Faculty of Arts
Jacques Rancière and the Politics of Participatory Art:
Participation in the works of Jeremy Deller and Tino Sehgal
Master thesis by Carmen H. D. van Bruggen
Research Master Literary and Cultural Studies
First supervisor: dr. T. E. Lijster
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Content
Introduction ... 4
Research question ... 4
Demarcation of the topic ... 5
Relevance of the topic ... 6
Theoretical framework and outline ... 7
Part I: The politics of participatory art ... 9
1.1 Activity in conventional modes of spectatorship ... 9
The activity of conventional spectatorship ... 10
Implied active spectatorship in art ... 11
1.2 Participation: a symptom of, or a protest against capitalism? ... 13
Spectacular capitalism and the question of the social ... 13
Cognitive capitalism and the notion of interpassivity ... 15
1.3 The democratic ideal of participation ... 19
Contesting consensus: the disadvantage of democracy in art ... 19
Proposing an alternative: agonistic interventionism ... 21
1.4 Changing hierarchies: questioning the authority of the artist ... 25
The public role of artists today: questions of authority ... 25
The authoritative creators of participatory art ... 26
1.5 Concluding remarks ... 29
The radical newness of participatory art ... 29
Too active, or not active enough? ... 30
Democracy, intervention and authority ... 30
Part II: Jacques Rancière and the political effectiveness of participatory art ... 32
2.1 Introducing Rancière: participatory art in the aesthetic regime ... 32
Key notions: the distribution of the sensible and the aesthetic regime ... 33
Participatory art in the aesthetic regime ... 36
2.2 Redefining the critical potential of participatory art ... 38
Distributing the sensible trough participation ... 38
Recognizing participatory art as art ... 39
2.3 A new notion of democracy ... 41
Stultifying or emancipated art? ... 41
The emancipated spectator ... 43
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Connecting participatory art to the aesthetic regime ... 46
Reformulating the criticism of participatory art ... 46
Democracy constituted by a third object ... 47
Part III: Participation in the work of Jeremy Deller and Tino Sehgal ... 48
3.1 Jeremy Deller and the Battle of Orgreave ... 48
The politics of Deller’s Battle of Orgreave ... 48
Democracy and authority in Deller’s work ... 50
3.2 Tino Sehgal’s Constructed Situations ... 52
Life encounters as objects ... 52
Unfriendly encounters: a criticism of cognitive labour ... 54
Final Conclusions ... 57
Answer to the research question ... 57
Some hesitations regarding the use of Rancière ... 58
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Introduction
In his famous book The Story of Art (1953), art historian Ernst Gombrich problematizes our contemporary understanding of primitive art. The main difficulty according to him is that his contemporaries are used to look at art, while the so called ‘primitives’ used art for several purposes. Gombrich encourages his readers to look beyond this conventional mode of looking at art and to imagine what it would be like to participate in an art ritual in primitive times
(Gombrich, 2006, p.38). The distinction Gombrich made between contemporary art reception and ancient participation in art would today, more than sixty years later, not be made that easily. In the past decades countless initiatives can be found of artworks and art projects that ask for participation rather than spectatorship. For instance, there are participatory theatre projects, community artworks, book clubs, interactive media installations and artworks that declare the public itself as the final art product. In all those initiatives one finds the idea that being a
spectator, as Gombrich understood it, is not sufficient anymore. The public needs to act, interact, speak, move and think in order to reach a better understanding of art and its social implications.
Research question
Recent studies interprete this emphasis on active art reception often in a political way. The political connotations ascribed to this relatively new form of spectatorship are not so much about the ideas or ideologies of these so-called participatory artworks, but rather about the new relations they create between artist, artwork and audience. The increasing possibility for the audience to take part in the realisation of an artwork is, for instance, interpreted as a sign of democratization (see for instance Bishop 2005; 2012; Miessen 2010 and Rancière 2014); or the trend that artists do not want to voice their own opinion anymore but rather want to let the audience speak is understood in relation to contemporary politics in which authority is less and less taken for granted (see for instance Bourriaud 1998; BAVO 2010 and Gielen 2013). However, such interpretations risk reducing artworks completely to social qualities, while overshadowing aesthetic differences between particular artworks. For instance, one praises a work because it gives voice to a marginalized subculture, but one neglects how this specific culture is
represented in the artwork, and why this could be artistic in some sense (Bishop, 2012, p.21-22). In this thesis I will elaborate on how different forms of audience participation in
5 paradoxical relation between aesthetics and politics. Whereas the domain of aesthetics bears the connotation of passivity – one is looking at something instead of doing something about it – politics is often related to activity and action. It is precisely for this reason, Rancière argues, that participatory forms of art are claimed to be more political than conventional works of art that are meant to be looked at. Participatory artworks seem to overcome the passivity that is normally associated with the realm of art and aesthetics (Rancière 2014, p.14). Rancière, however, counters this common sense idea by reformulating contemporary art as something active and political ‘by definition’. This theory challenges most political interpretations of participatory art in recent literature. For if all art in this time period should be interpreted as a form of political activity, how can we give meaning to new forms of participatory artworks that thematize this very notion of political participation? In this thesis, I will argue that paradoxically this conception of art as politics opens up new possibilities for interpreting participatory
artworks. My research question is: In what way can Jacques Rancière’s reformulation of art as
politics be useful for interpreting various forms of participatory art? Demarcation of the topic
While I do want to stress that these relatively new forms of active spectatorship can be found in many different art disciplines and projects –I recognize this for instance in the growing
popularity of book clubs as well as in digital media art projects – in this thesis I restrict myself to the smaller category of artworks fitting the definition of ‘participatory art’, formulated by art theorist Claire Bishop. She describes it as follow:
To put it simply: the author is conceived less and less as 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 (Bishop, 2012, p.2). According to Bishop, the idea that the art audience is part of the artistic realisation of the artwork is a key feature in defining participatory art. At first sight this seems a clear
demarcation criterion. It separates, for instance, participatory art from the broader category of interactive art. Even though many artworks could be described by both terms, ‘interaction’ also covers works in which users only have to react, choose or click a button, as is the case in many digital artworks. In these cases users do not quite seem to be part of the end product.
6 participation in participatory art from art in general, I would like to add to Bishop’s definition that participatory art can be seen as art that is dependent of the role of the art audience. In contrast to more conventional forms of spectatorship, the different ways in which the audience can contribute to a participatory artwork determine the very form of the artwork.
As mentioned above, I will look at the political interpretations of participatory art. This must be distinguished from questions concerning the epistemological values of active
spectatorship. The epistemological benefit of participatory art is nowadays an important topic in cognitive studies in art and the philosophical discipline called ‘enactivism’. Here bodily
experiences in participatory artworks are often contrasted with mental experiences of conventional artworks (see for instance Noë, 2000). Participatory artworks function, in those disciplines, as case studies through which embodied cognition can be researched. My emphasis will not so much be on the bodily experience of participation art, but rather on the social meaning of this ‘stepping in’. Moreover, the division between ‘bodily experiences’ and ‘mental experiences’ is less important in my work. Participatory artworks are not limited to works in which you can physically step in. One could also think of a discursive contribution as a way to participate, for instance in Joseph Beuys’ Bureau for direct democracy, or Tino Sehgal’s performances in which participants have to join philosophical discussions.
Relevance of the topic
There are several reasons why studying the politics of participatory art is particularly relevant today. First, it is remarkable that participatory art projects in the past few years in countries such as Great Britain, Australia, the United States and the Netherlands, have been more likely to receive funding in comparison with other art forms (Gielen 2011 and Bishop 2012). Gielen relates this to the neoliberal culture of those countries. In his view, the increase in subsidies for participatory artworks can be interpreted as compensation for ‘the absence or immanent breakdown of a strong social infrastructure’ that he sees related to neoliberalism (Gielen 2011, p.29). Art theorist Claire Bishop claims something similar. According to her the common sense image of participatory art matches easily with New Labour ideals of social inclusion. Since participatory artworks are believed to have socially restoring effects, they already seem to legitimize their public funding, especially in countries where ‘social inclusion’ is high on the political agenda (Bishop 2012, p.13). This social ‘image’ of participatory art is, however, strongly challenged in recent literature. Bishop, for instance emphasizes that many participatory
7 Second, the societal and political function of art is under constant debate. On the one hand there is the voice of those who claim that art is threatened from the outside. They stress that governments and educational institutions have increasingly less funding for art and art education because they are more and more concerned with economic benefits (see for instance Nussbaum 2010). On the other hand there are those who claim that the art world itself is in crisis. Through internal criticism, institutional criticism, canon bashers, anti-art and so on, it has become less and less clear what societal or political functions art has or can have (see for
instance De Ruiter 1994 and Gielen 2013). This thesis aims to shed a new light on this debate about the political relevance of the arts, and ultimately, to substantiate the claim that active spectatorship initiatives can be understood as attempts from within the art world to make art socially and politically relevant again.
Theoretical framework and outline
This thesis is divided into three chapters, each with its own theoretical and methodological approach.
The first chapter provides an overview of recent literature on the politics of active art reception. This debate is part of a tradition of philosophical writings on the politics of aesthetics, which can be seen as one of the main topics of the philosophy of culture, but it is also rooted in post-Marxist thought and critical theory. I will approach this debate hermeneutically, which in this case means that I will read, select, interpret and present the arguments that define active spectatorship as something political. The presentation of these arguments will be done
thematically. I will for instance bring together several opinions on the democratisation of the art audience, or on the (anti-) capitalist meaning of participatory art. This chapter will result in a structured overview of the debate on the politics of participatory art, something that does not yet exists in present literature. Something close to it, however, is the work of art theorist Claire Bishop, especially her book Artificial Hells (2012) and her edited volume Participation (2006). I will fruitfully draw from these sources, as they form a great collection of research on the topic of participation art.
In the second chapter I position the writings of Jacques Rancière in relation to the debate described in chapter one. Here my main method is philosophical reflection. I will argue and demonstrate that Rancière’s thinking is particularly useful for understanding certain areas in the politics of participatory art, but that in other areas other writers are more relevant. In the last section I propose a concrete framework with which participatory artworks can be interpreted. This framework will be applied in the third part.
8 reenactment of The Battle of Orgreave in 2001 and Tino Sehgal’s series of ‘constructed
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Part I: The politics of participatory art
In 1952 the American composer John Cage made a musical piece out of the presence of his audience. By keeping the piano from playing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, Cage created a situation in which all incidental noises from the public could be regarded as the final musical composition. As a result, Cage transformed his ‘listeners’ into ‘co-creators’. Instead of receiving the piece, the audience contributed to it, whether they liked it or not.
This relatively new audience role – that does not remain outside of the process of the creation of an artwork – brought along new types of political questions in the field of art theory: What does it mean that the audience becomes part of an artwork? Is it a sign of democratization? Does it say something about the loss of authority of the artist? Can it be regarded as a form of criticism, and of what precisely? This chapter attempts to give an overview of the different answers to these questions. The following themes will be discussed: the relation between participation and other types of spectatorship (§1.1), the critical potential of participatory art in a capitalist context (§1.2), the democratization of the spectator (§1.3) and the changing
authority of the artist (§1.4). I will end this section with some concluding remarks (§1.5).
1.1
Activity in conventional modes of spectatorship
When a new form of art is developed, not only the meaning it has for the present is questioned, but also the relation it has to the past. This could be beautifully illustrated with Walter
Benjamin’s famous essay ‘The work of art in the age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936). Here Benjamin does not only interpret the newness of mechanized art forms – such as film and photography – but also looks at the implications these forms have for understanding ‘older’ forms of art – such as theatre or painting. This retrospective look at history – ‘a reframing and retrospective construction of history from the perspective of the present’ (Lijster, 2012, p.173) – can also be found in the literature on participatory art, in two different ways.1 First, there are authors who argue that participatory art is wrongly understood as ‘active’ as opposed to ‘passive conventional art forms’.2 In the light of this claim historic texts that emphasize the activity implied in conventional art spectatorship become relevant again. Second, some authors
emphasize that the idea of emancipated spectatorship should not exclusively be related to recent examples of participatory art, but already has its roots in earlier developments in art such as Baroque painting or the theatre of Antonin Artaud.
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The idea of a retrospective function of new forms of art for philosophy is developed by the Dutch philosopher Thijs Lijster in his dissertation Critique of Art (2012, see for instance p.168-173) and the example of Benjamin’s essay can be found in his essay ‘Herkomst en betekenis van hedendaags design’ (2010).
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The activity of conventional spectatorship
In the edited volume Participation (2006) Bishop writes that participatory art can, first of all, be seen as ‘the desire to create an active subject, one who will be empowered by the experience of physical or symbolic participation’ (Bishop, 2006, p.12). This activity of participatory art is often contrasted with the passivity in conventional spectatorship. Bishop, however, questions this division between ‘active’ and ‘passive’. In her view, conventional spectatorship should be regarded as an active practice as well (Bishop, 2006, p.16).
Just as Bishop, many authors, throughout history, have pointed at the activity implied in art spectatorship. They emphasize that the conventional way of looking at art cannot simply be understood as opposed to action or participation. The process of looking at, reflecting and interpreting artworks is far more complex and involves mental and physical effort. This idea can already be found in the writings of Aristotle. His notion of catharsis indicates that looking at a theatre performance involves imaginary effort that affects the character of the spectator. The spectator should thus not be regarded as a passive bystander, but rather should be seen as someone who is altered by the work. The activity of spectatorship is also stressed by the
phenomenological tradition. Phenomenologist highlight that variables in the act of looking at art – for instance environment, time or the person who perceives it – constantly create endless possibilities that influence how the artwork can be interpreted (Eco, 2006, p.24). This implies that an artwork is never clompleted by the artist, but always open to different ways of appearing (see also Hammermeister, 2002, p.180). Hermeneuticians such as Paul Ricoeur and Hans-Georg Gadamer argue along similar lines. They emphasize that the meaning of a literary work results not only from the text, but also from the person who reads it.3 The reader’s experiences,
memories, thoughts and character traits ‘merge’ with a text in the act of reading. The end result can be understood as a fusion of the horizon of the text and the horizon of the reader, as
Gadamer puts it. Here, the reader or spectator is not at all regarded as the passive component next to the vivid art work; rather he or she is the one who revives the artwork (Gadamer, 2013, p.212).
A short but seminal text that explicitly draws attention to this active mode of
spectatorship is Roland Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author, published in 1968. Barthes turns around the idea that the author is the natural origin and meaning maker of a text. In his view, the positioning of the author in such a way is a cultural product that has its beginnings in Medieval times and its end in recent modern times. Just as the philosopher Jacques Derrida would argue later, Barthes argues that it is more logical to see texts, especially written ones, as ‘the
destruction of every voice, of every point of origin’ (Barthes, 1968, p.142). Once a text has been written, its meaning can shift constantly. First, because the words do not gain meaning through
11 being written by someone, but through being embedded in a language: as a language develops, the meaning of ‘its’ words develop with it. And second because every reader will interpret a text differently, which constantly changes the final meaning of a written work. Barthes concludes: ‘The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin, but in its destination’ (Barthes, 1968, p.148).
These are only a few examples of how conventional spectatorship in art has been interpreted as something active rather than something passive. Over and over again the
importance of the role of the audience for the final construction of the meaning of an artwork is stressed. One should therefore not see the activity of the audience in participatory art as opposed to the passivity in conventional ways of looking at art. It is better to look at how these relatively new forms of audience participation can be defined as another kind of activity in comparison with these other types of spectatorship.
Implied active spectatorship in art
In his essay The Poetics of the Open work (1962), semiotician Umberto Eco discusses a
remarkable trend in classical music of the sixties. While composers traditionally gave detailed instructions of how their piece must be performed and with which instruments, in the sixties the relation between composer and performer became less strict. This can be seen in Klavierstük XI by Karheinz Stockhausen, a piece consisting of a long list of note groupings that have no specific order. It is completely up to the performer which of these notes he or she will use in the
performance and in what sequence he will play them (Eco in Bishop, 2006, p.20). The performer, whose creativity is traditionally limited to the detailed instructions of the composed work, is now more free to choose for his or her own preferences. The final musical performance is a result of both the creative input from the composer and the reconstruction of the performer. Eco calls such works – artworks that are left unfinished by the artist with the aim to be completed by performers or by audiences – ‘open works’.4 Not only musical compositions, but also paintings can be understood as such, according to Eco. One could, for instance, look at the difference between Renaissance and Baroque art. While in Renaissance painting everything seems to have its order – heavenly creatures are for instance generally depicted on top of the painting and human figures below – in Baroque painting this is less fixed – the metaphysical is represented as
4 The freedom of the performer is of course not the same as the freedom of the public. When a performer
12 the physical and the other way around. According to Eco, the orderly pictures of Renaissance art presuppose an audience that agrees with this order. The order cannot be altered, rethought or changed by the public’s gaze, says Eco. Baroque art, in contrast, is more ‘open’:
the Baroque work of art never allows a privileged, definitive, frontal view; rather, it induces the spectator to shift his position continuously in order to see the work in constantly new aspects, as if it were in a state of perceptual transformation (Eco in Bishop, 2006, p.26).
Eco thus points at different forms of spectatorship implicit in art. Some artworks presuppose a pregiven gaze and a fixed interpretation, while others demand a more open and creative attitude from the audience.
Jacques Rancière also points at these different implicit forms of spectatorship in art. He draws a distinction between the epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht and the theatre of cruelty of Antonin Artaud. While Brecht asks intellectual activity from his audience, by creating
provocative pieces in a difficult ironic style, Artaud denies such intellectualism. His plays express a distrust of conceptual ‘control’ and offers an atmosphere that elicits the experience of creative and destructive control instead, what he call’s ‘violence of the senses’ (Rancière 2014, p.10-11). Both forms of theatre can be regarded as ‘open’ but in a different way. Brecht’s work is open because it leaves space for interpretation to its audience, while Artaud’s theatre is open because it refuses to impose any ideas on its public.
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1.2
Participation: a symptom of, or a protest against capitalism?
One of the most influential texts in the discourse on participatory art is Guy Debord’s The Society
of the Spectacle (1967). In this book Debord draws attention to how the social is being repressed
under the alienating logic of capitalism. The ‘constructed situations’ of the Situationist International (SI), of which Debord was a member, were posed as a reaction against this
antisocial capitalist climate. These early participatory artworks were supposed to ‘[rehumanize] a society rendered numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of capitalist
production’ (Bishop, 2012, p.11). Nowadays, however, this interpretation of participatory art is not that widely shared anymore. Not only forms of participatory art have changed, also the literature on capitalism has taken a different direction. While first the alienating effects of material production were at the core of the criticism, now more attention is paid to the immaterial aspects of working under post-Fordism.5 Texts such as Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism (1999), Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire (2000) and Paolo Virno’s The Grammar of the Multitude (2002) form the heart of the discourse on this new conception of capitalism that is often referred to as ‘cognitive capitalism’. The term ‘cognitive’ is used here because post-Fordist work often requires mental skills, such as
reasoning, inventing, designing or networking, instead of physical strength (see also page 15). While participatory art has thus for a long time been interpreted against the background of the spectacular capitalism of Guy Debord, this new and influential notion of cognitive
capitalism forced the debate to reconsider itself.
Spectacular capitalism and the question of the social
In The Society of the Spectacle Debord argues that social relations have become completely appropriated by capitalist logic. This omnipresence of capitalism that represses the social he calls ‘the spectacle’:
The spectacle corresponds to the historical moment at which the commodity completes its colonization of social life. It is not just that the relationship to commodities is now plain to see -- commodities are now all that there is to see; the world we see is the world of the commodity’ (Debord, 1994, thesis 42)
The spectacle can be seen as an illusory layer of society, created by commercials and mass culture, that is constantly mistaken for being real. Instead of experiencing real proximity of other human beings, there is a constant stream of representations – pictures, images, imago’s, media events – on which people focus in order to fulfil their desires. This altered human consciousness in which images play the most significant role, can be regarded as a permanent mode of
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14 spectating: one is not experiencing the real thing, but rather facing a stream of representations. Situationist art must, according to Debord, therefore counter this alienating mode of seeing the world. In these so-called constructed situations – in which people move, dance or make things together – the public is invited to let go of their permanent status of being a spectator. Debord describes it as follow: ‘The role of the “public”, if not passive at least a walk-on, must ever
diminish, while the share of those who cannot be called actors, but, in a new meaning of the term ‘livers’, will increase’ (Debord in Bishop, 2006, p.98-99).
The French critic Nicolas Bourriaud shares the idea that participatory art should free people from their alienated way of seeing the world. In his well-known book Relational
Aesthetics (1998) he discusses what he calls ‘relational art’: art that is concerned with the
production of human relations, rather than with objects. An eloquent example of such art is Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work Untitled (Free) performed in 1992 in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In this work visitors were invited to eat self-made curry in an exhibition room that was converted into a canteen. Tiravanjia’s artwork is meant to criticize the distance that
characterizes a traditional museum visit. While usually visitors are supposed to look at exhibited objects, here people are invited to eat and talk with each other. The gaze that typifies
conventional spectatorship is thus implicitly presented as something antisocial. Bourriaud describes it as ‘the ‘private symbolic space’ which must be replaced by a ‘sphere of human interactions’ (Bourriaud in Bishop, 2006, p.160). This replacement succeeds for two reasons, says Bourriaud. First, because relational art refuses to be an object that can be sold. Therefore it does not easily become part of capitalist trading. And second, because these artworks refuse to
represent something. There are no pictures or motives but the message of the artwork is
immediately acted out (Bourriaud in Bishop, 2006, p.163-164). Tiranavjia’s work, for instance, does not say that people should meet each other – representation – but people are meeting each other in his work – participation.
Both Debord and Bourriaud thus claim that art, if it wants to remain critical, should not represent anymore.6 ‘Representational artworks’ would too easily be confused with the
capitalist logic that is misguiding the individual rather than supporting the social. Claire Bishop, however, criticises this rejection of representation in art. She claims that Bourriaud incorrectly denies the symbolic meaning of those works that he calls ‘relational’ (Bishop in Dezeuze, 2010, p.262). Relational artworks, Bishop stresses, are not only performed or ‘acted out in real life’, but also documented, exhibited and reflected upon – as is ironically the case in Bourriaud’s own text
6 There are some differences between the views of Debord and Bourriaud as well. Bourriaud, for instance,
15 (Bishop, 2012, p.9). In those different ways of reflecting upon participatory art, clearly the symbolic or conceptual meaning of the artworks can be found. Instead of rejecting this ‘symbolic layer’ of the work as something that could easily be appropriated by capitalism, Bishop attaches great value to it. In her view, art must preserve this symbolic layer, in order not to fuse
completely with society.7 The latter would mean losing every possible critical distance. Bishop seems to argue, reminiscent of Theodor Adorno, that art must always remain autonomous to some degree, in order to ensure the critical distance to society (Bishop in Dezeuze, 2010, p.263; Adorno, 1997, p.308).
Not only is Bourriaud criticized for the formal claims he makes about relational art, also the effect he ascribes to relational art – that it increases social bonding – is often critiqued. The Dutch scholar Claudia Ruitenberg, for instance, questions the critical potential of the ‘friendly relations’ created by relational art. Although Bourriaud argues that it is precisely this ability to experience friendly interactions that functions as a form of criticism in a society in which social relations have grown numb, Ruitenberg argues that something more is needed for true criticism. According to her participatory art needs to be conflictual and confrontational in order to show what is wrong in society (Ruitenberg, 2011, p.214, see also Mouffe in Gielen (2013) and Bishop (2012)).8 Nevertheless the belief that participatory art is able to bring back the social in an antisocial society seems widely shared. Such artworks are extensively financed in neoliberal regimes, as Pascal Gielen remarks (see introduction). The image of participatory art as something with strong socially restoring qualities thus remains the same, even though it is highly questioned in the literature.
Cognitive capitalism and the notion of interpassivity
So far ‘the social’ has been discussed as something opposed to capitalism. Against the
background of Debord’s spectacular capitalism the social is something that art, if it aims to be critical at the society of the spectacle, should restore, or at least reflect upon. Nevertheless some authors today argue that it is precisely this emphasis on the social that is a symptom of
capitalism, rather than its opposite. Those authors understand capitalism as cognitive
capitalism. According to them today’s market system is not so much driven by the production of material goods but rather by the creation of immaterial services, such as knowledge, information or communication. Since immaterial work requires specific qualities that are not limited to the conventional working atmosphere – such as flexibility or authenticity (see for instance Boltanski
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In the context of Debord’s theory, this opinion seems paradoxical. Representational art would rather resemble the society of the spectacle than the anti-representational situations of relational art. Bishop, however, claims that anti-representational live art events that are not recorded or reflected upon cannot be recognized as art. To her this makes anti-representational art indistinguishable from society, which means that is misses its critical potential (Bishop, 2012, p.216-217).
16 & Chiapello 2005) – the influence of post-Fordism profoundly influences people’s daily lives. According to the Austrian philosopher Robert Pfaller and the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, for instance, people nowadays constantly feel the urge to do something and be productive (Van Oenen, 2014, p.258). Participatory art could be regarded as a symptom of this permanent ‘call for activity’, since it demands creative effort from the audience. For this reason Pfaller and Žižek oppose the ideals of participatory art: instead of aiming at more interaction or more
participation they propose to take serious what they call ‘interpassivity’.
Interpassivity can be regarded as the opposite of interactivity. Spectators are not
encouraged to interact with a work, or to participate in it, but rather stimulated to do nothing. In an interpassive situation, the possible means to interact with an object are outsourced to
someone or something else. A well-known example of such a situation is the ‘canned laughter’ in television shows. Here the laughing, which can count as the appropriate reaction to the show, is taken over by the television show itself. Another example would be Greek tragic theatre. The tragic choir fulfils here the ‘interpassive function’ by expressing all the emotions that a viewer is supposed to ‘go through’ during the show (Van Oenen, 2014, p.25). Interpassivity seems to stand in sharp contrast with participatory art. While the audience is always an essential part of the participatory artwork and sometimes even of its artistic realisation, interpassive objects or artworks are completely ignorant of their audience. The viewer of the television show can remain completely passive without ruining the show since the laughing will be there anyhow on the exact moments when one is supposed to laugh, regardless of the reaction of the viewer.
While this passive attitude implied in the interpassive work might seem something negative and uninspiring, Žižek and Pfaller ascribe positive and even critical functions to it. According to them the viewer is not neglected by the interpassive work, but freed from the obligation to respond to what is happening in front of him or her (Van Oenen, 2014, p.257). They are freed from the permanent call for activity, which can be seen as the hallmark of a society dominated by cognitive capitalism (Van Oenen, 2014, p.258). For Žižek and Pfaller, participation means agreement with a society that values productivity, seriousness, work and materials, above dreams, imagination and laziness. Interpassivity can be a form of protest, precisely because it undermines this constant call for participation.
For the Dutch academic Elke Müller the idea of interpassivity as protest needs a notion of ‘activity’ as well in order to overcome its negative connotations.9 She claims that Pfaller’s use of the term interpassivity cannot achieve anything positive (Müller, 2012, p.56). In addition, she argues that interpassivity is often dialectically related with interactivity, and that it might be
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17 more fruitful to look at the interplay between those terms instead of favouring one of the two. One of the main examples in Müller’s essay is the work Rembo of the Dutch sculptor Bastienne Kramer. This work was created for the Rembrandtpark – a park in Amsterdam in which
vandalism is not a rare phenomenon. Rembo is a huge rough Rembrandt-like figure made out of green ceramic. With the release of the sculpture Kramer explained that the work is meant to be demolished trough vandalism. Kramer herself will restore the future damage by covering the devastated parts with bronze. For Müller this work is above all interpassive. The chance that the sculpture might be demolished – which can count as an interactive response – is already
included in the work itself. The work therefore reverses future acts of vandalism. It is never possible to demolish the work, since demolishing is already part of the creative transformation of the sculpture. The possible act of vandalism therefore loses its meaning. At the same time the work is interactive: it needs people to demolish it in order to reach in more superior bronze form (Müller, 2012, p.58).
One thing that can be concluded from Müller’s article is that interactivity in art does not necessarily exclude interpassivity, and that the reverse might also be true. If we look for instance at Yoko Ono’s performance Cut Piece (1965) – a work in which visitors were invited to cut small pieces from Ono’s clothes – both ‘interactive’ and ‘interpassive’ elements can be found. Visitors were activated by the demand to cut a piece of clothing, but they were also left passive, because the artist already determines the cutting of the clothes, very specifically. Another interesting work that shows the dynamic between interactivity and interpassivity is Tino Sehgal’s The
Objective of that Object (2004). In this work, six philosophy students are paid for starting a partly
scripted debate on objectivity and subjectivity. When someone enters the performance, the students will ask him or her to take part in the discussion. Here, the work seems surely
interactive. However, the participant is soon to find out that there is no real interaction possible. Or, as Bishop describes it: ‘any contribution you make to the debate feels self-conscious and hollow, since it is impossible to alter the work’s structure, only to assume your role in it’ (Bishop, 2012, p.224).
In the debate described in this section participatory art is defined in two different ways. First as a protest against the spectacular capitalism of Debord and second, as the symptom of Cognitive Capitalism. In both positions participatory art is presented as something that activates the public. The appraisal of this activation, however turns out to be different. For Bourriaud, this is a positive feature, because it counters a society in which people have become passive
18 capitalism. Yet the assumption that participatory art must be seen as something ‘active’ and therefore as a criticism or as a continuation of capitalism can be questioned. In the previous section I highlighted texts that pay attention to the activity of conventional spectatorship. Here it became clear that participatory art cannot be understood as opposed to the passive
conventional spectatorship, but rather as another kind of activity. Furthermore, Müller’s article showed that notions of passivity and activity do not mutually exclude each other. They can rather be seen as dialectally related. To label all interactive art as a symptom of capitalism and all interpassive art as ‘resistance’ against it seems therefore incorrect. The dynamics of
19
1.3
The democratic ideal of participation
In the sculpture garden of the Kröller Müller Museum in the Netherlands, one can find an elegant and humble granite amphitheatre, made by Martha Pan in 2007. Next to the sculpture there is a text board that says ‘As an exception, visitors may walk upon this work’. The message of this artwork seems straightforward: ‘Enter the theatre, make your own show, be an artist!’. Participatory art seems the most democratic art form par excellence. The possibility for the audience to take part in the realisation of an artwork brings about that not the artist, but the public decides on what the art in the end will look like. This democratic image of participatory art is, however, highly questioned in recent literature.
Contesting consensus: the disadvantage of democracy in art
While participation often bears positive connotations of democracy and social relevance, this notion has been under attack for the past few years. One of the most fanatic criticisms comes from the German architect and essayist Markus Miessen. With books as The Violence of
Participation (2007) and The Nightmare of Participation (2011) he sets the tone for the battle
against the participation model that is most common in our democratic societies. According to him ‘participation’ as it is understood now, bears false connotations:
participation is often read through romantic notions of negotiation, inclusion, and democratic decision making. However, it is precisely this often-unquestioned mode of inclusion […] that does not produce significant result. (Miessen, 2011, p.13)
One of the problems, according to Miessen, is the notion of consensus: the idea that the best decisions will be made – for instance, when developing a neighbourhood – by incorporating as many voices as possible. This consensual decision is, according to Miessen, always suboptimal. First, because the final idea is most influenced by the idea that has the largest quantity of votes while quantity cannot guarantee that something is a good idea (Miessen, 2011, p.43). Second, because in practice participation structures are often imposed on people – ‘top-down’ – in order to share responsibility for plans those who are invited to participate would otherwise not want. Seen this way, democracy has nothing to do with ‘incorporating voices’, but becomes a tool for political legitimation in which real participation and responsibility is ruled out (Miessen, 2011, p.14-16).10 Miessen therefore proposes a model for participation that initially seems undemocratic.11 In this model participation must be understood as the practise of the individual outsider. This individual does not ask input from others, but is rather ‘forcefully entering an
10 Miessen seems not entirely clear in his criticism of consensus. He acknowledges (without arguments) that
the consensual structure is needed to get things done and that we cannot live without it (Miessen, 2011, p.83). It seems that he argues for a complementary structure in which consensus and interventionism exist next to each other.
20 existing discourse’ (Miessen, 2011, p.15).12. It is important to understand Miessen’s ideas on participation in relation to his profession as an architect. In the process of developing new buildings, architects are often obliged to follow a democratic procedure based on the model of consensus. The architect has to seek consensus with clients, design review committees and other stakeholders. In that sense, architects have even less autonomy than visual artists (Miessen, 2011, p.88-89). This democratic process makes it difficult for the architect to realize ideas that counter the status quo of the socially designed order. Those ideas would, namely, be ruled out by the voices of the majority. For Miessen, not more, but less democratization is needed in
architecture, in order to have more original, critical and problem-solving designs.
The Dutch-Flemish writing duo BAVO, also specialists in architectural practises, see those problems not only restricted to architectural forms of art. In their book Too Active To Act (2010), they claim that in the past decade one can see a trend of artists that are, unlike Miessen, more and more willing to let go of their autonomous position in order to listen to what the public wants. Participatory art can be regarded as part of this trend since the very idea behind it is that not the artist, but the audience is responsible for the creative production of the artwork. Artists themselves often regard this shift as something positive. They put old ideals of autonomy aside as elite and useless, and replace them with pragmatic and democratic ideas that are
believed to have a bigger social impact (BAVO, 2011, p.11). This often goes accompanied with an attitude of self-proclaimed incompetence: ‘Why would we know better what should be changed here than the local residents themselves?’13 (BAVO, 2011, p.39, my translation) BAVO, however, questions the social impact of such projects. They argue that such artistic approaches in which the pragmatic is valued above the aesthetic, fail to effectuate any real change. As an example they mention the project Dwaallicht by Jeanne van Heeswijk. This project is set in a
neighbourhood in Rotterdam that is currently being reorganized. One of the outcomes of this reorganization is that many affordable apartments (social housing)14 will be replaced by newer and more luxurious ones. Due to this procedures the former inhabitants of these houses – the poorest inhabitants of the neighbourhood – are forced to move out. Van Heeswijk’s project focuses on the stories of those inhabitants, and tries to give them positive attention. BAVO judges this project for not being critical at the real issues at stake here. Instead of shedding light on the inhumanity of the forced migration, Van Heeswijk helps the people to accept this decision, by making a ‘nice story’ out of their lives (BAVO, 2011, p.54). BAVO calls this problem ‘pragmatic selection’: the possible is being done at the cost of the critical.
12
This ‘opportunistic model of interventionism’ (ibid), must however be combined with the idea of responsibility.
13
‘waarom zouden wij beter weten wat hier moet gebeuren dan de bewoners zelf’
21 Bishop too seems sceptical concerning the result of artworks that are made on the basis of democratic audience participation. As an example she discusses Antony Gormley’s One &
Other. This work was realised on the so called ‘fourth plinth’ on London’s historic Trafalgar
Square.15 For 100 days the audience was invited to take place on the plinth, one hour each and one person at the time. The audience was completely free to shout, dress or act the way they wanted. In a short introduction video Gormley says: ‘‘I’ like to think that that little bit of space that’s 1.7 meter wide by 4.5 meter long is an open space for an open work that is about the democratization of art’ (OneandOther09, 2009). Bishop describes the result of the artwork as follows:
the project was described by The Guardian not unfairly, as ‘Twitter Art’. In a world where everyone can air their views to everyone we are faced not with empowerment but with an endless stream of egos levelled to banality. Far from being oppositional to spectacle, participation has now entirely merged with it’ (Bishop, 2012, p.277).
Just as Miessen, Bishop implies that a certain kind of democratic audience participation rules out interesting and provoking ideas. The 2400 participants of Gormley’s sculpture did what could be expected from the ordinary crowd. They dressed up, made an argument or posed as themselves on top of the plinth, but they lacked certain eloquence. In Bishop’s view this work shows society, without criticising it. It gives people democratic access to being part of an artwork, but in such a friendly way, that any tension between the artwork and society is missing. In her view art needs a more unfriendly and conflicting approach in order to be more critical (Bishop, 2012, p.278).
Proposing an alternative: agonistic interventionism
Generally speaking, one encounters two very different models of democracy. The first model shows democracy as the place where different people come together to make decisions. Here, the democratic participants or representatives will all have their say about a specific issue, and in the end the balance will be made up.16 Important for this interpretation of democracy is that differences in opinion must be overcome in order to make a decision. In the second model of democracy these differences between people are key. Here democracy is not understood as a procedure in which one should overcome those differences, but rather as the instance that provides enough space for these differences to exist.
The first model, as we saw in the previous part, is seen as problematic when applied to art: round table constructions can limit the creativity of the architect (Miessen), art that aims at
15
In 1841, when the historic sculptures of the Trafalgar Square were installed, one of the four plinth’s was left empty due to insufficient funding. From 1998 on, this plinth is used as a temporary exhibition space for contemporary sculptures. Among the artists that presented on this plinth were Marc Quinn, Yinka Shonibare and Hans Haacke.
16
22 pragmatic consensual solutions risks to lose real criticism (BAVO) and democratic artworks created by masses of people often lack a certain eloquence (Bishop). Though the consensual model might be necessary in order to make joint decisions in education, politics, business and so on, those authors believe that it is an inconvenient way to realize artistic projects. As an
alternative they propose different approaches that are more reminiscent of the second model of democracy. Among the most prominent defenders of this model is the Belgian political
philosopher Chantal Mouffe. Most important in her work is the idea that conflicts in a democracy should not be overcome with the help of the consensual democratic model, but rather be
preserved and protected. Instead of ‘antagonistic’, she uses the term ‘agonistic’ to describe this model. There is a slight different between the meanings of those terms. ‘Antagonistic’ can be seen as a term to describe a conflictual situation in which the different views are incompatible. Central, here, is to defend one’s own position against the enemy. ‘Agonistic’ stands for the cultivation of such a situation. Here, the presentation of the different sides of the conflict is seen as something productive (Kelder & Jonkers, 2010).
The art museum should be one of the places where incompatible conflicts could be cultivated, according to Mouffe. It should give voice to those artworks that do not fit within the
status quo (Mouffe in Gielen, 2013, p.64-74). Also the American philosopher Judith Butler
defends a similar position. In her essay ‘The value of being disturbed’ (2000), she discusses the public significance of Chris Ofili’s controversial painting named The Holy Virgin Mary (1996). This work shows a black Madonna that is made with elephant dung and surrounded with a collage of pornographic images, mostly close-ups of the female genitals. According to Butler the social order depends on the ‘exclusion of certain forms and kinds of representation’ (Butler, 2000, p.9).17 Ofili’s work is controversial, precisely because it shows what is normally hidden in the public space. A confrontation with this artwork can therefore be regarded as a conflict with the way people identify with the social order. Butler writes:
Who says: yes, take my icon, and make me rethink its value in the context of a
multiculturalism that is no longer reducible to ready-made pluralism!? Give me an image that is neither purely Christian, purely African, purely modernist, and make me live in the clash of perspectives presented there. […] More often than not, we ask of art and language to give us back a world that we already know, reconfirm our place, our position, our perspective. And this is precisely to sacrifice the critical perspective that gives us the world anew. (Butler, 2000, p.8)
The museum as agonistic space is thus a museum filled with works that represent the positions that are underrepresented in society. It is able to evoke a critical attitude, not because it is based on a consensual, but on a conflictual relation with the social order.
23 Of course Mouffe’s ideas on agonistic museum spaces are not immediately applicable to the issue of the democracy in participatory art. In the case of participatory art projects, not so much the relations they have to societal democratic structures, but rather the way an artwork is democratically or undemocratically constituted is important. This democratic creation of art can, however, be called ‘agonistic’ as well, in some cases,. Bishop, for instance, suggests that a certain tension is needed between the artist and the public, reminiscent of BDSM-sex structures, for participatory art to be really critical. She describes this tension as follow: ‘The artist relies upon the participant’s creative exploitation of the situation that he/she offers – just as participants require the artist’s cue and direction’ (Bishop, 2012, p.279). In order to understand this idea it might be helpful to take a quick look at Gielen’s mapping of community art. Gielen, distinguishes between four characteristics of community artworks: digestive, subversive, auto-relational and allo-relational qualities. The first demarcation between digestive and subversive art is meant to separate community art projects that confirm the social order, from projects that question it. The second distinction, between auto-relational and allo-relational emphasizes the difference between artworks that are characterized by an authentic style of the artist and artworks that are adjusted to the desires of the public (Gielen, 2011, p.25).18 For Bishop it is important that
participatory art is not digestive – as Gormley’s One & Other – but subversive. In her view, a subversive effect can be reached by finding the right balance between the allo-relational and the auto-relational. On the one hand the artwork should be allo-relational enough to appeal to an audience. It should, at the same time, also keep a specific signature to challenge this audience. In Bishop’s view an artwork should thus not be made in a friendly consensual way – as we saw above in the example of Gormley’s One & Other –but rather should create opportunities for ‘conflictual participation’.
An example of such a disruptive work is perhaps Please Love Austria (2001) by the Austrian filmmaker Christof Schlingensief – taken as an example of critical participatory art by both Bishop and BAVO. The work was constructed as a Big-Brother-like TV show, with a group of asylum-seekers as participants (Bishop, 2012, p.280). For six days, the public of the show could vote their favourite asylum-seeker. The least popular of the day was sent back to the deportation centre. In the end the winner could take home the grand prix: official citizenship through marriage. This work could be seen as agonistic in two different ways. First, the way in which the asylum seekers had to participate was not without tension. To a certain extent they were free present themselves to the public. At the same time the context of the artwork
reformed their contributions in a certain way. Was the public supposed to pity those people? Did they present themselves well enough to earn the prize of citizenship? The second level on which
18
24 this work could be seen as agonistic, is how it influenced the public debate. According to BAVO, the most striking aspect of this work that it succeeded in both provoking right-wing and left-wing politicians. Instead of trying to improve a tiny bit of the situation in which the asylum-seekers are, this work questioned the whole political procedure around asylum. Therefore, politicians were forced to reformulate their political program, as they unanimously disapproved of the TV program (BAVO, 2011, p.153-154).
While the debate on the democratic ideal of participation art will probably continue, it is important to bear in mind that most participatory artworks, in their final presentation, are not so different from other types of art. As Bishop rightly notices, many participatory projects can only be experienced by relatively small group of participants. In this sense, participatory art is often very inaccessible and undemocratic (Bishop, 2012, p.205-206). This is even more the case when the artist did not think of ways to document and communicate the project. Pictures of participatory performances are often not instructive at all – think of pictures with dining people, or people talking to each other – and uninformed passers often do not even recognize
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1.4
Changing hierarchies: questioning the authority of the artist
In the previous chapter possible forms of democratic participation in participatory art have been discussed. Inseparable from this issue is the question concerning the authority of the artist. If the role of the audience has increased, as we see in participatory artworks, does this consequently mean that the authoritative image of the artist has weakened? In other words: can we say with Roland Barthes that the rise of the audience in participation art also causes the death of the artist?
The public role of artists today: questions of authority
Many theories have been formed about why people in general seem to be accepting less and less authority over the years. To name only a few: the postmodern values of tolerance and cultural relativism are held responsible for the weakening of the former appraisal of high culture and expertise (De Ruiter, 1994), the many cases of fraud in the scientific, medical and economic sector should have decreased the general trust in those authoritarian institutes (Schuyt, 2013), and the neo-liberal focus on measuring outcomes in quantities have undermined the reckoning of unmeasurable quality (Gielen, 2013). It is difficult to say which of these theories offers the right explanation for the perceived loss of authority. Altogether they do, however, express concerns about the fact that expertise, and faith in expertise – in any field whatsoever – is losing impact.
To what extent is this true for the authority of the artist? According to the French
academic William Marx, the loss of authority can be clearly established for the literary author. In his view authors are less and less of relevance for the public debate (Marx, 2008). In contrast to the theories mentioned above, Marx seeks the causes for this loss not in external developments, but in the literary tradition itself. Over the years, he argues, authors have more and more abandoned their preeminent status. While poets in the eighteenth century were almost seen as priests and speakers of truth, literary figures nowadays constantly doubt and undermine the functioning of their writings. This is especially evident in the attitude of the Surrealists. To the question ‘Why do you write?’, they liked to repeat the answer of Paul Valéry: ‘Out of weakness’ (Marx, 2012, p.28).19 In Marx’s view the main causes for this self-undermining attitude is the ideal of art’s autonomy, driven by Kant’s aesthetics of disinterestedness, theories of the sublime and l’art pour lart movements. While these philosophies brought art to unprecedented heights – it was in art alone, one could touch the sublime – they also caused its rapid decline: art turned more and more inwards and became increasingly disconnected with social interests (Marx, 2012, p.83-98).
26 In his essay ‘Where is the critic?’, Thijs Lijster elaborates on this idea of Marx. To him Marx’s explanation is plausible to some extent: ‘If they [the literary authors] cannot or will no longer explain what their function and importance is, why should the public bother?’ (Lijster in Gielen, 2013, p.40). At the same time, he criticizes Marx for not taking into account external causes for the loss of autonomy. According to him, one should, for instance, not overlook the democratization of new media (Lijster in Gielen, 2013, p.41). Today’s Twitter and Blog culture have turned millions of Internet users into people who voice their opinion. According to Lijster this caused a split between mass opinion an academic opinion. Rather than being ‘a spokesman for the public’ the academic critic often condemns the public for its bad taste and its mass consumer behaviour, which increases the gap between the two. In Lijster’s view, however, the question about the authority of the art critic is not so much about this division between art and consumer culture, but rather about ‘whether the judgement of the critic, as a skilled, trained and experienced observer, is more legitimate or valuable than the opinion of any average person’ (Lijster in Gielen, 2013, p.44). Although Lijster writes about the art critic, a similar question could be posed for the artist. Does the professional artist have creative skills that cannot be replaced by the general audience? Is making art limited to a group of specialists – or can anyone be an artist?
The authoritative creators of participatory art
At first sight makers of participatory art certainly seem to resemble the self-undermining authors described by William Marx. As we saw in the second section of this chapter, the
community artists described by BAVO do not want to work within the artistic tradition anymore but rather consult the opinions of ‘people in the neighbourhood’. While the traditional means of art – symbols, metaphors, representation – are considered useless by them, the opinions of the public are believed to have socially restoring qualities.20 They thus confirm the marginalized position of art by turning away from their artistic expertise. At the same time, however, unlike the literary authors described by Marx, those artists do not accept their isolation from society, but try to be relevant again by asking input from society itself. In Gormley’s One & Other – an artwork I described in the previous section – the same appreciation for the opinions of the general audience can be found. By giving the public, one by one, space to voice their opinion on top of perhaps the most famous plinth of the world, Gormley literally turned the opinions of the people into art. He seemed to emphasize the comparability of the input of himself as an artist and that of the public even more by signing himself up as one of the participants.21 Does this
20
Whether such actions really meet the effects they aim at is difficult to say (see §1.2).
21
27 mean that the expertise of the artist, in case of participatory art, has become indistinguishable from that of the public? Has the artist completely abandoned his or her authority?
Claire Bishop argues against this idea. According to her, one should not forget that ‘participatory artists’ are working with people as their material (Bishop, 2012, p.223). Instead of moving paint or clay, they are moving bodies. In her view the way they direct those bodies, the people they choose for their art and the amount of freedom the participants get within the artwork, must all be seen as part of the artistic creation. From this point of view, makers of participatory art can even be considered to be more authoritative than conventional artists. If we look, for instance, revisit Yoko Ono’s Cutting Piece, we see that the cutting of Ono’s clothes in small pieces was demanded by Ono herself. There was no freedom to cut off a large piece of clothing, or to paint her cloth. The artwork proceeded exactly how the artist demanded it to proceed. Another interesting example is the well-known performance The Artist is Present (2010) by Serbian Marina Abramović. In a three-month during performance, visitors had the opportunity to sit in front of Abramović and to look at her. The performance was very simple: two chairs, one for Abramovic, and an empty one to be filled by someone from the public. As could be seen in the documentary The Artist is Present (2012), it was prohibited for the public to do anything else than just sitting still and looking at the artist. A male visitor, for instance, was removed after he held a mirror at the height of his head and a young woman was called back after she took off her dress under which she was naked. One can indicate here that the performance, including the participation of the audience, is mainly determined by the artist herself. The ability to create is certainly not fully outsourced to the public.
There is also another conclusion that can be drawn from the work of Ono’s and Abramović’s performance. Despite the fact that the public has a large role in those works, the artist does not disappear from the stage. In fact, the artist seems even more dominantly present in those works. In case of Abramović this is most obvious. It is not only emphasized by the title of her work, but also by the wildly enthusiastic audience. People camped near the entrance of the museum and waited for days, just to have a single chance to sit in front of the famous Marina. During those three months she seemed a half-God, idolized by the public, certainly not the marginalized artistic figure William Marx spoke about.
28 who does everything to present him- or herself in a commercially attractive way for various project holders. These artists try to counter this commercial individualized atmosphere by working in teams, and making project instead of objects that can be sold (Bishop, 2012, p.12).
Delegated performance can also be seen as the middle road, between an authoritarian artist who has clear instructions for the audience, and an artist who rather wants to let the audience speak. This can, for instance, be seen in the work of Tino Sehgal. He gives his
performers clear instructions about how to move and what to talk about, but he also leaves them a certain freedom to express what they want within these lines. Such works seem reminiscent of the compositions of Karlheinz Stockhausen, described by Eco. The authoritarian relation
between artist and audience is partly interrupted by the intervention of performers or composers. Yet, here as well, this interruption is created by the artist him- or herself.
From this section, it can be concluded that, instead of a loss of authority, a more dominant role of the artist can often be found in participatory artworks. Especially in early performance art, the artist is put forward as the centre of the work, as could be seen in
Abramović’s The Artist is Present22 and Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece. Nevertheless, not all participatory artworks put such an emphasis on the creator of the work. Some, as we saw in the work of BAVO, openly renounce their own authority. Besides, performance artists such as Tino Sehgal outsource their performances instead of working with their own body. Artists who deny their instructive position, however, seem unaware of the fact that the final product or project is their creation. They are not moving or moulding paint or clay, but real bodies in order to make their statement. The degree to which they give freedom to these bodies can also be seen as part of the artwork.
22
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1.5
Concluding remarks
In the final lines of Art & Today (2008) – one of today’s most comprehensive surveys of contemporary art –Eleanor Heartney gives the following interpretation of participatory art:
Participatory art is a direct challenge to cherished assumptions about the meaning of art, its function in society, and the special nature of the artist’s calling. But in their place, it poses a set of models for the melding of art and life and opens up exciting new
possibilities for artists seeking a more significant role in contemporary culture. Where is art going? How will it be different in the future? Of all the myriad forces at work
unmaking and remaking art today, none may be more momentous than the democratization of art trough participation (Heartney, 2008, p.412).
Heartney’s view is in my eyes exemplary for how participatory art is often interpreted at first sight. It is considered to be radically different from other forms of art. Besides, it held to be a form of criticism that can play a ‘more significant role in contemporary culture’. Also, it is immediately linked to the democratization of art or democracy in general. In the previous sections, however, these three assumptions – the newness, the critical potential and the democracy of participatory art – were thoroughly questioned. Is participatory art really that different from other kinds of art? Can participatory art be critical at a society that shows the same demand for participation in its cognitive capitalist organisation? Is participatory art as democratic as is seems to be? And, is a democratic approach actually desirable in art?
The radical newness of participatory art
First of all, it seems difficult to see how participatory art can be related to other forms of art. In §1.1 I highlighted texts that retrospectively show that active audience involvement is not exclusive to participatory art projects. Rather it can be found throughout art’s history in several forms. Therefore it seems that claims about the radical newness of participatory art must be nuanced. Yet authors such as Debord and Bourriaud claim the opposite. They frame
participatory art as something fundamentally opposed to art as it was in the past. For them, participation counters the logic of representation and spectatorship that is so characteristic for art of the past. Bishop, however, disagrees with both Debord and Bourriaud. In her view, one should not overlook the importance of the ‘secondary audience’ who does not participate in the artworks, but rather looks and reflects on them. In her view meanings and reflection do play an important role in participatory artworks, even if the artists themselves refuse to admit this. Yet a theory of how participatory art can be a form of representation is missing23. Such a formulation
23
