Amy Stafford © 1998, Surface Magazine issue no. 15
"Art no longer wants to respond to the excess of commodities and signs but to a lack of connections."
Jacques Rancière, Problems and Transformations in Critical Art, 2004
Claire Bishop, Viewers as Producers, Participation, 0262524643
1920 Soviet mass spectacle
At the other extreme from these collaborative (yet highly authored) experiences were the Soviet mass spectacles that sublated individualism into propagandistic displays of collectivity.
1921 Paris, "Dada-season"
André Breton coined the phrase "Artificial Hells" to describe this new conception of Dada events that moved out of the cabaret halls and took to the streets.
These two approaches [...] an authored tradition that seeks to provoke participants, and a de-authored lineage that aims to embrace collective creativity- One is disruptive and interventionist, the other constructive and ameliorative. In both instances, the issue of participation becomes increasingly inextricable from the question of political commitment.
1934 German dramatist Bertolt Brecht
German dramatist Bertolt Brecht['s ...] theatre compels the spectator to take up a position towards this action. [...] Many would argue that the Brechtian models offers a relatively passive mode of spectatorship, since it relies on raising consciousness through the distance of critical thinking.
1938 Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty
By contrast, a paradigm of physical involvement - taking its lead from Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty amoung others - sought to reduce the distance between actors and spectators. This emphasis on proximity was crucial to myriad developments in avant-garde theatre of the 1960s [...] In this framework, physical involvement is considered an essentail precursor to social change.
Contemporary
- Idea of collective presence - scrutinized and dissected by numorous philosophers
- Technical level - most contemporary art is collectively produced (even is authroship remains individual
- Participation - used by business as tool for improving efficiency and workforce moral; all-pervasive in mass-media as reality TV
- As artistic medium - no more intrinsically political or oppositional than any other
Since 1960s - Calls for an art of particiapation allied with one or all of the following agendas-
Activation - create an active subject
- empowered by the experience of physical or symbolic participation
- newly-emancipated subjects of participation will find themselves able to determine their own political or social reality
*** - derives legitimacy from a (desired) causal relationship between experience of a work of art and individual/collective agency
Authorship
- ceding authorial control is [...] more egalitarian and democratic than creation of work by single artist
- shared production [...] entails the aesthetic benefits of greater risk & unpredictability
*** - collaborative creativity emerges from, and produces, more positive and non-hierarchical social model
Community - Perceived crisis in community and collective responsibility
*** - more acute since fall of Communism
*** - takes its lead from Marxist indicting the alienating and isolating effects of capitalism.
*** - restoration of social bond through collective elaboration of meaning
The spectacle - as a social relationship between people mediate by images - is pacifying and divisive, uniting us only through our separation from one another.
Guy Debord, co-founder of "Situationalist International", critique of capitalist "spectacle"
If spectacle - passivity & subjugation that arrests thought and prevents determination of one's reality, then it is precisely as an injunction to activity that Debord advocated the costrution of "situations" - logical development of Brechtian theatre, but no longer audience, but VIVEUR (one who lives). "Constructed Situations" aimed to produce new social relationships and thus new social realities.
1998 - Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics
*** - Live events and people as privileged materials
Subsequent Generation of Artists
- engage more directly with specific social constituencies
- intervene critically in the participatory forms of mass media entertainment
2004 - Rancière's "The Emancipated Spectator"
- drawing links between history of theatre and education
- questions theory of spectacle = passivity
- active is NOT opposed to passive (presumptions of looking and knowing, watching and acting, appearance and reality
- should presume equality- everyone has same capacity for intelligent response to book, play, art...
- "Spectatorship is not passivity that has to be turned into activity. it is our normal situation. We learn and teach, we act and know as spectatos who link what they see with what they have seen and told, done and dreamt. There is no privileged medium as there is no privileged starting point"
- spectator who is active as INTERPRETER
- not in anti-spectacular stagings of community
- not in the claim that mere activity would correspond to emancipation
- putting to work the idea that we are all equally capable of inventing our own translations
- does not divide audiences into active and passive, capable and incapable
- invites to appropriate works for ourselves
- make use of these in ways that their authors might never have dreamed possible.
Future Reading
"Participation" ed. Claire Bishop
"The Emancipated Spectator" Rancière
Guy Debond - audience as Viveur, Constructed Situations, Situationalist International
"Situation" ed. Claire Doherty
"Conversation Pieces" Grant Kester
recent exhibition catalogue (The Art of Participation 1950 to Now
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