Bricolage House
The contemporary evolution of non-performative participatory structures of art-making has led to the opening of new windows to connect the arts to the wider world and people and ideas to each other. As more and more artists become disenchanted with the hierarchy of the traditional artist/view relationship, participatory art practices continue to evolve, thereby becoming an increasingly attractive option for contemporary artists.
Participatory art is not a recent innovation. In “Artificial Hells,” Claire Bishop situates the emergence of contemporary art (with its changing relationship to spectatorship) in early twentieth century performance art.[1] Bishop points to the Italian futurist’s “serate” (soirèes); multidisciplinary and participatory evening performances in which audiences were encouraged to get angry, yell, disrupt, and engage with the performers. The goal of these chaotic performances was “spectatorphilic”; to stir up, and eventually to politicize the audience.
The Futurists, like many of their contemporaries, sought to deliberately disturb the complacency of the audience.[2] The First Futurist Manifesto read “We intend to exalt aggressive action…the punch and the slap.”[3] This antagonistic approach to art making (common to many of the art movements of the 20th century) emerged directly from the desire to engage spectators and viewers in a more active way.[4] A common characteristic of the avant-garde, this provocation was based on the assumption that our shared systems (of language, image, etc.) are “dangerously abstract and violently objectifying,”[5] and that people must be shocked out of complacency. Modernism, with its Nietzchean idea of art as tool for finding meaning in life, wholeheartedly adopted this confrontational audience/viewer relationship, and put the artist in the exalted position of being the beacon of knowledge. (6]
During the second half of the twentieth century, some artists began to abandon the antagonistic approach to participation that was sparked by the Futurists, looking instead to connect with their audience in more direct and non-confrontational ways. These new forms of participatory (or relational) art making began to involve direct dialogue with the artists’ communities, e.g., Suzanne Lacy’s “The House is on Fire”— a piece that consisted of 200 young people sitting in parked cars and discussing families, drugs, sexuality, and other critical issues. Their conversations were broadcast live to the residents of Oakland. This dialog-based approach to participation is described by Grant Kester as dialogical art, and it offers an alternative to the “corrective” relationship between artist and viewer that characterizes the avant-garde.[7] Kester relates this shifting relationship to the one that Paulo Freire advocated for in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a move away from the ‘banking style’ of education (or art making) that is characterized by a one-way flow of knowledge.
[1] pg. 49
[2] Thereby fulfilling the early Futurists’ goal of awakening the proletariat and stimulating a Marxist Revolution. Artificial Hells, pg. 47
[3] written by Filippo Marinetti in 1920, The Reenchantment of Art, pg. 61
[4] Including Dada and Fluxus
[5] Kester, Grant, Conversation Pieces, pg. 10
[6] Gablik, Suzi, The Reenchantment of Art, pg. 68
[7] Kester, Grant, Conversation Pieces, pg. 10
[8] Bourriaud, Nicholas, Relational Aesthetics, pg. 14
[9] Claire Bishop, "Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity," lecture.
[10] By Pawer Althamer, 1992. Artificial Hells
[11] "A Very Short Critique of Relational Aesthetics", Radical Culture Research Collective.
[12] Bishop, Claire, Artificial Hells, pg. 189
[13] Bishop comments on this in Artificial Hells- expressing concern that participatory art will simply become an appendage of the failing social services system-filling the gaps left by privatization.
[14] Bishop, Claire, Artificial Hells
Nicholas Bourriaud calls this new participatory approach relational aesthetics; art that emerges from the realm of “human interactions and social contexts” rather than from an “independent and private symbolic space,”[8] and thus is uniquely able to respond to the needs of a particular community and exist outside of the capitalist hierarchy. Ideally, this form of art making consists of an equal give and take between artist and community, eschewing the presumption that the artist alone has the direct line to truth.However, every rose has its thorns, and the dialogic approach to participation in art comes with its own set of problems. While Kester’s concerns about the hierarchy of the artist/viewer relationship seem valid, it doesn’t necessarily follow that overtly dialogical art is the best way to circumvent this hierarchy. Any artistic process (even one based in dialog) that inserts itself into external communities presumes some level of superiority.Performing artists are well acquainted with the idea of participation; they instinctively understand the value of a balanced interplay between creator, performer, and spectator, as well as the tension that can result when the credit for a collaborative piece goes to a “solo genius”. The director/performer relationship, common in the theater and dance worlds, has been increasingly translated to the gallery environment, in the form of artistic projects that hire dancers or other performers to work long hours at minimum wage.[9] Besides being economically exploitive, this kind of “delegated” performance raises questions about the authorship of the work; is it still the work of the artist if he/she hires someone else to do the performing? Is a work like “Observator”[10], which used homeless men to address social issues, still participatory?
Political or not, involving other human beings in an artistic work that is claimed by a single artist can raise serious ethical questions. Who gets to determine the rules of this involvement? What happens when ownership of the work is challenged? What happens to the communities after the project is finished?
Too much of work that posits itself as “participatory” has subsequently been made available for commodification; entering into the very structure that it seems to abhor. Meanwhile, much of the work within communities is being led by organizations not concerned with the production of art; “…the radical processes of social experimentation are taking place elsewhere, in the streets and squats and social forums… in short, wherever people are trying to organize themselves to find a way beyond the system of exploitative relations.”[11] In other words, we don’t have to call dialogical processes art for them to have impact.
Bishop suggests that today’s artistic environment is one that is over-mediated by ethical concerns, saying, “High art’s legacy is that of the ‘softly, softly’ approach of present day’s socially engaged art, where situations of negation, disruption, and antagonism are no longer perceived as viable methods.”[12] Is this ‘soft’ tread a response to the fear of crossing ethical boundaries? Or simply a genuine concern for the other human beings involved in one’s work?
While I would not suggest that participatory art cannot or should not act in the political arena or have import and relevance in the world, it seems clear that prescriptive and proscriptive approaches to art making can undermine the ability of both the art and the artist to cross established boundaries and to raise critical questions, as can allegiance to the ideologies of any particular philosophy, political party, or social movement.[13] What happens to art when we begin to measure and define it in terms of ethics?
French Philosopher Jacques Rancière believes that the post-enlightenment system of art is predicated on this tension between autonomy and heteronomy: between the individual and the societal.[14] Indeed, The dual desires to express individuality and to integrate into the social body litter Western art history, and they raise complex questions about the roles that art should/could play in today’s world. Purists (art for art’s sake) would keep art in the theoretical field, activists demand that we respond to the crises around us, and participatory art oscillates back and forth between models of disruption and dialog. In the end, all art- and all of life- is participatory. We do not exist in isolated bubbles, and our lives, our work, and our ideas necessarily intertwine. By situating themselves within the community, modern participatory art practices have a unique ability to exist outside of the capitalist hierarchy, and to connect the arts to the real world and people and ideas to each other. Perhaps these evolving forms have the potential to effectively address the troubling issues of privilege and power in the contemporary art world.
Sunday Opinion
By guest columnist,
Professor Ezmerelda Pruff
