Participation. Documents of Contemporary Art. Edited by Claire Bishop, 2006.
Viewers as producers
A book about the social dimension of participation, rather than the activation of individual viewer in interactive or installation art. Reviews the history of practices since ’60s that appropriate social forms as a way to bring art closer to everyday life: samba dancing (Helio Oiticica) funk (Adrian Piper), drinking beer (Tom Maroni), discussing philosophy (Ian Wilson) or politics (Joseph Beuys), organising a garage sale (Martha Rosler). They differ from performance art, in that they strive to collapse the distinction between performer and audience, professional and amateur, production and reception. The emphasis is on collaboration and the collective dimension of social experience.
Precursor, Paris Dada-season of April 1921; a series of manifestations that sought to involve the city’s public, eg mock trial of anarchist author – where public were invited to sit on jury. Soviet mass spectacles that sublated individualism into propagandistic displays of collectivity. Authored tradition that seeks to provoke participants, and a de-authored lineage that aims to embrace collective creativity. One is disruptive and interventionist and the other constructive and ameliorative.
Walter Benjamin (1934ish) maintained that a work of art should actively intervene in and provide a model for allowing viewers to be involved in the process of production: ‘this apparatus is better, the more consumers it is able to turn into producers – that is, the more readers of spectators into collaborators’. Brechtian theatre abandons long complex plots in favour of ‘situations’ that interrupt the narrative through a disruptive element, eg song. Through montage and juxtaposition, audiences were led to break their identification with the protagonists on stage and be incited to critical distance – relies on critical thinking. Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty sought to reduce the distance between actors and spectators – physical involvement is considered an essential precursor to social change.
Today’s agendas: activation, authorship, community.
Activation: desire to create an active subject, one who will be empowered by the experience of physical or symbolic participation – able to determine their own social and political reality.
Authorship: the gesture of ceding some or all authorial control is conventionally regarded as more egalitarian and democratic than the creation of a work by a single artist. Shared production is also seen to entail the aesthetic benefits of greater risk and unpredictability -a non-hierarchical social model.
Community: community and collective responsibility in crisis. Alienating and isolating effects of capitalism.
Guy Debord (Situationist International). The spectacle – a social relationship between people mediated by images – is pacifying and divisive, uniting us only through our separation from one another – the opposite of dialogue. ‘Situations’ were a logical development of Brechtian theatre, except the audience function disappears altogether, in a new category of ‘viveur’ (one who lives). Rather than awakening critical consciousness (Brechtian model), ‘constructed situations’ aimed to produce a new social relationships and thus new social realities.
Nicholas Bourriaud (1998) Relational aesthetics.
Jacques Ranciere (2004) Problems and transformations in critical art. Art no longer wants to respond to the excess of commodities and signs but to a lack of connections. Argues that the opposition of active and passive is riddled with presuppositions about looking and knowing, watching and acting, appearance and reality. The binary active/passive always ends up dividing a population into those with capacity on one side, and those with incapacity on the other. Ranciere argues that emancipation should presuppose equality: the assumption that everyone has the same capacity for intelligent response to a book or play or work of art. Rather than suppressing this mediating object in favour of communitarian immediacy.
Calls for spectators that are active as interpreters. – we are all equally capable of inventing our own translations – inviting all to appropriate works for ourselves and make our own meanings.
