circa 1917, and the so-called ‘neo’ avant-garde leading to 1968. The conspicuous resurgence of the participatory art in the 1990s leads me to posit the fall of communism in 1989 as a third point of transformation. Triangulated, these three dates form a narrative of the triumph, heroic last stand and collapse of a collectivist vision of society. Each phase has been accompanied by a utopian rethinking of art’s relationship to the social and of its political potential — manifested in a reconsideration of the ways in which art is produced, consumed and debated. (3)

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 political positions. (3)

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. (5)

Debord’s critique strikes to the heart of why participation is important as a project: it rehumanises a society rendered numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of capitalist production. Given the market’s near total saturation of our image repertoire, so the argument goes, artistic practice can no longer revolve around the construction of objects to be consumed by a passive bystander. Instead, there must be an art of action, interfacing with reality, taking steps — however small — to repair the social bond. (11)

Instead of supplying the market with commodities, participatory art is perceived to channel art’s symbolic capital towards constructive social change. Given these avowed politics, and the commitment that mobilises this work, it is tempting to suggest that this art arguably forms what avant-guard we have today: artists devising social situations as a dematerialised, anti-market, politically engaged project to carry on the avant-garde call to make art a more vital part of life. […] While sympathetic to the latter ambition, I would argue that it is also crucial to discuss, analyse and compare this work critically as art, since this is the institutional field in which it is endorsed and disseminated, even while the category of art remains a persistent exclusion in debates about such projects. (13)

From I. Creativity and Cultural Policy

What emerges here is a problematic blurring of art and creativity: two overlapping terms that not only have different demographic connotations but also distinct discourses concerning their complexity, instrumentalisation and accessibility. (16)

Artists and works of art can operate in a space of antagonism or negation vis-a-vis society, a tension that the ideological discourse of creativity reduces to a unified context and instrumentalises for more efficacious profiteering. (16)

From II The Ethical Turn

All of this is not to denigrate participatory art and its supporters, but to draw attention to a series of critical operations in which the difficulty of describing the artistic value of participatory projects is resolved by resorting to ethical criteria. (19)

This emphasis on process over product — or, perhaps more accurately, on process as product — is justified on the straightforward basis of inverting capitalism’s predilection for the contrary. (19)

(On curator Maria Lind‘s judgement of Thomas Hirschhorn‘s and Oda Projesi‘s work) The visual, conceptual and experiential accomplishments of the respective projects are sidelined in favour of a judgement on the artists’ relationship with their collaborators. […] Hirschhorn’s (purportedly) exploitative relationship is compared negatively to Oda Projesi’s inclusive generosity. In other words, Lind downplays what might be interesting in Oda Projesi’s work as art — the achievements of making social dialogue as medium, the significance of dematerialising a work of art into social process, or the specific affective intensity of social exchange triggered by these neighbourhood experiences. Instead her criticism is dominated by ethical judgements on working procedures and intentionality. (22)

In Conversation Pieces, Grant Kester argues that consultative and ‘dialogic’ art necessitates a shift in our understanding of what art is — away from the visual and sensory (which are individual experiences) and towards ‘discursive exchange and negotiation’. (23)

At the centre of opposition to this trend have been the philosophers Alain Badiou, Jacques Ranciere and Slavoj Zizek who, in different ways, remain sceptical of the jargon of human rights and idenitarian politics. […] In insisting upon consensual dialogue, sensitivity to difference risks becoming a new kind of repressive norm — one in which artistic strategies of disruption, intervention or over-identification are immediately ruled out as ‘unethical’ because all forms of authorship are equated with authority and indicted as totalising. (25) — the politically correct.

Kester criticises Dada and Surrealism for seeking to ‘shock’ viewers into being more sensitive and receptive to the world — because for him, this position turns the artist into a privileged bearer of insights, patronisingly informing audiences as to ‘how things really are’. He also attacks post-structuralism for promulgating the idea that it is sufficient for art to reveal social conditions, rather than to change them. (26)

From III. The Aesthetic Regime

[…] a tension and a confusion between autonomy (the desire for art to be at one remove from means-ends relationships) and heteronomy (that is, the blurring of art and life). (27)

The aesthetic regime of art, as inaugurated by Schiller and the Romantics, is therefore premised on the paradox that ‘art is art to the extent that it is something else than art’: that it is a sphere both at one remove from politics and yet always already political because it contains the promise of a better world. (27)

(to be continued)