The Participator in Contemporary Art: Art and Social Relationships 9781350989061, 9781838609573

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Kaija Kaitavuori is Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Helsinki and Visiting Lecturer at the Aalto University in Helsinki. She received her PhD from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London where she also was a Visiting Lecturer between 2012 and 2015. She has previously held senior roles at the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki and the Finnish National Gallery.

‘Kaija Kaitavuori’s work is a perfect example of how the use of sociology and even structuralist anthropology can enlighten the actual art world. By crossing contemporary art issues with methods and concepts borrowed from the best authors, it offers an ideal matching between quite a new object – participatory art – and the intellectual frames it calls for. The book should thus become a reference, not only for contemporary art specialists and art lovers, but also for scholars in the humanities and social sciences.’ Nathalie Heinich, Senior Research in Sociology, CNRS-EHESS, Paris

The Participator in Contemporary Art Art and Social Relationships

Kaija Kaitavuori

Published in 2018 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright q 2018 Kaija Kaitavuori The right of Kaija Kaitavuori to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art ISBN: 978 1 78453 875 0 eISBN: 978 1 83860 956 6 ePDF: 978 1 83860 957 3 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset in Minion Pro by OKS Prepress Services, Chennai, India

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements

vii ix

Introduction Concepts, Methods and Terminology Challenges and Choices The Structure of the Book

1 2 5 6

1

The Participator: A New Role in Art

9

2

Typology of Participatory Art Group 1, Target Group 2, User Group 3, Material Group 4, Co-creator

3

Artwork as a Network Participators as ‘Produsers’ Multiple Authorship and the Network Perspective Defining an Artwork as Cutting the Network

93 95 99 115

4

Contracts of Participation User Contract: Liability Production Contracts: Ownership and Economic Rights Contractual Culture Art About Contracts Working for the Art(ist)

119 121

The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation Participation and Democracy

137 138

5

v

15 18 32 52 70

123 126 128 130

The Participator in Contemporary Art Top-down Participation Versus Participation from Below Models of Being Together Fears and Hopes of Participation

143 148 161

Postscript Appendix: List of Works

167 171

Notes Bibliography Index

183 223 237

vi

List of Illustrations Figures Figure 2.1 Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008, Helsinki. Courtesy of Galerie Diana Stigter and Carlos/Ishikawa.

19

Figure 2.2 Superflex, Free Shop, 2010, Helsinki. Photo: Veikko Somerpuro. Courtesy of IHME Contemporary Art Festival, Helsinki.

20

Figure 2.3 Pilvi Takala, Real Snow White, 2009, video, 9:15 min. Courtesy of Galerie Diana Stigter and Carlos/Ishikawa.

22

Figure 2.4 Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Coco Fusco, Two Undiscovered Amerindians visit Madrid, 1992. Photo: Nancy Lytle.

23

Figure 2.5 Erwin Wurm, One Minute Sculpture, Untitled (Stairs), 2002. Courtesy of Studio Erwin Wurm.

33

Figure 2.6 Michael Lin, Palais de Tokyo, 21-01-2002/ 21-12-2002, emulsion on MDF panel, 2,800 £ 900 cm, Paris. Courtesy of the artist.

35

Figure 2.7 Michael Lin, Kiasma Daybed, 2001, pillows, emulsion on wood, 360 £ 360 £ 45 cm, Helsinki. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Hannu Karjalainen.

36

Figure 2.8

45

Carsten Höller, Test Site, 2006, Tate Modern, London.

Figure 2.9 Spencer Tunick, Nude Adrift, 2002, Helsinki, participant copy.

54

Figure 2.10 Santiago Sierra, Person in a Hole, 2001, Helsinki, installation. Photo: Finnish National Gallery.

56

Figure 2.11 Santiago Sierra, Person in the Ditch measuring 300 £ 500 £ 300 cm. Space between Kiasma Museum and

vii

The Participator in Contemporary Art parliament building. Helsinki. Finland. September 2001, black-and-white photography, 152.5 £ 229.5 cm. Photo: Finnish National Gallery/Petri Virtanen. Courtesy of Finnish National Gallery/Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma, and Santiago Sierra Studio.

57

Figure 2.12 Vanessa Beecroft, VB46, 2001, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles. Photo: Dusan Reljin.

66

Figure 2.13 Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, Helsinki Complaints Choir, 2006. Photo: Heidi Piiroinen.

72

Figure 2.14 Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg, Voracidad Maxima, 2003.

74

Figure 2.15 1969.

80

Sherry Arnstein, Ladder of Citizen Participation,

Figure 5.1 Antony Gormley, One & Other, 2009, Trafalgar Square, London. Photo Alan Stanton. Wikimedia commons CC BY-SA-2.0.

154

Figure 5.2 Frontispiece (detail) of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, engraving by Abraham Bosse, 1651.

155

Table Table 2.1

Typology of participation.

viii

17

Acknowledgements This book is based on a doctoral dissertation completed in 2015 at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. I would like to thank my supervisors, Dr. Julian Stallabrass (Courtauld) and Dr. Nathalie Heinich (CNRS, Paris), for their support. During the different stages of my research, I benefited from financial support provided by the following foundations and individuals: The Finnish Cultural Foundation, Steven and Elena Heinz Scholarship programme, and Kone Foundation, Finland, for which I remain grateful. I also wish to acknowledge the artists, curators and other professionals who provided me with background information about the art projects as well as with image rights.

ix

Introduction

Forms of art practice that engage people in the making or using of art have become ubiquitous in the art world in the present millennium, as has discussion around and about them. It is fascinating to experience and to observe how participating actively in art can provide people, who are not professional artists, with life-enhancing experiences, interesting intellectual debates and social enjoyment. At the same time, there prevails a frustrating lack of balanced, analytical discussion about this art and a confusion of terminology or inadequate vocabulary available to talk about it. A usual approach is to lump a number of art projects under one title without differentiating between the various, even antithetical, characteristics or qualities of these projects. Additionally, the discussion easily acquires heated overtones as the debaters have strong interests in particular forms of participatory art and feel the need to defend one artist or form of practice against others. This publication sets out to address the situation and proposes some tools and concepts to better understand participation in art. Participatory art is art practice that engages people beyond spectatorship in the making or using of art. It is characterised by tangible and embodied audience participation, such as when Erwin Wurm invites visitors to become One Minute Sculptures, when Spencer Tunic collects thousands of naked people on a public square or when Antony Gormley gives the Fourth Plinth at Trafalgar Square to members of the public to use at their discretion for an hour.1 In its present forms and scale, participatory art is a twenty-first century phenomenon. While it has roots in several earlier art forms, it does not fit into any pre-existing categories. It is not conceptual, installation, site-specific, performance or activist art,

1

The Participator in Contemporary Art although it shares common features with some or all of these. Even if there are many examples of participatory art from the previous millennium, it is during the last 15 years that this type of art has become one of the most popular genres of contemporary art. Specifically commissioned participatory art projects are a standard feature of any large-scale international show or biennial; even art fairs have started to produce them. In the past years, browsing the new issues of international art magazines has usually brought up at least one new article about participation. Participation and related issues are also a subject of numerous seminars and conferences.

Concepts, Methods and Terminology The central concept of the publication is participation in art, not participatory art per se. The interest lies in the ways in which artists engage audience members in the making of art and in experiencing artworks, and in what happens in these encounters. Rather than studying artworks as aesthetic or historical objects, the focus is on the participation that these works require or encourage, and the relationships and interactions created in and by them. Instead of the artist, the study puts the participating layperson in the centre and observes what kind of subjectivities and agencies are produced – or how they are limited. The text that follows will make more specific categorisations about participation and use the notion of participatory art only as a loose, ostensive reference to all art practice that engages people. The chosen approach has methodological consequences. When the focus is on social processes rather than objects, the direction in which to look for conceptual and theoretical tools is sociology: sociology has developed specialised theories and methods for examining relations, formations and configurations of people. In a conceptual framework that is provided by the social sciences, artworks are seen as social events and as configurations of human relationships. In a more eclectic way, sociology is also used as a source of analytical tools for examining individual art projects. To consider participation as central to art is to claim that social aspects are essential constituents of art and not only its context: society or the social are not seen as external to art but part of its content and material. When society is not a background for art but exists within the artworks, 2

Introduction social aspects are not something external to art but part of what it is made of and essentially part of its meaning. The approach takes its cue from sociology that focuses on small-scale interaction and connections. According to Georg Simmel, society is produced in everyday situations, between the more or less stable formations like state or class: in everyday forms of sociability and the processes of human relations where the society is in the making.2 This scale and focus seem compatible with art practice that consists of small groups and interactions. Participatory projects summon groups or create platforms for ‘relationships of acting for, with, against one another, in a correlation of conditions’.3 Norbert Elias’ key concept for describing and understanding social structures and patterns is ‘figuration’, which departs from the view that individuals and society can be conceived as independent and separate from each other; rather, they are two different views on processes and systems of interaction.4 According to Elias, the language that we use to talk about the world and social phenomena falsely leads us to consider them as things: static elements instead of dynamic processes and complex webs of interaction. This reification of processes and substantialisation of concepts such as ‘family’, ‘time’, ‘language’ or ‘society’ give us a sense that social structures exist independently and separate from human beings and that everything external to us is a ‘thing’. Moreover, there is a tendency to consider stability as the norm and change as something needing to be explained. This leads to what Elias calls the ‘metaphysic of social structures’.5 The starting point in a figurational analysis, on the contrary, is that people are interdependent and can be understood only as part of figurations; figurations only exist as embodied and individuals only exist as figurational. Simmel’s key concepts – exchange, conflict, domination or positions in space – as well as Elias’ figurational understanding of social dynamics, are relational and processual. This sociological framework helps to conceive an artwork as a set of relations rather than as a ‘thing’. Participatory art calls for this kind of approach, as it is made of relationships, processes and dependencies, and suffers from an approach that attempts to capture its essence as an object or as an event in a substantialised form. This frequently happens when participatory projects are seen from the curatorial perspective and within the tradition of considering art in an exhibition context and as an object of aesthetic observation. Projects in this

3

The Participator in Contemporary Art study undertake various forms of social activity – shopping, singing in a choir, working in an office, sitting in a café – and unfold as processes. Changing the perspective towards participation – instead of striving to define participatory art as a category – brings the networked aspect of art into focus. Rather than studying art practice in society, the book analyses art as society – how society, and what kind of society, is constructed in the artworks, what types of relationships are built or proposed, and how prevailing norms about relationships are challenged. The core of the study consists of a four-group typology of participation. It does not aim to categorise participatory art but takes as a starting point the participating individuals and the various roles they can adopt when they participate in art. The main criteria for differentiation are whether the participants engage in the production of the project or encounter it as visitors to an exhibition, and the degree of autonomy they are allocated. The outcome is hence not to identify and name various types of participatory art but roles and ways of participation. In current discussions on participatory art, the use of multiple terms and criteria is highly incoherent; many different artistic approaches are grouped under the same notion, often ‘relational art’ or, on the other hand, similar approaches may be referred to by different terms. Often, the terms are presented as a list of interchangeable denominations. For example, Claire Bishop explains that ‘This expanded field of relational practices currently goes by a variety of names: socially engaged art, communitybased art, experimental communities, dialogic art, littoral art, participatory, interventionist, research-based, or collaborative art.’6 The inaugural moves in the debates were Claire Bishop’s articles in 2004 and 2006, which were critical of Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of relational art. Liam Gillick and Grant Kester, among others, continued the discussion in their direct responses as well as in other publications.7 The antagonistic tones in the discussions derive from misunderstanding or ignoring the different qualities and aims of various types of participatory art and judging them on grounds that are alien to the projects’ own logic. These differing perceptions of the main protagonists – Bourriaud, Bishop and Kester – are investigated in the following chapters in relation to the typology. Subsequent commentators have endeavoured to differentiate between various descriptors such as interaction, cooperation and collaboration.

4

Introduction Each writer has chosen slightly different terms with varying definitions. For example, Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook differentiate between ‘interaction’ in which people act upon and affect each other and the artwork (as opposed to purely reactive behaviour), ‘participation’ when participants have a true input in the production and make a change in the project, and ‘collaboration’ when all participants are equal and at the same level as the artist. Dave Beech identifies interactivity, participation, collaboration and cooperation.8 In my study, ‘participation’ covers actions under the above ‘interaction’ and ‘participation’; and none of the projects fulfils the criteria of true ‘collaboration’. In this publication, ‘participatory art’ is used as a general overall concept about any kind of art that engages people actively, beyond spectatorship; it is a descriptive, not an analytic term. Analysis, on the other hand, is based on the concept of participation and the different forms it takes. The book does not engage in the debate about participatory art as an advocate of any one approach. The initial motivation has been to understand rather than to put one way of doing before another: to understand what the different forms of practice are, where they come from and what they lead to.

Challenges and Choices The difference between studying time- and site-specific art and object-based art, and the challenge this presents, is that there is no access to the original work after it has ended or been taken down. Claire Bishop noted this as she was studying installations, three-dimensional spaces that require the viewer’s physical presence inside the artwork. She underlines the importance of experience as a source of information that no documentation can give. As a solution to the dilemma, she chose to use as her source material installations that she had had the chance to experience firsthand herself.9 Students of performance art face a similar situation and there are divided opinions about the status of documentation of performances and events, and whether they count as a valid form of representation.10 When the object of study is participation, the situation is similar. Studying people’s engagement with art based on secondary material would give a very limited picture of the work.11 The attempt is also hindered because audience participation is under-represented or totally missing in 5

The Participator in Contemporary Art documentation of contemporary art. Beryl Graham relates how difficult it is to study interactive media art from only a decade ago because of the lack of any documentation of people’s participation. The conventional ‘installation shot’ shows a display in a gallery without any people and the only documents about the reception of the exhibition are press clippings and reviews.12 When the object of study is participation, it is not possible to critically reflect it without the actual view of the participator’s standpoint and of the production process that otherwise is often invisible in the final outcome. The case study material in this publication, therefore, consists of projects that I have myself participated in or have worked with, and of which I have observed the production and presentation. The material is a combination of my own experience, other people’s reports of their experiences of the same or other participatory projects (online and in print), catalogues and other texts about the projects, conversations and email interviews with the artists, curators and other producers, and archival research. In spite of the participatory element in the research, this is not an empirical or ethnographic field study. The focus is also not on social or demographic participator data, nor on the individual participants’ psychological experiences, or the reception of the works. The interest is more structural, and the case studies serve to illuminate and to help analyse the various roles and social formations built into the participatory works.

The Structure of the Book One of the principal arguments of this study is that the ‘participator’ is a new role in art, a role that is different from the role of the spectator, viewer or audience. The main difference is that the participator becomes part of the work, and is observed as such by viewers (who may or may not, in turn, become participators). This role is built into the artwork as ‘participator function’ – similarly to Foucault’s ‘author function’ – and can be acted out by individual ‘participants’. The following chapters investigate this role in detail in order to prepare for the construction of a typology of participation, based on the different ways in which this participatory function can be structured in art. The book is structured around the typology of participation, based on eight art projects and presenting four categories of participation. 6

Introduction In opposition to the prevailing tendency to lump together various and even contradictory forms of participation, the typology is used to distinguish between different forms of engagement and to analyse the specific features they entail. The presentation of each of the four groups includes an historical outline of the suggested type of participation and connects it to a theoretical background. Two art projects per group serve as material to discuss the specifics of each type of participation. With the help of the typology, emerging questions that cut across the categories are discussed in thematic chapters. One of these questions is the authorship of collectively created work. The first of the thematic chapters extends the question to its widest possible scope and theorises participatory projects as collective, networked productions. Taking one of the case studies, a project by Santiago Sierra, as the object of dissection, it draws a map of multiple relationships and actors that together create the artwork. The participator is shown as part of a wider and more complex collective of actors. The role of the artist is also reconfigured as someone defining the limits of this network. With participatory projects, authorship and, tightly linked to it, ownership are aspects that become subject to renegotiations. The following chapter suggests that as the visitors turn into active participators and cocreators, the relationships between the artist, the participator and the art institution are increasingly regulated by contracts (written and unwritten). The concept of contract is a tool for redefining the relationships between the parties in collective productions when conventional agreements become muddled due to the arrival of the participator. Depending on the type of project, these agreements take the form of a user or production contract. The final chapter investigates how developments in art match phenomena in wider society and in other fields of life. It discusses and analyses whether and to what extent participation in art in its different forms can be compared to civic participation or understood as ‘democratic’. This passage aims at clearing up some confusion in the current debates around the subject of participation and democracy. The investigation then leads to some thoughts about the relevance of participatory art.

7

1 The Participator: A New Role in Art

The appearance of non-artist participators in the practice of visual arts recalibrates the balance between the artist and the audience. Although the division of labour between the artist preparing and the audience contemplating the displayed artwork may never have been totally clear-cut, the institutions and conventions of the modern art world have been established upon a model that separates the production from the consumption of art and defines the former as an autonomous professional field. The advent of a participating layperson means changes in both the concept of the artist and that of the audience. More importantly, even if both these concepts have various actualisations in history and within different art forms, neither of them covers the function of the participator. The changing role of the artist and its diminishing significance in relation to the role of the audience has been discussed previously – most notably by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault.1 They both disqualify the author as the ultimate source of the meaning of the artwork (text), liberating the reader from the task of decoding a ‘message’ in relation to its author. Unlike Barthes, Foucault does not postulate the ‘death’ of the author;2 on the contrary he underlines the importance of the author but as an organising principle within a discursive formation instead of as an individual. Foucault’s concept of the ‘author function’ allows attention to shift away from the individual to a discursive construction. The author is not constructed in the text (as he is for 9

The Participator in Contemporary Art Barthes) but is a function of discourse.3 This ‘author function’ gives the question a social dimension and a place in society and culture in a way that is different from confining the existence of the author to the text. Barthes and Foucault are more concerned with the construction of the author and the text than with that of the reader. Barthes famously declares the birth of the reader at the expense of the death of the author, but does not analyse the newborn character of the reader any further. In the direction shown by Foucault, it is possible to develop a ‘reader function’ or, in the visual arts a ‘spectator function’, analogous to the ‘author function’ as a position that is constructed in discourse and conditioned by society. In his study of the historical construction of vision in the nineteenth century, Jonathan Crary has done this.4 He directs the attention to the spectator, or the observer, as he prefers to say. The way he explains this choice of words resembles the Foucauldian understanding of discourse: Crary prefers ‘observer’ to ‘spectator’ in order to avoid the connotations of a passive onlooker in the word spectator. ‘Observer’ also includes a more comprehensive meaning relating not only to visual observation but also to the observation of ‘rules, codes, regulations and practices’. The observer ‘sees within a prescribed set of possibilities [. . .] embedded in a system of conventions and limitations’.5 Based on this approach, Crary develops a theory of the observer as a beholder of signs and objects in general, not uniquely of art. On the methodological level, Crary’s treatment of techniques and ideologies of vision could be defined as ‘observer function’ à la Foucault – discursive, social and constructed within the work. Even the theories that shift the balance from the artist, or author, towards the audience – reader or spectator – and dismantle the conventional relationship by recognising the constitutive power of the reader, still formulate the setting as that of an artist as the maker and the audience as a recipient of art; they do not recognise a participator as an element of the actual production process. The input of the reader happens at the moment of interpretation, at the stage when the work of art has already left the artist’s desk or studio. The people in the audience are not theorised as participators but recipients, even if seen as active and constitutive recipients. An actively participating layperson, contributing to the production and display, brings a new dimension to the way positions are set up within an

10

The Participator: A New Role in Art art project. This new role does not displace the artist, although it does enter into the arena of creation and production of the artwork. Despite stepping up from the amateur audience, the participator is not confined to the traditional viewer role either. The participator role needs to be discussed as a separate function in art projects. Furthermore, it is not enough to talk about participator or participation as something unified and unambiguous. New forms of engagement call for new terminology for audiences who are no longer only viewers, listeners, visitors or guests. I use the word ‘participator’ instead of ‘participant’ to define a position rather than an individual: a ‘participator function’ akin to Foucault’s ‘author function’. Just as the ‘author function’ is a position constructed within the discourse and conditioned by society, the participator function is constructed in the work and structured as a set of societal relations; in addition to structural and social aspects, it has a discursive and institutional dimension. As distinct from participant, participator is descriptive of a more general characteristic or behaviour of a person, and does not refer to a specific event or individual. It is a function or a role that includes potential for participation built into the project, just as an author is not only a person with a name and a personal life but a social and discursive function in art. I use the word ‘participator’ for this purpose and ‘participant’ for embodied individuals who take part in specific events and art projects. In practice, participator function has several actualisations and can mean several things, as there is more than one way in which the participator can be positioned in a work and actualised by a participant. Platforms offered by projects such as Michael Lin’s Day Bed intuitively guide participants to use the installations; others, such as Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures may need instructions that tell the visitors about their new role as participators. In one way or the other, the imaginary participator – the participatory function – is implicit in the way the project is laid out in the gallery or as a project. These ways of constructing the participator function will be the basis for the typology. As there has been no ‘participator function’ previously, it tends to be treated as or compared with either the spectator or the artist. As a new category in its own right, its discursive existence is only now being shaped in various articles, books and debates about participatory art. Most of the time, the discussion about participation is connected with individual artists’

11

The Participator in Contemporary Art practice and in general seen through artists’ work rather than as a distinctive position and activity. At the same time in the museum and exhibition context, there is a growing interest in a more active audience concept.6 The participator entails new connections both between the artist and the participator(s) and between the (secondary) audience and the participator(s). Participation as such does not render the artist, or author, obsolete; the artist’s authority may be weakened during the process, but even the most open, community-type of project, when presented in the art context, takes place under the artist’s name. The relationship between the artist and the participators can vary from total manipulation to true collaboration, but the initial decision as to how much power to influence the artistic outcome is ceded to the participators remains with the artist. The delegation of authority is in itself a manifestation of it; it is not possible to delegate something one does not have: the artists retain the authority to authorise. The role of the artist within the project, correspondingly, varies from sole protagonist to coordinator or facilitator. On the institutional level, however, the artist retains his or her position and role – the author function is as active as before. Participation does not eliminate spectatorship or the role of the audience in the conventional meaning either: most of the projects are presented to a non-participating audience either in a live situation or in the form of a documentation, and some works offer both possibilities. It is obviously a different experience to encounter a person as a part of a work in a live situation or as a reproduction. In some cases it may be useful to consider the direct participators as a primary audience and the conventional audience of the completed work as a secondary audience. In projects like Wurm’s One Minute Sculpture or Carsten Höller’s Test Sites, the transition between participator and audience member is more fluid: the viewer may slide from one position to another at will and the roles are complementary. The audience of a participatory project is presented with two new aspects. Encountering ordinary people in an artwork is a different experience from seeing a professional performance; it awakens empathy and identification on a different level. For Claire Bishop the presence of ordinary people is a source of authenticity.7 Some of this ‘authenticity’ can even be read in pictures and videos about fellow citizens. This is how Spencer Tunick’s photographs affect viewers.8 The second unprecedented

12

The Participator: A New Role in Art experience is that of being a participator-viewer and making conscious decisions in the exhibition situation about one’s role in it. Both these factors enhance audience engagement with art and make it tangible.9 Focusing on participation and the user aspect highlights the extent to which all art demands engagement from the spectator. It is tempting to see any kind of spectatorship and contemplation as participation in art. The argument could be expanded into ontological debate about when a work of art is finished and whether art is ever ‘completed’ without an audience – an aspect highlighted by the ‘birth of the reader’ in Barthes. It may be impossible to draw a definitive line between viewing (or reading) and participation, but most of the time participation – at least as understood in this book – is defined by physical presence, social activity and interaction, rather than mental engagement only, and by the focus and time invested in the project. A crucial difference is that a participator adds to the work something for other spectators to see and interpret. Overextension of the concept of participation would risk dilution of the meaning of participation until it is no longer useful. The spectator role, furthermore, has a function of its own. It is a position from which to observe the whole situation, which the participator cannot apprehend, being, as the nomination indicates, ‘part’ of the situation. In a detached position, the spectator may have no effect on the production but stays impartial; often, as discussed, the separation is not absolute but the spectator may decide to become or be subsumed into a participator. These are two different experiences of the same event and form two routes of knowledge production.10 Hence the idea is not to promote participation as something more valuable than enjoying art as a viewer. Jacques Rancière, who is the main critic of spectatorship understood as only passive and external, articulates his view of an intellectual and engaged spectator and argues for dismissing the opposition between looking and acting.11 The spectator or observer also serves the function of constituting the participatory situation as a public event and lends his or her presence as a witness to it. This coming into the open and being observed is part of creating the participative project as a forum for reflection and interaction that can be described as political. The presence of plural perspectives is essential to the shared inter-subjective world, as will be discussed in more depth in the chapter about politics of participation.

13

The Participator in Contemporary Art On the other hand, the awareness of the spectator renders the situation into a ‘spectacle’ and the participatory event becomes a performance played out for and consumed by the spectator. This is particularly true when the project is presented as a photographic or video documentation.12 The spectator then has the power – judgemental power – to view the participator in an objectified representation. When there is an option or even a requirement also to step onto the scene, the relationship is different: the spectator has a different responsibility for the total situation and for the other participants.

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2 Typology of Participatory Art

Current discourse of participatory practice usually treats all participatory art as part of the same phenomenon, without differentiating between various levels and forms of participation or analysing in any depth what this participation consists of and what its consequences are. It is customary to start the discussion by relaying a list of projects, as if giving ostensive evidence of the omnipresence of this new type of art. After the initial catalogue of works, the discussions usually go on treating the case studies as part of the same phenomenon, without differentiating between the various aims and working methods of the projects.1 Various writers use different terms and refer to partly overlapping, partly differing material. The confusion is further increased because each writer chooses his or her material from different sources but deploys it against one chosen discursive framework. Another source of confusion occurs when the same works are placed in different theoretical frameworks.2 In summary, as different works are referred to in the same terms (most often as ‘relational’) or the same works in different terms, the overall picture lacks precision and analysis. The fact of engaging people in an art project is not, however, a sufficient feature to enable an analysis of this type of work, let alone to draw any conclusions about it. We need a more detailed mapping of the terrain and more accurate tools in order to understand the specificities of this art. 15

The Participator in Contemporary Art The typology presented here sets out to do this: to structure the vast and heterogeneous field of participatory art and to enable further analysis. It does not ‘explain’ the artworks or the forms of participatory art, but organises the material according to selected principles in order to discern finer details in terms of both similarities and differences between the individual projects. The defining criterion of the categories is the form of participation – they are categories of participation, not of art. This means that the same work can be put into two categories, depending on which aspect or phase of the work or whose participation is under scrutiny. For the same reason, the classification does not apply to artists but to individual works and projects, and one artist may produce works that fall into more than one of the categories. The body of participatory projects can be roughly divided by two lines. One dividing factor is the phase in which the audience can take part in the project: they can participate in the display, or they can participate in the production of the work. To participate in the display of art means that the artist has prepared a work and the visitor or the viewer is expected to do something with it or at least to react to it in some way. To participate in the production of the work means being present and contributing to the creation of the work before (and possibly also when) it is exhibited to the public. The second principle of division separates two modes of participation: participation is either defined and programmed in advance by the artist, and the participators mainly fulfil the tasks set by the artist or merely react to the work; or the people take part actively and decide themselves if and how they want to participate, and what they want to contribute to the content of the work. Combining these two clusters gives us four sectors (see Table 1). The headings of the sectors reflect the role of the participator and the subheadings refer to the process and the form of the work. The group entitled ‘Target’ includes projects that do not directly invite people to participate or even ask the audience’s permission in advance but nevertheless enter into direct contact with more or less unwitting participants, asking them to interact with or to react to the work. I call it reverse participation: artists are participating in people’s lives rather than inviting people to participate in their art.

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Typology of Participatory Art Table 2.1

Typology of participation.

Participation in display Participation in production

Reactive/heteronomous participation

Active/autonomous participation

TARGET Intervention MATERIAL Production

USER Platform CO-CREATOR Workshop

The ‘User’ group includes artworks and projects that engage viewers physically and socially in the process of experiencing them. This means work where the artist has constructed an installation, a space or a platform, and leaves it for the visitor to get into and to interact with it. The viewer is expected simply to spend time or to do something more specific with the space and/or the props and material provided. In principle, participation is open to anyone willing to take part. Visitors can, however, also choose to remain passive viewers instead. Works in the category ‘Material’ require people’s presence and participation in their making. They are designed and controlled by the artist, and people are used, with their consent, as the subject and the material of the work or as a workforce in a production. The participators’ contribution is defined by the artist in advance. And finally, works under the ‘Co-creator’ heading rely on people’s active participation and collaboration. The word active is key here, as the participators are expected to bring their own initiatives and ideas into play and to contribute to the content of the work. Artists set the scene, but the content is to a large extent decided and produced by the participators. The categories can be seen as ideal types. An ideal type is a construction, derived from observable reality but not conforming to it in detail. It is made by selecting and accentuating certain elements, and arranged in a systematic way. An ideal type can hence rarely be found as such in observable reality.3 None of the categories is therefore completely exclusive; there are works and projects that fall in-between the categories, or which can reasonably be described as participatory and yet do not seem to fit in the groups or whose classification can be disputed; and there may be traits uniting works in different categories, and differences between works in the same category. 17

The Participator in Contemporary Art Ideal type is not ideal in the sense of excellence but in the sense of an idea, as a mental construction and an abstraction. It serves to avoid sweeping generalisations (‘participatory art’ or ‘relational aesthetics’ as a totalising concept applied indiscriminately to a variety of artworks)4 and, on the other hand, it guards against excessive particularisation that prevents all comparison.5 It is both a means of differentiation and of integration; it allows us to find specificities and particular characteristics in a conglomeration but also to find coherence within the specificities. The process of creating ideal types is therefore an interpretation based on concrete case studies. An ideal type is meant to be a meeting point of empirical observations and the concepts that guide the investigation. In this study, the typology directs the attention to forms of participation and not to the immediate themes or subject matter of the projects. The argument is that forms and relations are an essential part of the content, not simply an external factor. Therefore, the typology does not, as such, shed light on project-specific themes. For the same reasons, the works described as examples in each category are different in their aims and content and are not intended to be compared in other ways except that they all highlight the same structure of participation. The following four sections describe each of the categories – four models of participation. They revolve around two case studies, which are read as social phenomena and described with social concepts rather than with an aesthetic or pictorial approach. Each section also makes links with earlier artists and movements that have activated audience participation, and gives a historical context to contemporary works. The variety of historical lineages tends to be obscured when participatory art is treated as a totality; these accounts show that there is a plurality of narratives rather than a single history to participatory art. The sections also introduce theoretical underpinnings that characterise each approach. Issues that cut across all categories, such as questions of agency, ownership and the political relevance of participation, will be discussed in the following chapters. Hence this chapter functions as a refinery, of sorts, to extract and filter material for the analysis to follow.

Group 1, Target The works in this section create situations and function as interventions, engaging unwitting participants and forcing them to react to the work. The 18

Typology of Participatory Art role of participators and that of the audience are indistinct. Compared with the other groups in the typology, this work reverses the participation: artists intrude into people’s lives rather than invite people to participate in their art.6 In The Trainee (2008; see Figure 2.1), Pilvi Takala was working for a month as a ‘trainee’ in the marketing department of Deloitte Helsinki, a multinational financial advisory and accountancy company. Only two people there knew the true nature of the project.7 Under the pseudonym ‘Johanna Takala’ she infiltrated the office and its daily routines. At first, she behaved as a normal marketing trainee, while also observing the environment and the people, getting to know them and planning her future actions. After the research period, towards the end of her stay, she started carrying out artistic ‘experiments’ and applying peculiar working methods. Once she spent the entire working day overtly doing nothing at her desk, her hands idle in her lap, the computer shut down. Another time she travelled up and down in the office elevator for a day. Takala secretly recorded the reactions her behaviour caused: concern and confusion,

Figure 2.1 Pilvi Takala, The Trainee, 2008, Helsinki.

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The Participator in Contemporary Art embarrassment, comments, open questions and her explanations, and email exchanges in which her manager was urged to take action. All the people shown and recognisable in the videos were afterwards shown the footage and asked for permission to publish the material. No one refused. Free Shop (see Figure 2.2) by the Danish group Superflex has been realised in six cities in the world since 2003 (in Germany, Japan, Poland, Denmark, Norway and Finland).8 The Free Shop takes place in an ordinary shop: during the project, any goods or services purchased in the shop by any given customer are free of charge. The customer is not aware of this before coming to the till and the sales assistant making out the bill stating the total amount of zero. The project is organised in collaboration with an event or organisation, and a maximum total value of goods and services which may be used, is agreed upon in advance. The local producer is to a large extent responsible for finding the partners and for the practical arrangements. Some of the people’s reactions – shocked and astonished, mostly happy but also embarrassed and even angry – are recorded but according to the rules of setting up a Free Shop, a maximum of 10 per cent of the time may be documented. The rules also specify the visibility of the project, or rather

Figure 2.2 Superflex, Free Shop, 2010, Helsinki.

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Typology of Participatory Art keeping it invisible – there should be no signs or other information in sight – and prohibit any connections between the organisers and the outlet or shop designated as a Free Shop. A certain amount of publicity is sought through informing the press about the project and allowing them to observe a Free Shop taking place, as long as it stays within the permitted 10 per cent documentation time. Both cases deal with some type of system, albeit of different kinds. Superflex investigate alternative economies and systems of production and distribution, as they also do in their Creative Commons-licensed beer franchise Free Beer and the shop and intellectual property discussion forum Copyshop. Pilvi Takala experiments with social forms and organisations by staging events and encounters in public places and social situations. Her Bag Lady (2006) was a woman walking with a transparent handbag filled with high denomination banknotes in a busy shopping mall in Berlin. In Real Snow White (2009) she attempted to go into Paris Disneyland dressed as Snow White and was refused entrance by security guards. The ‘reverse participation’ projects infiltrate everyday life and target non-art audiences. Often the interventions do not appear as art to the incidental participants but as anomalies in the expected flow of things. Most of these types of projects tend to take place outside art venues, as did Trainee and Free Shop, in order to take full advantage of their disruptive potential: visitors to contemporary art shows, at least experienced visitors, are accustomed to and even anticipate surprise and astonishment. Some artists, however, manage to ‘intervene’ in this way even in a gallery, as did Tino Sehgal with his This is So Contemporary in the 2005 Venice Biennale in the German pavilion. As the visitor entered the room, the exhibition guards suddenly started singing and dancing around the visitor, chanting ‘Oh, this is so contemporary, contemporary!’ The work confused the roles of the usually unobserved guards and brought them into the centre of the artwork in the gallery space. Another disruption in museum behaviour was Martin Creed’s Work No 850 (2008), a sprinter in full sports gear dashing at full speed along the main hall of the Tate Britain, an environment where traditionally sport or any bodily exercise is prohibited. Typically, however, intervention takes place in a public space, such as in a shop or a shopping mall, as the above examples or in the street or other urban space.9 Urban interventions range from Francis Al€ys’ provocative act in which he bought a gun and carried it visibly in the street until he got

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The Participator in Contemporary Art

Figure 2.3 Pilvi Takala, Real Snow White, 2009, video, 9:15 min.

arrested by two police officers (Re-enactments 2000) to more subtle dislocations in public behaviour such as Kimsooja as Needle Woman, in which she simply stands still in the middle of a busy and crowded street and forms an immobile point of attention among the swarming people.10 The projects can be acted out by artists themselves or by other people hired by the artist. Superflex orchestrate other people to perform the Free Shop: they (or the local producer) persuade local shop owners to participate and to serve customers as they do usually, except for charging the zero sum at the end of each transaction. Tino Sehgal typically hires dancers or performers to create his works, and Martin Creed hired sprinters to run in the gallery. It should be noted that for the persons hired to realise the projects, the work appears in category 3, ‘Material’: the person is used as material or workforce in order to produce the work. Often, however, it is the artist him- or herself who is the main performer, as with Takala or Kimsooja.

Historical Connections Historically, there are similarities between this type of work, performance art and some forms of activist art. The projects discussed here are part of 22

Typology of Participatory Art performance art or ‘live art’ because they produce acts in social environments, based on a script or a task that the performer executes in direct connection with viewers cum participators. As activism, these interventions also aim to challenge preconceptions and disturb the normal course of things by introducing elements that contradict habitual interactions and the status quo. An emblematic project in which the aspect of performance as intervention comes into focus is the famous Undiscovered Amerindians (1992; see Figure 2.4) in which Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña staged themselves as aboriginal inhabitants, impersonating an until-then unknown people from the fictional island of Guatinaui. They spent three days in a golden cage in several cities, among them Columbus Plaza in Madrid, Covent Garden in London, and the Smithsonian museum in Washington DC. The Whitney Biennial in 1993 was the only art context among the seven venues. In the cage, they performed ‘authentic’ dances and told stories in their ‘native’ language; the ‘traditional’ tasks also included writing on a laptop, watching television, sewing voodoo dolls and

Figure 2.4 Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Coco Fusco, Two Undiscovered Amerindians visit Madrid, 1992.

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The Participator in Contemporary Art lifting weights. They were fed through the bars and taken to the toilet on leashes.11 The performance turning into an intervention was partly unforeseen. It was intended originally as a critical performative comment on the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Christopher Columbus to the Americas, but to the surprise of the artists, a large part of the audience did not recognise it as performance but took it literally and believed they were faced with true specimens of islanders undiscovered for a half a millennium.12 Like those encountering Free Shop or Bag Lady, the people were unaware of being the audience of a constructed situation. It was also the artists’ intention to create a surprise or ‘uncanny’ encounter.13 The reactions varied from sympathy to aggression. Fusco called their work ‘reverse ethnography’.14 In a manner similar to my notion of ‘reverse participation’ whereby the artist places him- or herself as part of the life of others, Fusco and Gomez-Peña, instead of being ethnographers, exposed themselves to the gaze of the general public as ethnic objects. Fusco notes, ‘The cage became a blank screen onto which audiences projected their fantasies of who and what we are. As we assumed the stereotypical role of the domesticated savage, many audience members felt entitled to assume the role of colonizer’.15 In its content, the work chimes with the post-colonial discourses of ‘otherness’ built on cultural and ethnic identities, but it cannot be explained within the notion of the ‘ethnographic turn’, coined by Hal Foster, because of its carnivalesque reversing of positions.16 In addition to artists’ self-objectification, Undiscovered Amerindians also objectified the audience. The part of the audience who took the performance seriously became the objects of interest – and entertainment – for others who did not. This dimension is further underlined in a film made about the project and the audience’s reactions.17 In all participatory art, participators are also targets of attention for the wider or secondary art audience, but particularly in this category (‘Target’), because of the reverse character of the action, the unwitting participants are prone to becoming the main focus; the audience is interested in and amused by their reactions. And it is these reactions that the artists are aiming to provoke, as well, although in the case of Fusco and Gomez-Peña the reactions had a partly unplanned dimension.

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Typology of Participatory Art Takala’s projects are presented through documentation where the focus is on people’s reactions; Superflex have published a Free Shop book recording the comments and reactions to the project in different countries. The focus on the participators rather than the artist separates the interventions from performance art. An interesting version of this aspect is Al€ys’ Re-enactment: the day after being arrested with the pistol, he persuaded the police officers to re-enact the events of the previous day, and documented it as he had documented the ‘original’ event. In this way, the police officers passed from a ‘Target’ position into ‘Material’ (group 3): willing and collaborating participators in the process of making the artwork. They regained some of their agency in regard to the project, yet were still fulfilling the artist’s vision; in fact, their share of the course of events was greater in the first version, whereas in the second they were merely performing or restaging themselves.18 There is a tradition of provocative performances, from Futurists and Dadaists to Situationists and Fluxus, that treat the audiences as targets rather than mere viewers.19 These avant-garde movements are also often mentioned as part of the ‘prehistory’ of participatory art.20 In the Futurist and Dadaist performances, the audience was ‘activated’ and occasionally drawn into becoming a part of the performance, often against their will, and the border between performers and viewers was frequently crossed. The events were, however, mostly staged and announced as performances (or processions, cabarets, clubs etc.) and so presented as art events, although they transgressed the conventional concept of art. The art interventions in this section, on the contrary, often seek to hide their character as art; consequently, they do not manifest the same ‘anti-art’ spirit as their predecessors.21 They are not constructed against art but to some extent in spite of it, in relation to everyday situations. The technique of détournement developed by the Situationists International (SI), as a way of perceiving reality differently, of diverting or subverting conventional acts or meanings, comes close to some aspects of the projects in this section. As opposed to SI, however, the social interventions do not necessarily share the strong political theory that SI was built on and its anti-capitalist spirit. In order to avoid co-option by capitalism and the spectacle, the apotheosis of capitalist alienation, SI developed ‘situation’ to replace artwork. As there cannot be an outside position from which to attack the system, SI opted for a change from

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The Participator in Contemporary Art within: a transformation of everyday life by creating ‘situations’ as pockets of non-alienation. Détournement was a technique for achieving this goal.22 The present interventions do not necessarily conceive of themselves as a protest; they work in a more experimental manner (Takala, Kimsooja), but they do share the aim of subverting perception and disturbing habitual reactions. Anti-capitalism, however, can also be in the agenda, as with the Free Shop. Socially engaged and activist art of the 1980s is another possible root for contemporary participatory art. It also challenged the audience’s preconceptions and perceptions of stated issues and intruded into the everyday, using performance elements in its actions and working through confrontation and conflict.23 The difference from the case studies in this section is that the activist art projects were making an explicit protest and aiming at bringing about a change on a stated case (AIDS, gender equality, racism), whereas the transformations the present projects attempt to induce are often more subtle alterations in perception or in social relations rather than single political issues. There may be a political critique underlying a project, as in the Free Shop, but the message is not unambiguously articulated and the methods are more exploratory in nature. A more direct descendant of the collective activism of the 1980s would be the contemporary protest interventions and pop-up performances, or projects and groups known as Tactical Media.24 Like activist groups on the 1980s, they operate in the cross-section of culture and grass-roots activism. Often they act via the internet, either creating online interventions, as ‘hacktivists’, or relying heavily on an online community although acting in physical space. They too, however, fall slightly out of the scope of this investigation, as they function more in the manner of a demonstration or an unsolicited performance, and engage outside participants only as audience or witnesses. Compared with the social interventions in this section, their actions are often more explicit in their content. The focus is on the critique and disturbance caused to the corporations and organisations rather than affecting individual people even if they get used as intermediaries.

Theoretical Underpinnings The projects in the ‘Target’ category create social situations in which people define their actions and negotiate relationships with other

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Typology of Participatory Art participants. The sociologist Erving Goffman’s theory of situation defines ‘a situation’ as a ‘spatial environment [. . .] within which an entering person becomes a member of the gathering’ and ‘a gathering’ as ‘any set of two or more individuals [. . .] in one another’s immediate presence’. In addition, Goffman defines ‘a social occasion’ as ‘a wider social affair, undertaking or event [. . .that] provides the structuring social context in which many situations and their gatherings are likely to form, dissolve, and reform’.25 One of Goffman’s examples of social occasions is a workday in the office. This is also the social context in which The Trainee takes place. The social occasion for the Bag Lady is a visit to a shopping centre; Free Shop takes place within a visit to the corner shop. The fascination – and the trouble – with situations created by contemporary art is that they do not obey the social occasion’s set-up, or they may even clash with it. Situations defined in space and time, such as the transaction at the till, are disrupted. In Goffman’s terms, this is called a ‘situational offence’. The projects structure human relationships and behaviour in a way that seems inappropriate in the particular context. Bag Lady reconfigures the normal gathering in the mall with a little deviation, the literal transparency of her intentions, which makes her both a security risk and a subject of protection; suddenly private property and social order are threatened. The effect of Tino Sehgal’s This is So Contemporary arises from the deliberate confusion of the social occasion – the visit to an exhibition – and the situation, which is the artwork itself: the social occasion and the situation coincide and contradict each other.26 By creating conflicts, Free Shop, Trainee, Bag Lady and other artistic interventions of this type resemble experiments by Harold Garfinkel, sociologist and the founder of ethnomethodology, particularly his so-called breaching experiments that he conducted with his students. He set out to investigate the ‘background expectancies’ that usually are ‘seen but unnoticed’. In order to reveal them, one must be a stranger to the ‘life as usual’ character of everyday scenes, or become estranged from them. This can be achieved by making trouble, by producing bewilderment and confusion: the invisible can only come into view through moments of breakdown, when participants fail to maintain the common understanding.27 Social life is based on the expectation of people’s commitment to participate in the constant maintenance of the social world, and the actions of others are interpreted based on this belief. When assumptions are

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The Participator in Contemporary Art breached, people look for a ‘reasonable’ explanation for the deviation.28 When none can be established, the reasons for deviant behaviour can only be explained as mental disorder or a deliberate search for conflict. The Trainee’s explanation that travelling up and down in the elevator helps her think, did not count as a valid reason. The emails and voice mails exhibited as part of the installation testify to the colleagues’ doubts regarding The Trainee’s mental health. The total loss of explanation for strange behaviour leads to irritation and anger.29 Responses to the Free Shop were shocked and astonished, mostly happy but also embarrassed, annoyed and even angry. The breaching of common understanding awakens strong socially structured affects of embarrassment, shame, anxiety, guilt, indignation and fear. Similarly, the experimenters were also distressed by being painfully aware of doing something fundamentally wrong.30 Also Pilvi Takala is often struggling to cope with feelings of embarrassment, but at the same time it is something she is seeking: it is a sign that ‘there is something there’, that she has found an invisible boundary. She compares her intervention projects to endurance performance art, except that her endurance is of a psychological kind as opposed to the physical torments of some performance art.31 Situations are not stable structures or the cumulative result of individual actions; they are phenomena that are constantly reconstructed. For example, shoppers and vendors work together to produce ‘shopping’ as a recognisable social situation. A breach and subsequent attempts to restore the ordinary state of affairs, bring into view the maintenance work that goes unnoticed in everyday life and the tremendous amount of embodied skills and understanding that people are equipped with to navigate through everyday life. Garfinkel calls this reproduction ‘congregational work’.32 This intuitive maintenance work was made visible by other customers and vendors who proposed to help the Bag Lady by giving her a proper bag for hiding the cash. In more established arrangements, a particular member may be positioned to guard the situational order and to supervise that only certain kinds of involvement are allowed – that no situational offence takes place.33 In the shopping mall, The Bag Lady was overseen by the security staff. In a museum, the guards are official guarantors of appropriate museum behaviour. This is So Contemporary breaches the contract

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Typology of Participatory Art according to which the visitor is not expected to pay attention to the guards and the guards are not supposed to intervene with the visit, unless the artwork or the visitor is in danger or needs help. The guardians of order commit a situational offence. Gatherings should not be thought of as encounters between independent individuals coming together as free agents. Instead, participants are created in and defined by the situation, and their behaviour can only be understood in connection to and as part of the situation.34 Together, they create the situation. In Tino Sehgal’s work, the guards would not be guards and the visitors would not be visitors unless they were engaged in the situation defined by the social occasion, any more than shopkeepers and customers would assume these roles without taking part in the situation, the shopping, and being created by it as vendors and buyers. In an ambivalent situation, however, it remains uncertain who or what is being created. Interventions, such as Sehgal’s or Superflex’s, create confusion and the habitual existence of the visitors or customers is set off balance. The situational order is easily challenged. Interventions do not need to do much to shake up a social situation; a slight deviation from the established course of action or a minor change in the presumed flow of dialogue may cause a radical reorganisation of the situation. Sometimes it is actually more powerful to abstain from doing. This was demonstrated by Pilvi Takala’s Trainee, who spent the entire working day doing nothing at her desk. This ‘misbehaviour’ caused raised eyebrows, agitation and more emails in which her manager was urged to take action. Kimsooja’s Needle Woman is another project showing the efficiency of non-action. It would have been socially acceptable for the Trainee to hide her idling by pretending to be busy when people approached her – as in an example of ‘everyday tactics’ described by Michel de Certeau35 – but the open nondoing was too much. Pretending to work while actually stealing time for oneself is a means, according to de Certeau, by which ordinary people navigate their way in and against structural systems that oppress them and that they cannot influence. In his vocabulary, a ‘strategy’ is ‘the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that become possible as soon as a subject with will and power [. . .] can be isolated’ and ‘a specific type of knowledge, one sustained and determined by the power to provide oneself with one’s own place’. A ‘tactic’, on the other hand, ‘operates in isolated

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The Participator in Contemporary Art actions, blow by blow. It takes advantage of “opportunities” and depends on them [. . .]. In short, a tactic is an art of the weak.’36 This type of clandestine ‘tactics’ would have been an understandable – even if not acceptable – interpretation for a breach of work ethics. As Takala refused to pretend she was working and thus did not offer this as a possible explanation for loitering – she was openly not working – her act seemed more disturbing, even dangerous to the order of things. In the Goffmanian sense, it seriously challenged the collectively maintained situational order. Takala’s non-action seemed to reach beyond tactics, the domain of the weak, and to attack the strategic level of the status quo.37 Free Shop undermines the economic system of exchange, which is so deeply embedded in our everyday relations that it is simply not possible to understand or accept its absence. The reactions to the zero receipt vary from total disbelief to anger. The hostile responses resulted from the interpretation that something else was taking place – that the refusal to take a payment was a symbol or a message of something; for example, a gentleman assumed that the shopkeeper was flirting with his wife, another that he showed disrespect by doubting his ability to pay for his purchases, or that there was something wrong with the product because it was given free. The more benevolent responses assumed the cashier was joking or that it was a clearance sale or an anniversary.38 The project interrupts the exchange that is based on immediate reciprocity; it also removes the exchange relationship from anonymous exchange to a personal level: when the standardised monetary relation is obliterated, an alternative cause for the interchange has to be invented – a total lack of exchange would be too disturbing. In interviews made after the projects, most of the shopkeepers participating in the project also voiced their absolute disbelief in the possibility of any alternative non-monetary economic system – despite having just experienced one.39

Conclusion The projects in this group share with the works in the ‘User’ group the fact that people encounter a situation that is already defined by the artist and form around it a social gathering. The main difference between the groups is the level of active, conscious participation – or the lack thereof in the first group. The lack of active agency is the feature that connects the works

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Typology of Participatory Art in the category of ‘Target’ to those in ‘Material’. In both these groups the participant is objectified as material for the work. In the first group, the participant who is targeted or affected by the artist’s intervention is also the primary audience; in this role he or she is objectified for a second time as the object of attention for the wider, secondary audience. Also in group 3, ‘Material’, there is a strong focus on audience and their reactions, as will be seen in that section. Particularly when the work is communicated to the wider public in the form of photo or video documentation, the participants or the immediate public, as seen above, become the focus of attention and curiosity for a more specialised audience in a cultural context.40 The products resemble episodes in a Candid Camera reality television series, but whereas there the prank is the end in itself, for Takala and others it is a tool for an experiment. The role of the artist in these projects comes close to that of a researcher. However, contrary to science, the artists only collect and display the data but make no further analysis nor draw conclusions about it. The interpretation of the data is left for the viewer.41 Takala acknowledges her interest in ethnography but says there are no direct influences from any particular scientist or theory.42 The documentation of Free Shop would equally provide material for sociological analysis but the artists leave it on the level of documentation. In particular, artists working in global networks of museums, biennials and residencies – Free Shop, Kimsooja, Complaints Choir (group 4, ‘Co-creator’) – often repeat the same ‘experiment’ in different cultural environments. The effect of the projects in the ‘Target’ category is related to their power to interfere with social life and to interrupt systems. In a comparable way, Augusto Boal’s ‘invisible theatre’ – a form of the Theatre of the Oppressed – is intended to provoke conflict and discussion and to direct attention to injustices underlying the social order.43 Invisible theatre is a play that is performed in a public space without informing the public that it is a play; the ‘spect-actors’ are participants who are unaware that they are part of a theatrical production, but nevertheless contribute to the events and discussion that takes place. Like Garfinkel’s breaching experiments, invisible theatre and the projects in the ‘Target’ category bring to light patterns and connections that normally go unnoticed even if the projects are not, as noted above, directed against an explicit goal. ‘Breaching’ has also been adopted as a conscious method of anti-authoritarian activism.

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The Participator in Contemporary Art A list of breaching experiments can be found, for example, as part of the ‘Culture Jammer’s Encyclopedia’, along with ‘hacktivism’, ‘news trolls’ and other tools.44 The breach invokes an element of danger. In Al€ys’ case, the transgression was against legal rules and included an element of potential violence, the gun, but Takala dressed as the Real Snow White hardly presented any real threat. Yet, the arguments for banning her entrance were based on ‘something bad’ happening. Equally, as Bag Lady she presented a risk and was monitored by security. The dangerous, the perverse, is lurking just around the corner, ready to attack if control lapses. Maintaining the organised world is based on mutual trust of shared work. It is a moral necessity that in any social gathering those present maintain their engagement and show their commitment to the situation: the socially organised and intersubjective world stands or falls with the maintenance of interpretative trust.45 The strong affects related to the breaching of this mutual understanding show how threatening it is to the existence of a shared world.

Group 2, User This category includes artworks and projects that engage viewers physically and socially in the process of experiencing art. The works provide a platform in the exhibition or gallery venue for people to use or activate. The works rely on viewers’ presence and activity: people are expected simply to spend time in the space or to do something more specific with the props and material provided. Visitors decide whether they want to take part or to remain as audience. The artist may or may not be present. Erwin Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures (see Figure 2.5), an ongoing series since the end of the 1980s, consist of written or drawn instructions for visitors to perform a ‘statue’, and possibly of objects and props to use in these embodiments. The instructions and objects may be installed on a pedestal, which serves as a stage, or simply placed in a gallery space. Some sculptures are also performed outdoors. The props are everyday objects such as empty bottles, shelves, pens, fruits, brooms and buckets. The works invite viewers to take an active stance and physically engage with the objects. Visitors can, however, also choose to remain passive viewers and 32

Figure 2.5 Erwin Wurm, One Minute Sculpture, Untitled (Stairs), instruction and performance.

The Participator in Contemporary Art observe while others use the work. The exhibition hence becomes a social situation where people either endeavour to fulfil the instructions and help each other to do so, and/or watch others trying to do the same. The given tasks and the combinations of humans and objects are unconventional and absurd, such as using one’s shoe as a mobile phone or tucking empty bottles under the armpits, between the legs and in the mouth. A certain amount of embarrassed or amused giggling is usually part of the scene when people are engaging in play in a public place and in the presence of strangers. Wurm exhibits his work also in the form of photographs or videos, showing himself or his assistants acting as sculptures. Occasionally, visitors also have the opportunity to be documented on a Polaroid print; for an additional fee the artist signs the photos and the participant receives a signed piece of art.46 A One Minute Sculpture is therefore both an act in time and space – participants are instructed to strike a pose and maintain it for one minute – as well as an image and a tangible piece of art, in the production of which the visitors have concretely participated. In principle, there is no end to the series, and there exist myriads of realisations or interpretations of each work. Wurm’s instructions have also been used outside the exhibition context, often unauthorised. A well-known appropriation is the band Red Hot Chili Peppers’ music video Can’t Stop which uses One Minute Sculpture poses; fashion photography has also exploited Wurm’s work.47 Michael Lin’s painted floors and interiors are less instructional and leave a lot of freedom for the visitor to decide how to use them. Often his works are situated at the fringes of exhibition spaces, such as the lobby or the café. Rather than urging people to do something specific, they invite them to idle, relax, spend time and be together, or they form a backdrop for other activities. This was true for Lin’s installation Palais de Tokyo, 21-01-2002/21-12-2002 (see Figure 2.6). It was part of the new art space the Palais de Tokyo in Paris as it opened in 2002.48 Lin’s design comprised a floor painted in big bright-coloured flower patterns, and comfortable large cushions and textiles on the lounge chairs and benches. The space could be seen from a floor above at the entrance level, giving a comprehensive view of the floor as a painting, inhabited and animated by the visitors. The space was first empty without other functions than a lounge, but was after a while made into a café. Inside the

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Typology of Participatory Art

Figure 2.6 Michael Lin, Palais de Tokyo, 21-01-2002/21-12-2002, emulsion on MDF panel, 2,800 £ 900 cm, Paris.

space, the experience was more immediate and tangible, but not all the visitors necessarily perceived it as art. Lin’s interiors intermingle with design. He considers himself a painter but understands a painting as space rather than surface, a space embracing viewers or users of the space. There is a close link also to craft or folk art. The patterns come, as with Lin’s art in general, from Taiwanese textiles; they are often rich floral motifs but also geometrical patterns that he and his assistants painstakingly copy in the larger scale of the given space: domestic motifs on a monumental scale. His works are temporary; when the exhibition finishes they are removed. Similarly to Wurm’s platforms, people in Lin’s spaces engage in a reciprocal game of observing others and being observed by other people. Cafés are urban sites par excellence for watching others and being seen, and in the newly opened Palais de Tokyo, its café, opening onto a terrace and the city, was a popular scene for socialising. In the new millennium, several artists have been invited to or have themselves decided to decorate cafés within exhibition venues: Lin at the

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The Participator in Contemporary Art P.S.1, New York (2004); Tobias Rehberger at the Tate Liverpool (2006), in the Venice Biennale (2009) and other places; Liam Gillick at the Whitechapel Gallery (2002); Jorge Pardo at K21 Museum, Düsseldorf (2002); and Felix Gonzalez-Torres at the Magasin du Grenoble.49 Also other forms of social space – archives, libraries, schools, shops, kiosks, massage parlours, hotel rooms, lounges and so forth – are adopted as artworks and intended for people to use. Lin’s Day Beds provide such leisurely hang outs for exhibition visitors. The use of photography, either as part of the work (Wurm) or spontaneously used by visitors, further underlines the aspect of watching people and being watched, turning the situation into a performance – a performance delegated by the artist to amateurs. The camera functions as a pictorial framing device in the same way as the stage or the pedestal denotes the status of on object as artwork: visitors are conscious of being in an artwork and being observed.

Figure 2.7 Michael Lin, Kiasma Day Bed, 2001, pillows, emulsion on wood, 360 £ 360 £ 45 cm, Helsinki.

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Typology of Participatory Art

Historical Connections This type of work is rooted in two different traditions. Often referred to as a platform, it has connections with site-specific art and installations, reaching back to Minimalism and the discussion about activated spectatorship. The other obvious source of influence is ‘instruction art’ or ‘instructional art’ – works that are based on ‘scores’ or give instructions to the audience for accomplishing the work, such as those by Yoko Ono and other Fluxus artists. The ways in which Minimalism activates the space around the sculptures and engages viewers as bodily beings has been explored thoroughly by many artists, scholars and critics. In particular the reading of Minimalism through phenomenology brought forward a new interest in the body, not as a representational object or a distant observer but as literal presence sharing the same space with the art object.50 The physical nature of the experience of and engagement with an artwork was a shared understanding of Minimalist sculpture, irrespective of whether it was criticised as by Michael Fried with his concept of ‘theatricality’ in his seminal essay, ‘Art and Objecthood’, or seen positively as by Robert Morris in his ‘Notes on Sculpture’, in which he calls the relationship the viewer establishes with the work ‘intimacy’. Equally, they both acknowledged that the interplay of the work, the space and the viewer happens in time and creates a situation – only that this had an opposing value to each of them.51 If Minimalism engendered a heightened awareness of bodily participation and a new subjectivity of the viewer, it did not, however, encourage actual participation as a user of the space or the work. Early examples of introducing interaction and engaging viewers as bodies in space and making them aware of other visitors are Dan Graham’s installations using mirrors and possibly video and Bruce Nauman’s corridors, particularly Video Corridor (1970). These works only come alive when a viewer enters them and becomes aware of him- or herself as part of the work along with other viewers. The viewer is at the same time in his or her body and outside it: in the Video Corridor we see ourselves in the monitor from behind, entering the corridor and receding from view in a way someone else would see us; Graham’s mirror and video spaces also create a heightened consciousness of being present in the space and in the presence of others through the many reflections and time-lapse video

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The Participator in Contemporary Art projections. These works highlight the active role of the viewer, and the work unfolds as the viewer experiments with the space and the images. In Graham’s works, the viewers’ relation to other viewers is at least as important as their relation to the objects and the space. His works are installations rather than sculptures (Minimalists did not conceive their work as ‘installations’) and the role of the viewer is an important aspect for him: he displays ‘the spectators, their gazes at themselves, their gazes at other spectators gazing at them’.52 It is impossible (and unnecessary) to try to define an exact point when an installation becomes participatory, but the above examples of Graham’s and Nauman’s works indicate some of the moves in this process. Robert Morris’s installation Bodyspacemotionthings at the Tate Gallery in 1971 serves as another illustrative transition point from Minimalist sculpture to a truly participatory work. In this exhibition, Morris, one of the core Minimalists and one of its most eloquent exponents, expanded his art into an interactive installation. The work was made up of basic geometric forms constructed of plywood but at the same time these forms were beams, platforms, see-saws, tunnels and ramps that the audience was allowed and encouraged to use and explore, to climb and play with. The bodily experience was no longer passing solely through perception but included actual physical contact – it put minimal forms to active use. Bodyspacemotionthings is also an example of the risks involved in audience participation, and one of the cases where participation took unplanned dimensions and got out of hand. The Tate was forced to close the new exhibit four days after it was opened because of the extensive and overexcited participation, which caused minor injuries to the audience and wrecked the work.53 Morris’ artistic background and the sources his work sprang from were a combination of Minimalist sculpture and involvement with modern dance.54 The type of bodily interaction he had in mind was probably more restrained than what actually took place; trained bodies are less prone to accident than the unprepared general audience in physically challenging situations. Some sort of excitement and agitation was expected, but the forms and the scale it took came as a surprise to the artist and the organisers.55 The audience either was not aware of or did not want to confine themselves to what was expected of them.56

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Typology of Participatory Art Two other early works played intentionally with the risk of open audience participation. In Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964)57 and Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974),58 the audience was invited to use the objects provided and to interact with the artist: to cut away a piece of cloth from Yoko Ono’s dress while the artist sat motionless on the stage; and to use an array of objects and tools to interact with the standing, totally passive Abramović. Particularly with Rhythm 0, which unlike the Cut Piece did not give any further instructions or restrictions of how to use the objects, audiences became aggressive, even violent towards the artist. By the end of the six-hour performance, her clothes were torn, she had been painted, decorated, cleaned, cut and she had had a loaded gun pointed at her head. It is with this group of participatory works that issues of misuse of participation may occur. This category is the most open and exerts the least control over the participants.59 It creates situations without clear guidelines for behaviour and challenges the rules guiding everyday situations. The question of misuse, however, is all but clear-cut; if open-endedness and unpredictability are part of the work’s ethos then, by definition, it cannot fail. This is the stance of, for example, Thomas Hirschhorn for whom any outcome is the right one, as he does not want to dictate the participants’ acts and reactions.60 His Altars are always at risk of being vandalised as they are left unguarded in public places.61 Despite the differences in their aims and content, the works all highlight the open structure of participation. Artists create a platform or a stage for people to be or to perform on; they can do this simply by constructing a space or by providing objects and material for use, or even by objectifying themselves to be used by the audience and asking the audience to perform instead. The works activate participants’ relationship to the physical and social environment. Sometimes the audience needs to be prompted or directly instructed to participate. In Cut Piece the directions were communicated to the audience through written flyers. The work itself is based on a score, which can be performed by anyone, male or female. Yoko Ono started making instruction paintings and other instruction pieces in the early 1960s. They are simple ideas and proposals for actions that can be carried out in everyday life or as a performance piece.62 The artist hence became a conceiver instead of a maker, as with conceptual art in general. According to Bruce Althshuler,

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The Participator in Contemporary Art ‘by 1969 the international art world was exploding with art-by-instruction’.63 Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures follow the instruction art strategy by giving the audience directions – in verbal or pictorial form – of how to perform the work. Similarly, Marina Abramovic’s Transitory Objects – crystal shoes, pillows or helmets – requiring audience interaction are equipped with instructions for the public, for example, to take off their shoes and put on the two crystal shoes, close their eyes, not move, and make their departure.64 Not all works that expect audience participation give clear instructions. With works that are more self-explanatory and where the actions to be taken are quite obvious – such as Carsten Höller’s slides – the only instructions concern restrictions and safety issues. In addition to installations and instruction art, projects in this category have connections to what is loosely called interactive art. Although the term can be defined as art in which ‘the viewers participate in some way by providing an input in order to determine the outcome’,65 hence not connected to any specific medium, it is customarily used about computerdirected works and interactive media art.66 In these works, the curator or the artist is acting as a host, creating a platform and putting part of the decision making in the hands of the audience-participant. The platform is a virtual one, giving participants a space to play in, within parameters defined by the artist. The New Media Art audience, unlike the conventional art audience, is encouraged to participate, to interact and to collaborate with other visitors.67 Finally, ‘platform’ as a concept has become current in the first decade of the century not only as a form of artwork68 but also as a curatorial strategy, so much so that it has given rise to talk about ‘platform formalism’.69 The most notable instances have been the 49th Venice Biennale: Plateau of Humankind curated by Harald Szeemann in 2001; the Kassel Documenta of 2002, which was structured in the form of five Platforms taking place in different cities, the Fifth Platform being the exhibition itself; and Venice Biennale 2003 Utopia Station, curated by Molly Nesbit, Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Rirkrit Tiravanija, designed by Tiravanija and Liam Gillick.70 Exhibitions as platforms gather in the same space or venue several artists and works, which may be, in their turn, conceived as platforms – including self-service activities such as libraries, reading rooms, computer lounges, videoteques, archives, cafés, chill out spaces and the feeling of an ongoing festival.

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Typology of Participatory Art Installation art developed in conjunction with exhibition models – with installation of art – or the other way round: heightened consciousness of exhibition as installation developed along with installation art.71 In the contemporary situation, some installations are integral to the exhibition support structure rather than individual autonomous work. Michael Lin’s interiors are works of this kind, for example Day Beds, which constitute a break in the exhibition visit – an intermission in the dramaturgy of the show. An artwork here acts as part of the framing, of the context of art. In a similar way, Ai Weiwei’s 1001 Chairs in the Kassel Documenta 2007 formed sites for gatherings within the exhibition and among other artworks.72 With participatory art, the visitor often cannot be sure which of his or her experiences are part of the physical or social context, and which are art.73 This effect is further increased by artists who consciously seek to locate their work in the fringes of the exhibition spaces. Even instruction art has its counterpart in curating. Do It as an exhibition model is based on interpretation as artistic principle. No artworks are shipped to the exhibition’s venues, but they are recreated at each site according to the artists’ instructions. The exhibition ‘is a work of the same kind as its components. Do It is a do-it, a work to be realised from instructions, and as with other pieces of art-by-instruction it can be done simultaneously in more than one place.’74 Do It began in 1993 by Christian Boltanski, Bertrand Lavier and Hans Ulrich Obrist. The exhibition has taken place in venues in more than 40 cities worldwide. Do It (home version) is a website with instructions according to which segments of the exhibition can be made at home, in the office or in any other place.75 Much of this change in curatorial practices goes under the term ‘new institutionalism’, which Alex Farquharson describes as institutional critique that has moved from external critique into the museums and is practised by institutions themselves. In these ‘new institutions’ other activities – discussion, events, research, residencies – are given equal importance with exhibitions, and production and reception coexist with presentation on equal terms. Significantly, according to Farquharson, ‘“new institutionalism” has more in common with Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno, Rirkrit Tiravanija and other artists associated with Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics, with whom new institutions have collaborated repeatedly, than with most institutional critique’.76

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The Participator in Contemporary Art

Theoretical Underpinnings Of all the categories, art in this group corresponds best to the artworks and ideas discussed by Nicolas Bourriaud under the title of ‘relational aesthetics’. Although the term has gained a life of its own and is now used about almost any kind of participatory art, most of the examples in his book fall into the ‘User’ group. Central to Bourriaud’s thesis is that the art of the 1990s explores social bonds and social exchanges, and is itself made of social connections and encounters. The projects he describes are mostly, although not uniquely, works in which the artist invites people to do something, to take something or to add something to the work. His focus is on sociability and socialisation; art according to him operates in the sphere of communication and social formations and reflects and produces intersubjective relations.77 The prevailing ambiance maintained throughout the book is one of conviviality and sharing, although Bourriaud does not explicitly claim that this art would be exclusively positive and happy. For him, the central question lies in the form of the artwork: it is the way in which a project is structured that produces the conditions of encounter and defines the exchange. For Bourriaud, this type of art activity can have an ameliorative function; it fills in cracks in the social bonds. He argues that artists are creating ‘new models of sociability’, not utopias but concrete models.78 In the quest to define a place for art that revives social bonds in the mechanised, specialised world, with its impersonal relationships, he refers to Debord’s Society of Spectacle asking whether it is possible to have directly experienced social encounters as opposed to ‘spectacular’ representation.79 How this ‘relationality’ happens is exemplified by Felix GonzalezTorres, who is the subject of an entire chapter in the book. Bourriaud sees his art as based primarily on intersubjectivity. He describes GonzalezTorres’ work as materialisation of processes and creation of events. The constant theme is cohabitation and coexistence. Bourriaud mentions particularly the ‘candy pieces’, in which visitors are allowed to help themselves to sweets that the work is made of, as works that put viewers in a situation where they need to make decisions of a social and ethical nature, conscious of the presence and the observation of others – other visitors as well as museum staff.80 He underlines the openness of the situation that leaves it to the viewer to negotiate his or her stance towards what is offered,

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Typology of Participatory Art but not predicted by an authority: the viewer hovers between the states of ‘a passive consumer and a witness, associate, customer, guest, co-producer, protagonist’. Bourriaud calls this function ‘interstice’, a space-time outside the strict administrative and economic rules of public space. There, he claims, the instant and temporary micro-communities of spectatorparticipants are formed; in this free association the aura of art, previously associated to the artwork, is reconstituted around the viewer instead.81 In a later text, Bourriaud lists artists who produce ‘platform works’ such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liam Gillick and Surasi Kusolwong, and the forms that they use: reading cubbies, cafés, spaces for public speaking or collective production.82 Bourriaud’s ideas and the concept of relational aesthetics essentially apply to the type of art discussed in this category where the form of the work is a ‘platform’ and the viewer position is defined as the ‘user’ of the work. When forcibly transferred to other types of participatory art, the concept of relational aesthetics loses its explanatory power and is quite rightly found wanting by writers who discuss works in the other categories (as will be seen). Bourriaud’s approach brings forth certain aspects of the projects and leaves others aside. For example, his account emphasises the ‘relational’ character of Gonzalez-Torres at the expense of his activist side: Bourriaud does not mention that he was also a member of the Group Material collective. His reading of Gonzalez-Torres is relatively traditional, and contrary to some criticism accusing him of claiming too ambitious political relevance for relational aesthetics, Bourriaud prefers to engage with aesthetic analyses (formal structures and colour scheme of the works, even beauty)83 and with biographical investigation (throughout the text, Gonzalez-Torres’ work is set against his homosexuality and the death of his partner from AIDS). Group Material was one of the first artist groups to use the exhibition as a forum or a platform in their project Democracy in 1989 at the Dia Art Foundation.84 The exhibition functioned as a centre for meetings and discussions around four specific themes: education, electoral politics, cultural participation and AIDS. The works discussed by Bourriaud are less discursive and there are rarely any overtly political issues tackled: the openform work is used rather as a space for interaction and sociability. The settings of Lin, Wurm or Höller include no or little text and are less likely to provide a platform for making statements or for explicitly political

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The Participator in Contemporary Art engagement; they are proposals for encounters instead. This approach, however, need not be completely devoid of political relevance, as will be discussed later. Bourriaud describes Lin and Tiravanija as working with ‘ambiance’, ‘in other words, the constructed situation’.85 Erving Goffman’s conceptualisations about social situations are also useful and valid with this group.86 The projects create situations defined in space and time into which visitors enter and in relation to which they define their position. Lin, for example, typically titles his works with the site and installation dates to mark the boundaries of the situation. As opposed to projects that take place in an everyday life context, in this group, the situations most often take place in an art exhibition or an art space. The ‘social occasion’, to use Goffman’s terms, of experiencing these works is hence more or less specified in advance: it is a visit to an art exhibition. A specific exhibit, such as One Minute Sculptures, would constitute a ‘situation’, and the visitors assembled together to explore it a ‘gathering’. The action initiated by platform art, however, goes against traditional rules of museum behaviour, causing ‘situational tension’. As with the works in the previous group, these projects create ‘situational offences’ and structure human relationships and behaviour in a way that seems inappropriate in the social occasion. The ‘situational proprieties’, according to which individuals modify their conduct, are in this case the expectations guiding a visit to an art exhibition: people are aware that they are viewing an artwork. Contrary to the first group, in which deviant behaviour caused anxiety, here ‘art’ serves as an alibi for strange behaviour. Within these parameters, the projects, such as One Minute Sculptures or Höller’s Test Sites, create disconcerting, confusing, amusing or astonishing situations. This does not, perhaps paradoxically, contradict the fact that visitors in a contemporary art context often expect to encounter something unexpected and surprising – the exceptional is commonplace. Within this framework, the projects create situations for viewer-participants to explore the situational boundaries and their own reactions to them. Lin’s ‘invitation to sleep’87 and other similar works change the visitor’s relation to the museum space: they are cosy, homelike and with their sofas or beds evoke a private, domestic environment. Activities such as lying down or eating are conventionally incompatible with the museum

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Figure 2.8 Carsten Höller, Test Site, 2006, Tate Modern, London.

The Participator in Contemporary Art environment and normally ‘a situational offence’. The social occasion and the situation are intertwined and in contradiction or at least in tension with each other. One Minute Sculptures and similar projects that demand that visitors actively manipulate the work put people in a situation in which they first have to make a decision whether to play with empty bottles or to take a ride on a long slide and, if they do, to put themselves in a situation, which defies the rules of normal adult behaviour in a public place and in the presence of others. If they decide not to, they will still be part of the situation as audience to the other participants. In an art gallery context, observing other visitors instead of art would normally count, to use another of Goffman’s terms, as ‘side involvement’, which should be kept, if engaged with, unnoticed.88 Visitors should also refrain from attracting unnecessary attention to themselves by, for example, making loud noises. Artwork as a platform or a stage, however, places the visitors in the spotlight and in the focus of others’ attention. With this heightened awareness of others and of being monitored by them, visitors reflect on their self-image and actions in relation to other people and often in explicit communication with them.89 All sorts of aspects of social life, such as social status, gender or physical condition are activated, made visible and negotiated in an unaccustomed way; a visitor to Höller’s exhibition reports, ‘“I shouldn’t have worn a dress today”, the woman in front of me complained as she stepped onto her flying carpet.’90 As opposed to the ‘Target’ group, now the participants decide for themselves if and how they want to participate and the act becomes more of a play, in which visitors take turns to be on stage and in the audience. As noted in the previous section, a situation is created by its members and, at the same time, participants are created in and their behaviour conditioned by the situation. In Lin’s or Rehberger’s cafés, visitors are defined as customers but even then they are also part of the artwork because – similarly to the projects in the first category – the work turns everyone within the situation into a participant or an element of the work or even a performer and, at the same time, a spectator. Different spaces also engender different behaviour – cafés lead to different comportment from galleries – or in social research terms, behaviour can be predicted by the spatial and social situation.91 When the situational cues are ambivalent or obscure, as in situations created by art, the rules are not clear and an unrestrained or even unlawful state emerges.

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Typology of Participatory Art The violent behaviour towards Abramović in her Rhythm 0 performance may be explained by this absence of norms: when the behaviour is not guided by the external situation – the situation is not identified or defined – individual spontaneous and uninhibited impulses come to the fore. Some artists deliberately create controversial situations, as a social experiment of sorts, expecting misuse and chaos.92 Carsten Höller’s background as a scientist (specialising in entomology) is regularly mentioned in connection to his exhibits, and titles such as Test Sites openly refer to his exploratory attitude. Instead of insects, he creates laboratory conditions for people.93 If there are any results of these tests, however, they are reaped by the test subject rather than the tester. Several of Superflex’s projects are built up as situations where the participants collectively have to make decisions as to what happens in the provided setting or how the specific project will be used. They are interested in the theme of self-organisation, which ‘refers to groups that are independent of institutional or corporate structures, are non-hierarchical, open and operate participatory decision-making processes’.94 One of the platforms based on self-organisation was Karlskrona2 (1999), an online replica of the city of Karlskrona, Sweden, where the inhabitants of the city could ‘live’ and arrange the city and their lives collectively in alternative ways. Superflex have also built exhibition situations around the online game Counter-Strike as a starting point – a game in which people unknown to each other have to form teams and cooperate in order to play the game.95 Superflex call their art ‘tools’, declaring openly the idea that their projects are designed to be used and the participants are ‘users’. Superchannel, for example, is a studio and a tool to produce internet TV, used among others by two tenants’ groups in Liverpool.96 Other artists are also explicit in this approach. In addition to cafés, Michael Lin has also designed, as a work of art, a smoking room (Untitled Cigarette Break 1999) and a meeting room; and a real wedding took place in his installation In Sickness and in Health (2004). Using public or commercial space for private events is also staged by Goshka Macuga: the meeting table in her installation The Nature of the Beast (2009) can be reserved for meetings by the public. The only requirement is that participants document the meeting in some form. On a more abstract level, Liam Gillick defines his art: ‘My work is like the light in the fridge, it only works when there are

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The Participator in Contemporary Art people there to open the door. Without people, it’s not art – it’s something else, stuff in a room.’97 In this understanding, it is the audience that ‘switches on the light’. Tania Bruguera has taken the idea of usefulness to a new level as the principle of her artistic vision. She has coined the concept of ‘arte útil’, useful art, the immersion of art directly into society, no longer only showing problems but as ‘a place from which to create the proposal and implementation of possible solutions’.98 The concept is implemented in her five-year project Immigrant Movement International (IMI), working to improve the political presence of immigrants, and in the Arte Util lab and the Museum of Arte Util, which gathers together projects that are based on the ethos of usefulness.99 Michel de Certeau’s concept of tactics, discussed briefly in the previous section, opens up the idea of agency and hence of political power of the user. It is a theory of everyday life that shifts the attention from production and product to the consumer as an active agent and an actor; instead of considering people as passive consumers, it proposes terms such as ‘user’ and ‘everyday creativity’, and looks at how users operate. ‘Tactic’ is a process of appropriation and about inventing ways of using things, space and narratives differently, making them one’s own and ‘habitable’.100 According to de Certeau ‘a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities [. . .] and interdictions’ and the user of the space ‘actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge.’101 His concept of making things habitable – in the same way as users make a rented room, streets, work, even a text habitable and their own – is an active process of writing-reading or consumer-production.102 De Certeau’s examples range from simple events such as cooking or walking and tracing one’s itinerary in the city, to more complex actions like the uses of language. Within this framework, platforms such as Lin’s interiors or Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures encourage actions that can be compared to tactics: they prompt and urge the visitors to an exhibition to use it in personal, unorthodox ways, to experiment and to appropriate everyday items, space and behaviour to alternative uses. If physical structures – cities, buildings, museums and so forth – mediate our activity and are organised to maintain order and obedience, then artworks can work against rigid frameworks of interaction; they can change the mental perception of a place and its use.

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Typology of Participatory Art Höller’s slides propose a surprising means of moving in space and between the floors of a museum, and a part of his catalogue for the Tate was an independent feasibility study about slides in public buildings.103 If the works in the first group, ‘Target’, make assaults on the strategies (in de Certeau’s sense), the works in the ‘User’ group seem to work on the level of tactics. This encouragement to tactical acts may have subversive, albeit subtle, potential; it opens vistas for users of subverting the rituals and representations that institutions seek to impose upon them. Hou Hanru sees Lin’s works as doing exactly this: they negotiate the power of the established systems by deconstructive methods, interrupt the existing protocols of the art institutions and upset hierarchies.104 This understanding of tactics seems to be echoed in Bourriaud’s central concept ‘interstice’, derived from a term used by Marx, denoting spaces for personal exchange and an alternative to a framework conditioned and structured by capitalist economy.105 It corresponds to tactics in that it allows alternative and subversive operations within the dominant field, but refers more specifically to exchanges taking place in the cracks of the monetary system, whereas tactics denotes a wider scope of negotiations of space and time in everyday life. Bourriaud, however, uses the term in a more metaphoric way, granting exhibitions of contemporary art the power of installing these moments of interstice that ‘create free spaces and periods of time whose rhythms are not the same as those that organize everyday life’.106 In other words, Bourriaud’s concept of interstice is actually a better equivalent to de Certeau’s more open concept of tactics than a Marxist reading of economic exchange relations. In the ‘User’ group, the relationship to space and objects is more significant than in the other categories. In fact, the physical dimension is as important as the social dimension. The platform and the items are not only passively waiting to be used but they are part of the total setting that creates the viewer as participator and combines the artwork: the physical space and the objects guide the positioning and actions of the visitors and are active factors in the encounters. Actor-network theory (ANT) is useful in helping to understand how this works. In its terminology the space and objects are actors or ‘actants’ in the same way as people: both human and non-human actors affect and modify other entities. In the processes, they connect with each other and become something else, in this case an artwork.

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The Participator in Contemporary Art ANT understands the world as networks and connections – or associations, as they are called by Bruno Latour.107 The networks should be studied in all dimensions, and no difference should be presupposed between human and non-human elements, also called ‘actants’. At the same time, all actants are already themselves networks, created by countless connections and associations. The concept ‘actor-network’ describes this duality or multiplicity. The same entity is both actor and network at the same time, and which aspect is activated depends on the circumstances and the observer. Things do not have an essential core but their nature is conditioned by circumstances and other actors that affect them. ANT presents a deeply antiessentialist approach focusing instead on relational aspects – relevant to relational aesthetics. It could be said that any artwork, whether a painting or an installation, always affects people by changing them into viewers and physically positioning them in relation to the work. In works involving physical manipulation, this process becomes more concretely observable. Human and non-human actants form hybrids or ‘quasi-objects’ as Latour calls these combinations.108 In Wurm’s sculptures, the empty bottles or the person are no longer the same as they were before being united: for one minute, they become a bottle-human or human-bottle. Some favourite examples of ANT are citizen-gun or gun-citizen and driver-car.109 They are effective, even lethal combinations of elements that on their own have no such potency. The said assemblages have a more established and permanent role in modern society – and are hence regulated by rules and laws – whereas hybrids created in art, such as bottle-human, tend to be temporary and exceptional. All objects and actants in general are in themselves already networks, but when they are treated as one entity they behave as ‘black boxes’. Hence the items and spaces used by the participants as well as the participants themselves are nodes with many connections but they are normally taken as singular entities. Latour calls the processes in which actants affect each other ‘trials’.110 Black boxes become visible through these processes in moments of innovation, error and crisis – when something goes wrong or changes so that the constructedness comes into sight.111 We could add art to the list of forces making black boxes visible. It is one of artists’ regular strategies to approach familiar situations and objects by exposing them to non-standard behaviour or treatment (to ‘trials’), and by doing this to

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Typology of Participatory Art reveal their inner structures or the networks that they consist of. Artists are not only making new hybrid combinations but also specialise in opening black boxes and exposing the networked content to the public. We could say, for example, that Höller’s slides expose the structure of the building in a way that is not visible in the everyday use of it. By altering the habitual ways of getting around they expose the way buildings structure our patterns of movement and behaviour. The slide itself remains a black box that does not reveal its internal structure unless it malfunctions or an accident takes place. Then the material elements and the networks of people who constructed it are activated and brought to attention. This may further create new connections and networks for example in the form of legal and financial claims in the case of injuries (as discussed in the chapter about contracts). In art discourse, the material aspects of an artwork may feel secondary to its symbolic significance. Nevertheless, it is a custom to list the materials and techniques beside the work. This may cause confusion. A visitor to Höller’s exhibition at the New Museum reports her quest for the meaning of the exhibition and the Mirror Carousel: ‘I looked to the small labels beside the mobile for answers, but they offered only a list of materials used and the name of the organization assuring the health of the canaries.’112 With this type of art, the material reality is significant. The problem with such labels is that they omit the human actors who are equally important.

Conclusion The ‘User’ group differs from the ‘Target’ in the degree of agency granted to the participants and is similar to the ‘Co-creator’ group in that the participants actively decide to participate and, through their participation, produce the work. Even if some participants in Lin’s or other artists’ café interiors may not be aware all the time of being inside an artwork, they are still considered as participants in this category. The difference between the ‘User’ and ‘Co-creator’ groups is the phase in which the participants make their contribution: either as ‘users’ when the work is presented to the public, or as ‘co-creators’ when the work is in the production phase. This difference has consequences, for example, for what kinds of contracts are imposed upon them, as will be discussed later.

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The Participator in Contemporary Art Thinking about art through actor-network theory broadens the idea of ‘multiple authorship’113 from human actors into objects and networks. In this view, the world is constructed of people and objects, animate and inanimate entities, affecting each other and forming networks. Even Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures are in fact bodies as sculptures. The question of subjects and objects will take a wider turn with the category ‘Material’, where humans will be also considered as objects. The interchangeability of humans and objects can be seen, as discussed above, with Marina Abramović who first objectifies herself by taking the place of object in Rhythm 0 and then with regard to Transitory Objects contends that objects can replace the human presence. In both options, she is engendering active audience participation. In the next section, the members of the public will also be put in the place of objects. In the ‘User’ group, the relationship of the participants to other viewers is equal as the situation is mostly open and potentially anyone can take part in an active role. In the coming two sections the roles of the participants and the viewers, and the possibilities of participation, are defined and structured in advance. The aspects of ‘relationality’ and harmonious coexistence, as opposed to more antagonistic relationships, will be further discussed in the chapter on politics of participation.

Group 3, Material In this category, people participate in the making of artworks, in which they are used, with their consent, as material for the work or as workforce. In this mode of participation, the participants voluntarily cede part of their power of decision and control to the artist; they lend their body, their time and presence, or their labour for the artist to construct a work of art. People participate to perform a set task, and the form and content of their contribution is defined in advance and controlled by the artist. In these projects, people take part in the production phase but they may also be present at the presentation or display of the work. The invitation to participate may be an open call or it can be extended to a limited group only. The process of making the work may be a closed process and confined to the specific individuals who have decided to join the project. Spencer Tunick is known mainly, one could say only, for his mass nude photographs, which he has been producing since the early 1990s. They 52

Typology of Participatory Art include dozens, hundreds or thousands of naked people, assembled in an urban setting or in a natural landscape. Nude Adrift was staged in Helsinki in 2002 (see Figure 2.9). On an early morning in August nearly 2,000 people gathered in one of the principal squares of the city, the main Market Place by the sea. The area is bordered by official buildings such as the City Hall, the Presidential Palace and the Supreme Court in Helsinki. At the meeting point, Spencer Tunick, standing on a stepladder, welcomed and thanked the people for participating in his art. The participants were then guided to the side of the market place behind the indoor market hall where each participant was allocated a small square on the ground as a place to leave all clothes and other personal belongings. Following the instructions of the staff, people got undressed and started walking towards the square. The area was guarded and closed to the public, although it was too early for there to be much traffic or passers-by, and the participants had been told not to disclose the time and place of the event to any other people. On the spot at the square, Tunick, standing on a cherry picker with his cameraman, directed the process and megaphoned instructions to the participants about where and how to stand or lie down. Two poses were performed at two different spots after which a smaller group did a few more shots at the nearby fountain. The recruitment for the project had happened through emails and a publicity campaign by a Finnish life-style magazine Image, which had invited Tunick and organised the project in collaboration with the Helsinki City Art Museum. Volunteers registered their interest in participating and gave their details by email, and then received instructions about where to come, how to behave and what to take with them. The exact date, place and time were not disclosed until just before the very date. The result, Spencer Tunick’s Nude Adrift photos, were later shown in an exhibition at the Helsinki City Art Museum. Each participant also got one small photo as a souvenir. Before and after Helsinki, Nude Adrift has been staged in other countries. The locations and the number of participants in Tunick’s projects vary but the process follows roughly the same steps as described above.114 Tunick calls his projects ‘installations’ and sometimes also ‘live art’. ‘The live installation itself combines elements of performance art, sculpture and land art’, he says.115 The outcome of these events, the large prints sized approximately 120 £ 150 cm, are exhibited in shows and sold. One

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The Participator in Contemporary Art

Figure 2.9 Spencer Tunick, Nude Adrift, 2002, Helsinki, participant copy.

photograph of the Helsinki Nude Adrift series was purchased by a private collector in Finland.116 As with any mass event, Tunick’s projects need an efficient production machinery to make them happen. The actual shooting is but the tip of the iceberg in the whole process. It is preceded by fundraising, recruiting and registration of volunteers, requests for permission, planning of the logistics

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Typology of Participatory Art for up to 7,000 people,117 and arranging the technical side of the production. Working in a public space means negotiations with many authorities, and Tunick is notorious for having trouble with officials, particularly in his home country, the USA. Guaranteeing a safe and protected experience for a few thousand naked people in the centre of the city can also be relatively complicated. This preparation process is not conducted by Tunick himself but by a local organiser. He only works on invitation. In Helsinki what was thought of as ‘a couple of hours’ shooting’, was afterwards described by the producer as an ‘organisational inferno’.118 Our second example, Santiago Sierra, employs people in precarious situations – drug addicts, homeless, prostitutes, illegal immigrants and so forth – compensating them with what is usually comparable to a minimum salary, or some other sum that has a meaning in the life of the participant, for example the price of drugs. His works are presented to a live public. Seen from the audience viewpoint, the work at this stage becomes an intervention and moves into the category ‘Target’.119 In this case study, however, the focus is on the production phase and the ‘primary’ participants. Sierra’s Person in a Hole (see Figure 2.10) was an outcome of a commission to produce a new work in Helsinki in the framework of a group exhibition ‘ARS 01, Unfolding Perspectives’ at the Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma in 2001. As a result of a visit to Helsinki and discussions with the curators, he decided to focus on the issue of homelessness. He notes on his website, Helsinki has a homeless population of some 10,000 people: an unexpectedly high number for a country with such a high standard of living. The country does not ignore them though, the homeless receive economic aid and shelter, which they reject. Most of them are alcoholics driven out of their places of work and homes.120

The installation was a homeless person sitting in a hole dug in the ground outside the museum. One person at a time sat in the hole for four hours per day, over two weeks, and was paid 50 Finnish marks (approximately $7) per hour. Similarly to Tunick’s project, the preproduction of Sierra’s work was almost totally in the organiser’s charge. The curator responsible for the project contacted the association for homeless people and made arrangements for the sitters with them; the facilities department dug the 55

The Participator in Contemporary Art

Figure 2.10

Santiago Sierra, Person in a Hole, 2001, Helsinki, installation.

hole, supported it with steel pillars and provided the equipment: a chair and a marquee.121 The artist himself never saw the setting in use, as he had already left the country before the first person descended into the pit. During the action that lasted for two weeks, the museum documented the project with video and still photography. The video was shown during the rest of the show, when the hole was filled and the performance had finished. Later, the artist produced a photographic work by enlarging a still from this video and authorised an edition of five images as his artwork, which were then sold by his gallery, among others, to the museum that produced the work (see Figure 2.11).122 For projects within this group, participation is strictly defined and directed by the artist and the participants have undertaken to follow the artist’s instructions, to perform a task or simply to sit or stand and be present. Sierra often puts them to work that demands a simple physical action such as moving or holding a heavy object against the wall or sitting inside a cardboard box. As parallel examples, Vanessa Beecroft hires nude 56

Typology of Participatory Art

Figure 2.11 Santiago Sierra, Person in the Ditch measuring 300 £ 500 £ 300 cm. Space between Kiasma Museum and parliament building. Helsinki. Finland. September 2001, black-and-white photography, 152.5 £ 229.5 cm.

models to stand for hours in a gallery event and for her photographs; and in Francis Al€ys’ When Faith Moves Mountains 500 students participated in shovelling sand outside Lima to move a sand dune by a few inches. The activity can take place in a live situation or become the documentation of a performance. At the other extreme, the participants are not made to do something, but something is done to them. Sierra manipulates the physical appearance of his participants by for example bleaching their hair or tattooing their back; Beecroft shaves, paints and makes up her models. The artists even talk about people as their material: Tunick compares using people in his photographs to the way a painter uses colours or a writer uses words.123 Vanessa Beecroft describes the young women she employs as her ‘material’.124 Central issues with these projects are related to the object position of the participants and the relations that this creates.

Historical Connections There is a history of artists’ self-exposure and self-objectification, related quite obviously to performance art where artists use their own body as the

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The Participator in Contemporary Art medium: Marina Abramović, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden or Gilbert & George, to name but a few. In these projects, the artist takes the place of an art object, placing him- or herself as the object of gaze or manipulation and occasionally submitting to humiliating or painful situations. Acting as docent Jane Castleton, giving a tour in the museum, Andrea Fraser pronounces that ‘I’d like to live like an art object’, as something producing pleasure for others.125 In Untitled 2003 she used her body as a vehicle in a different way: a collector bought a night at a hotel with Fraser and a video of the encounter.126 Abramović declared in Rhythm 0, ‘I am the object. During this period I take full responsibility.’ In her Artist is present performance she also talks about herself as taking the place of the object. On the other hand, she saw her crystal objects as her substitute.127 As with the works in group 1, ‘Target’, these projects subscribe to immediacy and real presence, and may produce an event or an endurance test for the artist and possibly also for the audience. Projects in the category ‘Material’ also present live people as part of the work. Yet there is a considerable difference in staging oneself and staging others. There are not so many examples in history of artists using other people as an artistic medium. The most famous example would probably be Yves Klein using women as his human paintbrushes to spread blue paint on paper (Anthropometries 1960, staged as live art happenings). In a more subtle way, his exhibition Le Vide (1958), an empty gallery that the visitors filled, may already be considered a way of using people as art. Piero Manzoni incorporated people as his art by signing their bodies and declaring them his Living Sculptures (1961).128 Oscar Bony put a Working Class Family concretely on a plinth in 1968 as part of an experimental show in Argentina. A father, mother and their son were paid to sit on the plinth eight hours a day.129 When working with larger groups of people, the artist functions rather as a film or theatre director or choreographer. Another, although different, early example of employing people as part of one’s work would be Mierle Laderman Ukeles in her Touch Sanitation (1977 – 80) in which, over 11 months, she met all the sanitation workers in New York City and shook their hand saying, ‘Thank you for keeping NYC alive.’130 The ethos of the work is empowering and not instrumentalising. Yet, rather than contributing anything by their own initiative, people became participants in her game and part of her artwork, acting along a script defined by the artist.

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Typology of Participatory Art The people who are used as ‘Material’ to produce the work need not be present in a live situation in front of a public; they can also be part of the production of a film or a photograph. Another lineage therefore leads to photographic documentary portraiture, which in a similar way is dependent on people’s presence as the material or the subject matter of the work and on the contact and collaboration between the artist and the model. To some extent, every portrait can be seen as a collaboration between the artist and the model, irrespective of the medium. The differentiation between collaboration, use and abuse is far from being clear-cut as controversy around photographers such as Sally Mann or Nan Goldin shows.131 The subject – object relationship seems to become more problematic the more distance – social, economic, ethnic – there is between the photographer and his or her models. Photographing existing events and people is not exactly the same as exhibiting people or using them as material or instruments to make art; however, even within the photographic medium, the line between a documentary and a staged situation is thin. Rineke Dijkstra moves across the blurred borders of documentary, portraits and collaborations in her works. Her photographs with young people on beaches (Beach Portraits) bear little resemblance to any active participation on behalf of the models except of lending their appearance and posing for the photographer. In a similar way, it can be said that the homeless person in Sierra’s work is asked to pose for the audience. The obvious difference is that he is staged by the artist in an artificial environment, whereas the bathers are in their natural surroundings. Images in Dijkstra’s New Mothers series, as opposed to Beach Portraits, are named individuals but staged in an anonymous and abstract way. In her videos Buzzclub (1996) and Crazyhouse (2010), shot in two Liverpool clubs and showing individual young people dancing in front of the camera, the young people took part more directly in the process. This project comes close to collaborative or participative photography, which relies more on the participation of the models and on dialogue between the artist and the participants. It is often aimed at empowering the participants and is more related to the group ‘Co-creator’.132 Additionally, the time element allowed by the medium of the moving image gives the young people more presence as individuals. The video I See a Woman Crying (Weeping Woman) (2009) takes the collaboration a step further. It was produced in a workshop situation with a school class; the children

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The Participator in Contemporary Art are seen talking about a painting (Picasso’s Weeping Woman), which is not shown in the video; the focus is entirely on their comments and facial expressions. There exists, however, another historical tradition of exhibiting people: the so-called human zoos or freak shows and ethnographic showcases. Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña drew on this tradition when they exhibited themselves as Undiscovered Amerindians (discussed in the ‘Target’ section) and, as part of the show, also presented a history of displays of human beings. They wanted to point out the continuity of the colonial discussion and its ties with entertainment, science and education.133 Fusco and Gomez-Peña objectified themselves as showpieces; the works in the ‘Material’ group are staging the presence of others. The cage performance imitated the idea of the human zoo; a homeless person exhibited in Sierra’s ditch is perhaps even closer to this ethos. In freak shows people were chosen for their physical deviance from the ‘normal’ and from the mainstream; now the criterion is social deviance instead. Art provides an accepted framework for exhibiting people as representatives of a social or ethnic group. Claire Bishop captures this notion in her terms ‘delegated performance’: the artist hires other people to perform on his or her behalf and the people are ‘performing themselves’.134 Projects in group 4, ‘Co-creator’, may also recruit the participants from a closed group or community but their treatment is different; the dividing criterion is the amount of self-determination allowed. In the ‘User’ category, in contrast, people stage themselves; here they are staged by the artist. It is more difficult to build a genealogy for this group of participatory art than for the three other types. There are connecting points with performance art as well as photography. An even closer association, as I will argue below, for the use of people as material could be drawn from object art or ready-made art.

Theoretical Underpinnings The main exponent for the type of participatory art that constitutes the ‘Material’ group is Claire Bishop. In her critique of relational art as advocated by Bourriaud, she dismisses its positive, convivial quality and defines a different type of participation based on conflict and antagonism

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Typology of Participatory Art rather than harmonious togetherness. Bishop grounds her argument on the notion of antagonism by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. She contends that the concept of relationality and art projects founded on consensus cannot be democratic because they are bypassing the political and avoiding conflict and antagonisms which, according to Laclau and Mouffe, are essential to democracy.135 In her several texts on participatory art, Bishop has a preference for controversial, challenging and ‘antagonistic’ art, which indeed often (but not always) coincides with projects that use people as material, hence projects explored in this section. This again is in contrast with community-based or ‘dialogical’ art advocated by writers like Grant Kester (explored in the next section). Most of Bishop’s case studies are projects of this type, for example Phil Collins who makes young people dance until exhaustion (They Shoot Horses, 2004), Artur Zmijewski who makes deaf people sing in a choir (The Singing Lesson I, 2001),136 and, most importantly, Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn. The relations created in Sierra’s and Hirschhorn’s art are, according to Bishop ‘marked by sensations of unease and discomfort rather than belonging’. They dismiss Bourriaud’s idea of a ‘microtopia’ and focus instead on tension among viewers and participants. The tension is seen to rise from bringing together ‘diverse economic backgrounds’.137 Just introducing social or economic differences into a work, however, does not as such create the tensions: projects in the next section, ‘Co-creator’, also do this but with less confrontational fervour. In the light of this typology, the decisive factor would be how this bringing together is achieved and what types of relationships are forged, that is, what type of participation is in question. ‘Antagonism’ does not fully account for this category. A new feature in Bishop’s later writing is the strong emphasis on the roots of participatory art in performance and theatre. This supports her notion of the projects as ‘delegated performance’, in which, as she sees it, the artist hires people to perform on his or her behalf. For the viewers, these projects often appear as performance art, but considering the participants as an artist’s proxies does not capture the whole nature of the projects. A more appropriate comparison would be with object-based artworks envisioned and designed by the artist but produced industrially or manufactured by others – a procedure that has for a long time been commonplace. The participants are part of the material: human readymades of sorts. The works in this category deal with the idea of human as

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The Participator in Contemporary Art object and the inter-changeability, or uncertainty of object and subject positions. Many artists have declared their desire to become an object, as discussed above. Asking other people to take this position is not completely straightforward. The commission creates an exchange or a working relationship between the artist and the participant. Within this framework, producing a participatory art project of this type is a process of constructing exchange relations and making contracts. There is always an agreement about the terms of participation between the artist and the participants. It may take the form of a written contract or exist only in an unwritten, even merely assumed mutual understanding of the terms of participation. The primary contract is formed between the artist and participants but the contractual situation extends to the viewer and the producing institution, as was seen in the descriptions of the production processes above. Objectification of a person creates an asymmetric relationship, in which one party gives up some of his or her self-determining power (or agency) and gives his or her labour or presence for use by the artist. This exchange may be valued in exact numbers and a monetary compensation given to the participant, but the participant’s reward may also be of a more immaterial nature. A paid transaction, as with Sierra, makes the relationship visible and objective. There is no straightforward logic that would allow us to infer what kind of participation would be paid and what is based on voluntary unpaid contribution. Tunick does not pay his nude models; Vanessa Beecroft uses professional and non-professional participants in her nude poses and all get paid. Beecroft’s models work long hours but so do the unpaid volunteers in Al€ys’ project When Faith Moves Mountains; Al€ys’ participants are not professionals but neither are those of Thomas Hirschhorn who still get paid; and so on. The artists have differing viewpoints about paying their collaborators: Hirschhorn, who creates projects by engaging a group of people to construct and maintain his installations in public places, considers non-recompensed volunteers unpaid labour and makes sure the participants in his projects get their pay,138 while Al€ys maintains that if he paid the participants in his film it would compromise their participation. The economic and contractual dimension of producing a participatory art project and engaging participants will be discussed separately in

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Typology of Participatory Art relation to works in other categories in the chapter about contracts. Here it is enough to say that, aside from money, there are other motives for participation and engagement in sometimes strenuous labour or for being reduced to an object. Simply contributing to art – doing it for art’s sake – is occasionally mentioned as a motivation for participating in Tunick’s projects, but the main reason and the most important compensation for the participation is the experience, the sensation of being involved in something beyond the everyday. The experience is objectively exceptional: being among a crowd of thousands of naked people on a public square is something that unbalances everyday existence and contradicts normal impulses of behaviour. Standing side by side, a few inches apart, from unknown people and possibly some acquaintances, stripped of all social trappings and facade, is a situation in which habitual ways of communicating and socialising do not apply and no alternative is ready at hand.139 ‘Experience’ is also the incentive used when marketing and recruiting people for projects140 and is in general part of the economic logic of the cultural industry.141 Experience is used here as a means of exchange. There may be other personal motives involved too. Two young artistactivists infiltrated one of Beecroft’s projects with the intention of sabotaging it. They were annoyed by the objectifying manner in which the artist treats women. In the end, they aborted the plan but stayed nevertheless, partly for the monetary recompense for their strenuous work and partly for a kind of solidarity that was built between the participants during the experience, which this time was far from pleasant: The further Cassils and Leary went along in the process of VB46 production, the less possible a direct intervention in the live performance seemed. The trauma and exhaustion of the days of shooting, the discipline imposed on the group, the sense of solidarity with the other models, and the undeniable financial imperative (fees for each model being raised to $2,900 with the addition of overtime by the end of the second shooting day) forced consideration of less direct but possibly more complex responses to Beecroft’s work in the form of writing and artistic production.142

Instead, they decided to collect information and document their experience. Their report about the process gives an example of the sort 63

The Participator in Contemporary Art of personal agendas the participants may have and which mainly remain hidden from the public. As an exchange for money or experience, what most of these projects demand is physical labour or other heightened bodily presence: bodily work is brought into the realm of aesthetics and the spectacular, and turned into symbolic production. It is noteworthy that the projects using participants as material almost as a rule operate in the sphere of visibility: they place people on stage and expose them to spectators without giving them an opportunity to express themselves verbally or use their voice.143 Projects that are made in collaboration with participants (‘Co-creators’), on the contrary, often grant them a platform to use their voice both in the symbolic sense – to express their opinions – as well as literally – to be heard speaking or singing (discussed in the next section). For some, such as Ukeles, visibility is a positive aspect: it brings the hidden, unnoticed sanitation work into the open and credits it as important. For others, visibility is more suspicious. Peggy Phelan points out the ambivalent consequences of visibility and how it is prone to control. For her, the ‘usual traps of visibility’ are surveillance, fetishism, voyeurism and the colonialist appetite for possession.144 These were definitively the issues that Fusco and Gomez-Peña were struggling with, both deliberately and unexpectedly. Sierra’s project at the Venice Biennale in 2001 is a powerful case for the visual as a method of control: the artist bleached the hair of illegal street vendors, mostly of North African and Asian origin, making them stand out from the crowd in the streets of Venice (133 Persons Paid to Have their Hair Dyed Blond). This same technique is used by the police and border control to enable them to spot more easily trespassers who have previously been caught. The persons have no voice but are visually singled out for attention. On a less ‘agonistic’ visual level, Tunick’s models are his colours and on his website, where it is possible to register as a volunteer for upcoming projects, people are asked to choose from a colour chart a sample matching their own skin tone, hence to some extent to objectify themselves for him.145

Nudities The object position of bodies, and the significance of visibility, brings up nudity as a special aspect in this group. Nudity epitomises the position of the ‘material’ as being exposed, and it therefore deserves special attention.

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Typology of Participatory Art An image of a large group of naked people in an urban square has hardly any points of reference to everyday life. A crowd standing in a public place, all facing the same direction, could resemble a concert audience or a mass protest or demonstration. The fact of being naked, however, obliterates these connotations. A gathering of a nudist community, on the other hand, would be a more social event and not take this rigid form. The only associations that come to mind are images of extreme humiliation and submission.146 None of the people participating in Tunick’s photographs would have any previous experience to compare it with. The precariousness of the situation itself is not diminished by the fact that it is performed voluntarily and under safe and controlled circumstances. Tunick’s nude projects manage to touch on what sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann call ‘primary socialisation’. Socialisation, according to them, is a two-step process by which the individual becomes a member of the society. The primary socialisation takes place in childhood and happens through the ‘significant others’ of the child. It becomes the very foundation of the social individual. The secondary socialisation is learned at school, in training and specific rituals. It is based on the social division of labour and includes the acquisition of role-specific knowledge. Primary socialisation is emotionally charged and much less flexible than secondary socialisation, which can be changed or modified.147 Issues regulated by secondary socialisation can be negotiated, and the individual understands that they could be arranged differently. Therefore, even if certain dress codes may seem fixed, it would take less convincing for someone to change them than to abandon garments altogether. Matters of primary socialisation, on the contrary, are ‘felt’ to be right or wrong, they have to be as they are, and any breach of them is controlled by feelings of shame and embarrassment. Violating these principles arouses strong emotions and is experienced as potentially dangerous and threatening, both to the individual and to the social order. They are hence socially conditioned, but psychologically grounded. Avoiding public nudity is one of the things conditioned by primary socialisation. It challenges the deeper level of socialisation, not just social rules and conventions. This is the main fascination of Tunic’s projects for the participants, the thousands and thousands of people who year after year take part in the events. Tunick manages to do the impossible: the projects allow for public nudity in public places. The experience of participating in a Tunick shoot

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The Participator in Contemporary Art writes itself in the sphere of other extreme experiences, such as a bungee jump – it is a social bungee. The online material describing participation in Tunick’s projects is a testimony to the participants’ exalted feelings. It is not rare to find the experience described as ‘once-in-a-lifetime or the best experience in my life’.148 Vanessa Beecroft (see Figure 2.12) also uses naked people as the material of her work but in her case, the live performance is a work in its own right; her photographs are not only a documentation of the event but shot in a studio and exhibited and sold as separate artworks. From the secondary, non-participating audience’s viewpoint, the balance between the production of the work and the encounter with the audience is different from Tunick’s and the outcome, a live performance, comes close to the intervention (Group 1, ‘Target’). Despite the different approach, and because of it, it is interesting to compare Beecroft to Tunick’s project with regard to the theme of nudity. In Beecroft’s art, the nude models are selected for their physical features. The way they are staged is almost the opposite of Tunick’s installation: the young women stand on high heeled shoes and often wear another garment or accessory such as a cap or tights, underlining their

Figure 2.12

Vanessa Beecroft, VB46, 2001, Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles.

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Typology of Participatory Art nudity and femininity, whereas the masses of naked people of both sexes and all sizes and forms in Tunick’s work have no props. They are present as they are. Beecroft’s models adhere to a kind of uniformity, sometimes enhanced by identical wigs, heavily made up. Like Tunick, she uses skin colour as in a painting.149 Tunick works in open public space, while Beecroft’s nudes stay indoors and, more specifically, mostly in spaces confined to art. The main difference is that Beecroft’s ‘girls’, as she calls them, are physically present in the same space as the viewers. They do not, however, make eye contact with the audience but rather give an impression of total indifference. They are under control and obey strict rules: no talking, no moving around, only certain moves and positions are allowed. Condemned to many hours of silence and immobility, they are objectified as targets of uninhibited observation. The setting also links them to the tradition of performance as endurance: standing for hours on high heels eventually takes its toll, the models start to show signs of exhaustion and pain, and the ordered composition starts to crumble in front of the audience. The experience of participating in the two projects is totally different. Whereas a report of a shoot for Beecroft testifies to physical and psychological agony and pain,150 Tunick’s performers publish exalted accounts of enjoyment and excitement.151 The differences between these approaches may be further examined when scrutinised as processes and networks rather than as actions of separate individuals (artist, participants, viewers). This shift of attention brings forth the interdependences of the actors and their positions in wider networks. Nudity is a social issue. In the western world, in the latter part of the twentieth century social norms and rules of behaviour concerning nudity have become firmly internalised and sanctioned through feelings of shame and embarrassment, and learned by each individual in early childhood.152 People participating in Tunick’s shoots transgress the prohibition developed over the centuries. This, however, is only possible under special conditions. The situation has to be bracketed metaphorically: as art; and concretely: as severed from the normal course of life (taking place at dawn, closed to the public and protected by guards). There is also no immediate audience, in contrast to Beecroft’s performances. Tunick’s audiences are faced with an image, a photographic representation; the viewers of Beecroft’s performances have to position themselves in relation to real people.

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The Participator in Contemporary Art Beecroft’s displays of nudes, however, seem to be mediated through images, a myriad visual representations. In a sense, they are not naked persons directly present in front of the audience but clad in nudity, transmitted by classical paintings and countless media images. The models in Beecroft’s installations are more related to other nudes in art than to real naked people.153 The scene also resembles advertisement and fashion photography, and fashion designers in actual fact provide Beecroft with clothes and accessories. Beecroft’s art operates at least as much in the realm of visual representation as in the live situation. The impression of the girls being not ‘present’ but ‘an image’ is enhanced by the unfocused look in their eyes (Beecroft wants them to look hypnotised) and their made-up faces and oiled or powdered bodies. Paradoxically, Beecroft’s installations are hyperreal images, images rendered present and live; Tunick’s photos, on the contrary, are human presence rendered into images. It is pictorial nudity versus social nakedness. Beecroft’s ‘tableaux vivants’ use and ‘overuse’ some of the omnipresent sexually laden media imagery of women as objects of the gaze. The models are deliberately sexual beings; their femininity accentuated with high heels and hair-dos, and wearing only a top and no bottom, or vice versa, highlights the nudity and gives it a sexual nature. The setting also allows staring: the close proximity to the models give free range for the spectator’s curiosity and desire, the girls are staged just for that, and they serve as a spectacle. At the same time, through exaggeration, they expose the prevailing spectator – object relationship as such. Tunick’s performances do not produce a spectacle or, at least, not a live but a deferred spectacle. The situations of the shoot are designed to overcome the shame related to nudity. Beecroft, on the contrary, says her intention is to arouse embarrassment; her performances underline it and make people confront it.154 The bodies present in Tunick’s projects are not, at least not primarily, sexual.155 The situation would be different if there were spectators on site. The presence of some press already presents a serious threat in this direction. The few journalists and photographers cause a tension that risks breaching the artificial enclosure and absorbing the situation back to normal life.156 Tunick’s shoot creates a situation where normal rules, such as the observational mode, are suspended.

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Conclusion Norbert Elias, talking about power as a structural characteristic of all human relationships, points out that the greater the power imbalance, the more stable the setting and the more predictable the outcome. In a game, the stronger player or team has the control not only over the other, the weaker, but also over the entire game and can influence the whole dynamics and even the rules. In more equal settings (less power imbalance) there is more space for unpredictability.157 It is therefore not surprising that projects which choose environments of sharp social inequalities as their backdrop or unfold in the realm of an imbalanced global economy, are likely to produce relatively predictable and stable outcomes. These asymmetrical positions are the condition in which it is possible, in the first place, to stage a homeless person as a species in a zoo or young naked women as a live fashion ad. Even when objectification happens in mutual understanding and with consenting adults, it takes place in a power structure that sets limits to consent. The works in the ‘Material’ group use such relations and moments of power disparity and vulnerability, or create them deliberately. The actors in these ‘figurations’, to use Elias’ term, are interdependent and in relation to each other and to the whole. Their existence and actions would not be understood without seeing the whole pattern. In Tunick’s project, the ‘border control’ staff – the security guards, the accident and emergency team, the traffic control patrols – all are constitutive of the community of naked people. The participating people in turn justify the existence of the guardians of order, and mark the outlines of the standard society. In Sierra’s case, the networks extend to the producing institution and art institution at large, and to society and its legislation over its citizens (in terms of how domicile and homelessness are regulated). This network aspect will be further explored in the next chapter. In the ‘User’ group, Latour’s concept ‘actant’ served as a tool to describe the connections between the various participants, human or non-human. In this group, it can help understand the interchangeability of object – subject positions and the aspects of social and object relations. The actornetwork theory does not make a difference between humans and objects and sees each element – everyone and everything – as a networked entity in itself. In an actor-network context it makes perfect sense to see a human

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The Participator in Contemporary Art as an object and material in an artwork. ANT also understands these relationships as reciprocal. The network perspective will also be relevant in the next group, ‘Cocreator’. The feature that sets the ‘Material’ group apart from ‘Co-creator’ is the lack of agency on the participants’ side; in the next group the pattern is different as the participants are granted more independence. This causes complexities in terms of the authorship of the projects, and affects the contracts that are forged between the actors. The position of the spectators is different from the previous groups. There is no chance (or risk) of becoming a participator as with the ‘User’ group or even more so as a ‘Target’; the role of the spectator is more that of a witness. Their function in the figuration is nevertheless essential: they are the audience the events are staged for. In a live situation, such as Person in the Ditch, they are constitutive parts of the set-up: they mark the social power structure in an embodied form. The idea of witness is particularly pertinent to Tino Sehgal’s works which are not documented and hence have no permanent afterlife: they can be recalled only by the testimonies of those present.

Group 4, Co-Creator The final category of participation investigates works that rely on people’s active participation and collaboration in the creation of the work. Participants are expected not just to be present but also to bring their own initiatives and ideas into play and to contribute to the content of the work. Artists set the scene and the rules, but the content is to a large extent determined and produced by the participants. As with the ‘User’ group, works in this category function as platforms for people to do things, but this time the process mostly takes place behind the scenes and the outcome is presented to the public in a separate form (video, performance, installation or other form of documentation), or, if the participants are present in the exhibit, it is a prepared contribution, not a spontaneous decision as in the ‘User’ group. The focus is on the process; hence the prototype of this form of participation is a workshop. Contrary to people as ‘Material’, in this group the participants are encouraged and expected to produce content and the artists give away part of their decision-making power over the final outcome of the work; rather than 70

Typology of Participatory Art making a finished product, artists initiate processes and provide others with the space and means to do things. The Complaints Choir (see Figure 2.13) by artist-duo Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen consists of an invitation to people to submit complaints on their chosen topics, which are then collectively made into a song and performed by the participants. The performance is documented on a video, which is shown in exhibitions. The project has been realised in many cities. In addition, the artists have given an open ‘licence’ for any other people to create their own choirs and to upload the resulting videos on the official Complaints Choir website. Kochta and Kalleinen have arranged ten choirs and since 2006 more than 70 Do-ItYourself Complaints Choirs have been organised all around the world.158 The actual production of a Complaints Choir starts with an open invitation for people to take part in the project by submitting complaints about anything they want and signing up for the workshops and performance to sing their complaints out together with fellow complainers. The project is open to everybody and no singing skills are required. The call is distributed through flyers, posters, press releases, websites and mailing lists. The performance is produced in workshop sessions over a period of two or three weeks. In the first meeting the participants get to know each other and start working with the text material. The artists have worked through all the complaints and grouped them into categories that emerge from them (recurrent ones being, among others, city, neighbours, work, technology, global issues). Participants are asked to choose the topic that interests them most and to form smaller working groups. In groups, the participants choose which complaints end up in the final song and how they are arranged. Complaints can be rearranged, combined and edited to rhyme or to fit the structure. Some new material may even emerge during the process. In the end, the groups read out the result to others. The material is given to a composer who turns it into a song in the time between the sessions. The next meetings are devoted to rehearsing the song, which takes between three to five rehearsals. During the rehearsal sessions, the participants also discuss and decide about any practical issues that come up and, among other things, about the places where the live performances will take place. Each meeting finishes with a shared meal.

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Figure 2.13 Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, Helsinki Complaints Choir, 2006.

Typology of Participatory Art The song is then performed, first in the main venue and after that preferably several times, unannounced, in other public places in the city, depending on the location and the arrangements with the organising institution. All the performances are recorded on video. The postproduction is made by the artists; they edit the sound and film footage from different performances into a video film that is shown in exhibitions and published online. This general process is explained also in the Complaints Choir website.159 The artists created the site when the success of the concept led them to a situation where they were not able to respond to the high number of demands to produce choirs. They decided, instead, to encourage people to form their own choirs: to organise workshops, produce the song, perform and record it. The website provides clear instructions for how to run the process in nine steps, and an online platform for publishing the results. All the choirs by Kochta and Kalleinen are organised in collaboration with a local partner: a museum, festival or other institution. Preproduction always includes employing a local composer who will write the melody and direct the rehearsal process, as well as a list of practical arrangements for the production, from advertising and promoting the project, to providing venues and facilities for catering. Voracidad Maxima (2003; see Figure 2.14) by another artist-duo, Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg, is a work about and produced with male sexual workers in Barcelona, the so-called ‘chaperos’ (hustlers).160 Dias & Riedweg contacted 18 chaperos of whom 11 confirmed their participation and with whom the artists conducted interviews. The six to 16-hour interview sessions took place in an apartment of the Barrio Chino, a former working-class district and one of the areas of prostitution in Barcelona. The work was commissioned by Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Macba), which is located in the same area. The interviews were recorded on a bed, placed between two parallel mirrors, in one bedroom. The artists talk with the men in their ‘working clothes’ – white bathrobes – lying on the same bed. During the video recordings, the participants wore latex masks cast of the artists’ faces: the interviewee was wearing the interviewer’s identity, either Dias or Riedweg. The chaperos were paid what they would be paid per hour (for sex), the artist in this way taking the place of a client. The masked face of the interviewee was hence reflecting not only an individual but also the position of a client.

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Figure 2.14

Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg, Voracidad Maxima, 2003.

The artists call this and similar settings ‘staged encounters’. This is one of the methods the artists use to create an encounter to share time and presence with people that they would not normally spend time with in their everyday lives.161 The two-part term refers to both conscious artificiality and real encounters, and is thus suggestive of sociological or anthropological debates on the impact that different research methods have on the research subject and on the information gained. With these settings, they want to avoid making a representation of a group of people but instead construct a platform for people to present themselves.162 In Voracidad Maxima the artists were lending their face for the voice of the other to be heard. The idea of ‘staging’ seems logical also against Riedweg’s background in performing arts – music and theatre more specifically – as a means of producing situations. Some of the outcomes of their work take the form of a performance presented through video, such as Beautiful is also that which is unseen (2002) in which as part of the installation a blind woman reads Homer and Borges on the steps of the National Library in Rio de Janeiro; another projection in this installation includes the visitors in the spectacle by reflecting a delayed shot of them on one of the screens. 74

Typology of Participatory Art The ages of the participants in Voracidad Maxima vary from 21 to 38 years, they are from South American and Caribbean countries, and have various levels of education. In the resulting videos, they talk about their background, family life, homeland, education and their decision to emigrate; about the discovery of their own sexuality, their first sexual experience and their sexuality at present, their way into prostitution; they talk about the relationship between prostitution and their other ambitions, sexual practice and sexual fantasy, their plans, their dreams, and their daily life. The work is presented as an interactive two-screen video installation, where the viewer can choose the interviews he or she wants to see. The interview scenes are interspersed with close-ups of the interlocutors’ bodies. The work also comes in a CD with the catalogue.

Historical Connections Art that is created with non-artists and allows participants’ active input in the work bears a close connection to collective social art production and to community art tradition. The year 1995 saw the appearance of four books and one exhibition publication, dealing with issues of art and the public, compiled and edited by five women in the USA.163 They all trace back in time the development and signposts of art in a social context and public participation in art. As one of the writers, Nina Felshin, remarks, this abundance of publishing and other attention in the form of exhibitions, seminars and funding opportunities, is a sign of coming of age of the art that the publications deal with, thus an outcome of a longer development in time; it is the moment when this art becomes established and, perhaps, even institutionalised.164 In her book Mapping the Terrain. New Genre Public Art, Suzanne Lacy derives the roots of artistic participation from the site-specific public art of the 1980s supported by the Art in Public Places Program at the National Endowment for the Arts.165 She traces back in time the development of art in public places, and sees the new art forms, which she names ‘new genre public art’, as a change towards interaction and engagement. The ‘new’ aspect is the move from ‘art in public places’ to ‘art in the public interest’,166 characterised by collaborative methods, relevance for communities and common interests with leftist politics and social activism. The new genre public art was meant to distance itself from object-based public

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The Participator in Contemporary Art art (‘plop art’ or ‘turd in a plaza’ as it was named)167 and install a more socially aware type of public art. Lacy is presented in other publications as one of the pioneers of the new art, and is also included in the compendium of more than 80 artists in her own book.168 In her texts Lacy endeavours to develop a new language for new art; her starting point is the artist’s position and the transition she sees in it from autonomy towards engagement. Lacy sees the roots of audiences’ engagement in movements such as feminist, ethnic and Marxist activism.169 Some writers trace the genealogy of art as a social force back to the New Deal art programmes of the 1930s that were created for unemployed artists, defined as workers.170 Putting art to practical use and the ethos of social change and activism, particularly murals as a public art form, gained recognition again in the 1980s, when the new notion of public art developed from object-based works towards collective and participatory forms.171 In Britain, a distinctive feature in community arts, closely linked with architecture and urban regeneration, was the introduction of the concept of town artists. The first town artist to be appointed in 1968 was David Harding in Glenrothes, Scotland. He was hired to participate in the development of the new town as a member of the Planning Department, directly involved in planning, urban design and architecture. He defines ‘town artist’: A town artist I believed had to be a contributing member of the planning department of a town, collaborating with the various design teams and be engaged on a long-term and full-time basis. This was not the artist as consultant nor, what was soon to be described as, the ‘artist-in-residence’. This was the artist as a fully-functioning member of the staff employed to design and build a town.172

Harding describes how his own creative work and the collaboration with the planning team and inhabitants were, at first, two separate things but later became one.173 He visited Chicago and Los Angeles in 1975 –76 and got acquainted with the community mural movement. Another important connection and a source of inspiration for Harding was the Artist Placement Group (APG), a project initiated by Barbara Steveni and John Latham in the late 1960s. APG placed artists with various organisations in the private and public sectors, and also with government departments. According to APG’s concept, artists could bring their creativity to bear on 76

Typology of Participatory Art policy and planning. In the role of an ‘incidental person’, artists could bring new insights to institutions and communities.174 Other towns and artists followed; they were located in new towns, places with no history or identity. During the 1970s and early 1980s, community art became well established in British cultural policy, to the point that, as Owen Kelly regrets in 1984, it was turned from activism to ‘welfare arts’ and tamed by an ‘addiction’ for Arts Council grants.175 The understanding of the term ‘public art’ as sculpture and objects in a public space, however, was persistent.176 On the educational side, the activity led to the establishment of the first course in Art and Social Context at Dartington College of Arts (in 1978 – 85 led by David Harding). Projects Environment, which since the 1990s worked under the name Littoral, was another early group of artists working in community arts practice. The term ‘littoral’ was developed by Ian Hunter and Celia Larner to describe art practices that are located on the edge of or in-between established fields of art, social and political worlds.177 The artists, who worked in community art centres, led a collective mural painting, practised as town artists or in other ways worked with non-artists, shifted the idea of the artist from a studio-based creator towards a facilitator or coordinator. It is a clear departure from the modernist concept of the artist and also in opposition to the role of the artist in the previous section, ‘Material’, where the artist maintains the control of the creative process. Creating art together with non-artists and facilitating a process for others to produce content, necessitates new methods of artistic production and entails a change in the role of the artist in society. Besides organised community art production or artist groups, there are a number of individual artists who have engaged other people in the creation of the artwork and given them plenty of leeway to influence the outcome. Since the late 1960s Stephen Willats has produced extended projects working with residents of public housing estates across Europe. His research-based projects are concerned with social interaction; developed in collaboration with the public, they produce visual narratives of the lives of the participants.178 Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison are regularly mentioned as pioneers of collaborative, socially (and environmentally) aware arts. They work in specific locations in collaboration with local activists and policy makers and call their method ‘conversational drift’.179 During the late 1960s and early 1970s David Medalla made a series of works

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The Participator in Contemporary Art where the audience was encouraged to be involved in the production of playful and experiential pieces. A Stitch in Time involves the audience sewing small objects of significance onto a large cloth in a public space. Medalla described the piece as ‘participation–production–propulsion’.180 Tim Rollins is a modern pioneer of the collective production of work with non-artist participants. The story of Rollins and the Kids of Survival is well documented;181 contrary to most of the above-mentioned artists or groups, they have been highly successful also in the mainstream art scene and the art market.182 Suzanne Lacy, besides being an advocate of socially engaged participation, is herself an artist working in this genre. She and other artists working in the 1980s are models for the participatory works in the 1990s and the new millennium. The Roof is on Fire in 1994, organised by Lacy, brought together young people to discuss racial prejudice that they encountered and, in a follow-up project Code 33, young people discussed the same matters with the police. To a large extent, early collaborations with audiences were organised as part of a social framework (the New Deal artists, town artists). Individual, independent artists who decided to work in this way in the late 1960s and 1970s, such as Willats or Medalla, were isolated pioneers compared to the upsurge of collective and participatory art in the 1990s. What connects them to the present day is the process by which the participants produce the content without being precisely directed or controlled by the artist. The artist provides the environment and the means of production, sets the parameters and gives broad instructions. Often the production takes place in a workshop situation or is connected to educational goals, as with for instance Rollins. A distinct feature of this category, as opposed to the previous one, is that the boundaries between the roles of the artists and the participants get blurred. It is still, however, the artist’s role to make decisions about the extent to which the participants’ input counts as art and whether the documentation has the status of artwork or not (as will be discussed in the next chapter about networks). The challenge of showcasing projects created in collaboration with non-artist participants is to negotiate the balance or the tension between the process and the outcome. Community art projects do not necessarily need an audience at all: the immediate participants are also the audience. Some projects, such as Willats’ for example, are presented to a secondary

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Typology of Participatory Art audience through documentation, which may consist of photographs and videos produced by the artist or an external person or work produced by the participants themselves. The line between the documentation of a process and the final artwork may be thin, and presenting art produced by non-artist participants may result in conflicts of quality norms.183 Curated projects and works created in an exhibition or biennial context obviously are built with the idea of presentation in mind from the start. Even then, however, the participants’ experience can be very different from that of the spectators of the final work, to whom the process remains to a large extent invisible. Art presented in the ‘User’ group has a counterpart in curating: the construction of ‘platforms’ as an exhibition model. In a similar way, the ‘Co-creator’ group is connected to a curatorial approach that corresponds to the process-oriented method and to social engagement with a locality or a group of people. A pioneer of this practice, Mary Jane Jacob, started operating first within museums and then independently outside institutions. Her approach provided an alternative to socially oriented projects that were run by community organisations and to directly artistled projects. Culture in Action in 1993 in Chicago, which Grant Kester calls a landmark in this practice,184 was based on collaboration with local communities, and the invited artists worked from the beginning in contact with the public. Collaborative projects often take place outside museums, whether they are organised by museums or by independent curators or small organisations. Lately, artist residency programmes have provided a production framework for artistic collaborations with local people. In museums, contacts with communities have since the 1990s been developed also or mainly through education departments and their various outreach programmes that also often employ artists. This has created a situation in which it is not always possible to tell from a project’s outcome whether it is produced on the curatorial or educational department’s initiative (the changing professional roles are discussed in the next chapter).

Theoretical Underpinnings For many, this is the only ‘proper’ participatory art: art that is built on a process that genuinely listens to the participants’ voices, relies on their

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The Participator in Contemporary Art creative contribution and respects their needs at least as much as those of the artist. This is the only group that would rank high in the Ladder of Citizen Participation, a model often used to describe levels of participation in society, originally published in 1969 by Sherry Arnstein (see Figure 2.15). In the ladder, participation is arranged into eight rungs, from manipulation through versions of tokenism to real citizen control,

Figure 2.15

Sherry Arnstein, Ladder of Citizen Participation, 1969.185

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Typology of Participatory Art corresponding to the extent of citizens’ power in determining the end product. In this model, the aim is to progress and finally reach the top of the ladder, thus defining the lower steps as failures or still lacking in the right kind of participation. This view is reflected in the discussion on art that tends to equate the amount of public participation and the degree of democracy with the quality of the project. One of the most active theorists of art as co-creation has been Grant Kester. His central concept is ‘dialogical art’, a term that he borrows from Mikhail Bakhtin.186 For Kester, art is looking for models of communication187 (instead of new forms of sociability as suggested by Bourriaud). The title of his book is Conversation Pieces, in order to underline, as he explains, the interactive character of the projects. To outline his case, Kester opposes dialogical art practices to the modernist approach, which he defines either as hermetic abstract art or as avant-garde built on producing a shock effect on the viewer. He dismisses this as disruptive, unproductive and sensational.188 This mode of art, Kester explains, is based on ‘orthopaedic aesthetic’ – a belief that the viewer suffers a lack or a need that the artist and the artwork correct.189 The dialogical mode, on the contrary, is a process-led rather than a product-led form of production, and based on an encounter and interaction between the artist and the people with whom he or she works. The art project is created in dialogue with the community within which the work is produced.190 Unlike Bourriaud, Kester is not interested in the formal conditions of encounter but instead underlines the importance of aesthetic experience.191 Building on Jürgen Habermas’ concept of discursive forms of communication, Kester describes projects by artists such as Stephen Willats, Suzanne Lacy and, more contemporary, WochenKlausur and Jay Koh as processes in which a discourse is not merely a channel to transmit information already formed by independent subjects but a process through which content is produced in dialogue.192 Here Kester also diverts from Habermas in that, according to his own account, he thinks it is essential to expand (verbal) argumentation with empathy and listening in the dialogical or discursive interaction.193 At the heart of Kester’s approach is the critique of the artist as the sole source of content and as an individual creator. The image of the artist is founded on openness and sharing rather than expressing or producing, and the artist’s capacity to listen is more important than making statements.194

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The Participator in Contemporary Art With this, Kester comes close to Suzi Gablik’s shift from eye to ear: her ‘connective aesthetics’ is ‘listener-centred rather than vision-oriented’ and is based on empathy and ‘the intertwining of self and Other’.195 Gablik contrasts modernism’s spectacle and heightened individualism with empathy, listening, healing and feminine values. She is critical of the individualistic notion of the subject both in psychotherapy and in art, and rejects modernism as isolationist, alienated art, calling for an awareness of art’s social role, a new sense of community, a collective sensibility and an ecological perspective.196 Kester calls ‘textual’ an approach by which the artist creates a work autonomously and offers it to the public, as opposed to the dialogical and collaborative approach to creation.197 In dialogical art, the artists are context providers, not content providers.198 Kester goes as far as considering collective and collaborative projects as a new paradigm.199 Although Kester asserts that artists refrain from defining the content of art projects, he favours socially engaged art focusing on specified issues, such as artists and groups who work with environmentalists, AIDS activists, trade unions and anti-globalisation movements; often participatory art is assessed pragmatically as straightforward problem solving. Collective production, however, does not necessarily have social amelioration as its goal. Projects such as the Complaints Choir do not have open instrumental goals other than transforming something negative, complaining, into positive energy. Even Voracidad Maxima does not set out to improve the conditions of the ‘chaperos’; it simply brings them into public view. Dias & Riedweg are adamant that their work ‘does not aim to judge, classify, teach, cure, improve or even change anything in the Other’s life’.200 The idea of social aims, however, is never completely out of sight, particularly as ‘participatory art’ as a term has a somewhat confusing range of reference. Aside from independent artist-led forms of art, it may also refer to art or activity run by specific organisations. Helix Arts in the UK, for example, is an organisation that locates its work in the ‘participatory arts sector’. Further to this somewhat administrative definition of the field, the organisation nominates the ‘community arts sector’ as its forerunner and recognises Kester’s work as a theoretical foundation for the activity. The activity leans toward the social, and the organisation defines its participants by stating that ‘we work exclusively with the most disadvantaged and

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Typology of Participatory Art marginalised people’.201 This is participatory art as social work, which approaches collaboration differently from artist-initiated participatory projects. Kester also compares the roles and work of a community artist and a social worker and sees many similarities, although he is critical of the moral undertones of welfare policy and the risk of community artists falling back on the model of artistic identity as an authority that would allow them to speak on behalf of others.202 It is the ‘sector art’ approach that, at least in part, explains the clear hostility among some critics and curators towards community or dialogical art.203 Claire Bishop has taken a firm position against art that fulfils social criteria. She claims that following the social turn in art, there has been an ethical turn in criticism, and that not enough consideration has been paid to relational projects as art, only as politics. She associates Kester with the ethical turn, which replaces artistic value with social and moral criteria.204 Bishop advocates challenge and confrontation as central elements in participatory art, as we saw in the previous chapter. At times, artists’ works are praised for not being (banal) participatory art. Catherine David, for example, notes approvingly how Dias and Riedweg’s art ‘exceeds and subverts the limits of “public art” [. . .] which professed to control and discipline unprivileged groups’. She goes on to quote Maureen Sherlock describing ‘community-based art’ as ‘government “pacification/reservation” programs’.205 There is a strong need to differentiate artist-led projects from politically motivated social programmes, which understand communities within the framework of top-down inclusion agendas, regeneration and social impact. The sore point is the understanding of ‘community’. The above communitarian or managerial approaches classify communities according to fixed criteria such as a shared geography and location, social and economic class, political affiliation or identity defined by culture, ethnicity, gender or religion. Miwon Kwon provides one critical account of community-based public art, founded on a critique of the concept of community. She sees new genre public art as a new form and an extension of site specificity and public art: as ‘community-specific’ art.206 She challenges the bureaucratic definition of community, in which community is always defined around a social problem and which moves artistic practice towards social services.207 Kester is aware of the risk of patronising, and warns against ‘delegation’, but he

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The Participator in Contemporary Art nevertheless challenges Kwon and defends the existence of ‘politically coherent communities’, collective identities, solidarity and empathetic identification.208 When considerable sums of money are distributed to art through social programmes, artists are put in a position where they are pulled between artistic integrity and demands from the funder.209 Artists, however, are mostly aware and critical of the pitfalls of managerial agendas and use the community approach consciously. For Tania Bruguera and the Immigrant Movement International, for example, the choice of working with nondocumented immigrants, their descendants and the Latino neighbourhood in Queens New York, is a clear political act and against the political status quo. Similarly, Jeanne van Heeswij’s project 2Up 2Down, created for the Liverpool Biennial in 2012, worked against the politically led and economically motivated gentrification programme Housing Market Renewal.210 ‘Community’, therefore, can be a critical concept as well as used instrumentally. For that reason it is not a productive concept for the typology and does not define the ‘Co-creator’ category. Whether understood as a predetermined and fairly defined concept or as a temporary or nascent community, it does not condition the models of participation and the relationship between the artist and the participants or between participants, which are the main focus of this investigation. As opposed to the previous group in which people are abstracted or typified samples of a larger crowd, these works present individuals and very personal experiences. They start from a micro-social level and expose intimate relationships played out against a macro-social framework. Both Sierra and Dias & Riedweg employ ‘marginal’ people, but their use of them could hardly be more different. While in Sierra’s works prostitutes are staged as material, in Voracidad Maxima they are shown as individuals with names and personal stories, needs and desires; Sierra’s immigrants are staged as examples of a category, whereas in Dias & Riedweg’s Innendienst or Inside & Outside the Tube (1988) they tell their stories which are transmitted to the public through a sound installation in various parts of the town.211 Similarly, both artists work with street vendors, but when Sierra exposes them to attention by bleaching their hair, Dias & Riedweg conduct interviews in which the vendors talk about themselves (Mera Vista Point 2002).212

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Typology of Participatory Art Of the four groups, this one is the only one that adheres to the hierarchical model of participation (ladder), in which the participants are active contributors and in which a high level of autonomy is the goal. Seen from this point of view, art forms that operate in ‘relational’ (‘User’) or ‘antagonistic’ (‘Material’) modes seem unsuccessful. Kester describes how, in the works that Bourriaud favours, the artist retains the control and the participant’s role is defined in advance; this description is accurate, but for him it is a shortcoming.213 Rirkrit Tiravanija, who is one of the main artists that in Bourriaud’s account create important moments of encounter and interaction, is accused by Kester of ignoring the local social reality.214 And vice versa: despite their mutual disagreements, neither Bourriaud nor Bishop appreciate socially engaged art. For example, in her genealogy of participatory art, Bishop does not explore the history of community art or mention artists like David Harding.215 The discourses simply do not meet. Kester claims that contemporary participatory art is so different from traditional art that techniques from social science, such as fieldwork and the participant-observer method, are needed for its study.216 Though he is talking as a researcher, the methods he refers to resemble the methods used by the artists in creating their projects. As with the interventions in the ‘Target’ group, the artists set up a framework to gather material, although instead of analysing it they simply present it in the form of an artwork. Some of the co-created works would in themselves provide material for sociological research. The complaints in the Complaints Choirs from different cities in the world present a distilled body of observations that is relevant to the local context and the specific life worlds of the inhabitants of those places but also similarities on the level of categories of topics (such as neighbours or traffic). Voracidad Maxima displays the individual experiences of a group of people united by their socio-economic situation. The chaperos’ accounts provide insights into power relations that govern the positions between the sexual workers and their clients – an area particularly difficult to study objectively because of its clandestine nature. Both these projects are qualitative material that could be either compared and analysed as such or combined with quantitative information. This is not done by the artists. Instead, in terms of knowledge production, Kester claims that aesthetic experience as such produces knowledge:217 it is then the viewer’s task to draw conclusions and determine the ‘results’.

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The Participator in Contemporary Art Another feature that demarcates the two modes of participation, ‘Material’ and ‘Co-creator’, is their use of photography. In the ‘Material’ group people are usually presented in a frontal pose, looking at the camera and clearly aware of being photographed but frozen in a still and passive stance. Alternatively, as with Sierra, the photograph aims to convey a documentary snapshot, as if the subject was caught unaware and in action. In ‘Co-creator’ and community projects, on the other hand, if they work in the photographic medium, the projects are constructed collectively and the camera is often handed over to the participators. This is also a frequently used method in collaborative educational or so-called outreach projects. Similarly, in artists’ projects participators are trained in using photographic equipment and create pictures of themselves in their chosen environments. Rather than being the object of photography, the participants assume the role of the subject. The working processes in projects based on an open call and a larger group of volunteers also vary between the groups: in Tunick’s projects people are herded according to the artist’s commands whereas in Complaints Choir they are given a responsible role in the working process. It is the autonomy of the subjects that marks the difference between them, not disparity between the social status of the artist and participants per se. Inequality, if it exists, becomes problematic in different ways in the two groups. In the context of ‘Material’ it revolves around the issue of exploitation: is the artist taking advantage of his or her more powerful position and humiliating the collaborators? In settings where participants are co-creators, the question is often whether, albeit under the guise of good intention, the artist is nevertheless patronising or manipulating his or her co-creators. The other difference between these approaches, as noted in the previous sections, is that people as material are often presented as visual spectacle, but co-creators are often heard and their visual features may even be hidden. A particular feature of ‘Co-creator’ projects is the extended time span that these often require. When the content and the execution are not planned in advance, as they are in the type ‘Material’, just the process of getting the (group of) participants introduced to the artist(s), to each other and to the project takes its time. Preparing the production and generating the content is also a long drawn-out process. A specific workshop format has developed around this type of participatory art.

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Typology of Participatory Art It can consist of drawing mind maps and working in small discussion groups, using scents, images and other materials to provoke memories and conversation, or include participants bringing their own items or family photos and so forth. Dias & Riedweg have used this approach in many of their projects. Their projects come very close to educational workshops in museums. Innendienst, for example, was structured around objects and odours brought by the participating children, which were then used as triggers for associations and memories about their old and new home country. A similar approach was used in the project Question Marks (1996) in two prisons in Atlanta, and in one of their most famous projects Devotionalia (1994 – 2003) with children in a favela of Rio de Janeiro.218 Some of the projects are processes that have lasted for years. The process includes negotiations not only with groups of individuals but with institutional actors: political decision makers, NGOs, administrative bodies – as one artist puts it, ‘being in bed with bureaucracy’.219 The projects deal with wide-ranging issues in urban regeneration or rural village life or social problems; they have an integral connection to many local networks and actors, and consequently to long-term processes. Jeanne van Heeswijk typically works with projects that span several years and grow into a network or self-sustained structure that continues to exist even when the artist is no longer present. The project 2Up 2Down in Liverpool was eventually turned into a cooperative bakery run by a local community.220 Similarly, Bruguera’s Immigrant Movement International is a five-year project, finishing in 2015 and in the end intended to be entirely run by the participants and the community on their own. In art institutions, which often produce participatory projects, dealing with non-professional audiences has for a long time been the domain of educators. It could be said that audience participation has entered museums first through the back door, as part of educational activities.221 Many artists work as educators and the roles overlap or they do not differentiate between the two. Some authors who write about this type of participation make explicit reference to contemporary educational theories which emphasise the active role of the learner in the construction of knowledge and in the process of learning, such as Pablo Helguera writing about socially engaged art and comparing it to Reggio Emilia pedagogy and its active engagement of learners.222 Kester borrows Paulo

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The Participator in Contemporary Art Freire’s concept of ‘banking’ education to describe not education but art and to denote the type of art that he is against: it is art that is given by the artist to the viewer, as opposed to the process-based and dialogical works that he favours.223 Kester and Helguera do not further analyse or develop the educational theories but use them more as a confirmation of the approach already in place. Freire’s liberating and problem-posing pedagogical views are a relevant framework for exploring the projects in the ‘Co-creator’ category. Freire uses the word ‘spectator’ to describe the position of an individual as the target of ‘banking’ education; according to him, learners are (or should be) ‘re-creators’, re-creating knowledge of the world instead of being recipients of it.224 In the same way, the participants in the projects under discussion here are co-creators and not merely spectators. Both teachers and learners – or artists and participants – are subjects, and their work on reality is ‘co-intentional’, as Freire calls it, granting the learner an equal amount of directed intention to re-create the world.225 The ethos of co-creation is shared with the ideas of direct democracy. As opposed to representative democracy, direct democracy involves citizens directly in decision making, not via elected representatives. Citizens are making decisions on matters (vote) not on people (election) and, even more importantly, they are entitled to introduce topics to the agenda to be decided about, and to make the decision.226 Direct democracy is based on shared responsibility and trust in people’s capacity to learn to make informed choices, based on discussion. In a way, all citizens become politicians, and the role of elected (or professional) politicians is to make participation and decision making possible. This type of approach was applied in the process of making the Helsinki Complaints Choir. When questions arose about various aspects of the process – for example suggestions about how to work a certain passage in the song or practical questions about what to wear in the performance, or the colour of the folders for holding the lyrics – the artists directed the question back to the participants, consciously refusing to take responsibility for the decision, and thus relinquishing control of the final product. If a quick solution could not be reached in the plenary, small groups were formed to discuss and decide about the issues. As a significant detail, these groups are called ‘expert teams’ and their use is also included in the DIY instructions.

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Typology of Participatory Art During one of the choir rehearsals, one participant brought out her concern about one verse in the lyrics, where a well-known public person was named and mentioned in a slightly negative light. The matter was briefly discussed and people aired opinions for and against omitting that section from the song. As before, an expert team was formed to deal with the question. Anyone who felt strongly about the matter could join the committee whose task it was to discuss the issue and come to a decision about it, which all the others would then have to respect. Contradictory opinions and conflicts were thus seen as a normal part of the collective process in which a hundred people where engaged in constructing one unified piece of art.227 There is a fair amount of suspicion of lay participation, both in art and in politics. This way of working goes against many people’s idea of an artistic process, and, for that matter, of a collaborative process in general. This could be witnessed in the choir workshops where it was sometimes difficult for people to understand and to accept that the artists did not take the responsibility for dictating decisions but instead asked the participants to negotiate and to come to a conclusion. With the structures that were provided for this to happen (general discussions, expert teams), the artists created a situation in which people were encouraged to take an active role in the shaping of the project. At the same time, the structure had flexibility to accommodate more passive reactions and allowed the people who were happy to follow the flow to remain relatively distanced from the debates. Only those who thought they had an interest at stake or a contribution to make became self-appointed ‘experts’. Jacob and Kester notice a similar suspicion against the nonprofessional viewer in projects, which include material produced by them: the ‘abject and unsophisticated Other’ as Kester calls him or her.228 Antony Gormley’s One & Other (see Figure 5.1), which invited 2,400 members of the public to occupy the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, was frequently described as uninteresting, predictable and boring, among other things, when the contributions of the ‘plinthers’ were compared to professional performance. One & Other and questions of democracy and the disdain for participation are further discussed in the last chapter. Projects in the ‘Material’ category receive less of this type of criticism: the undeniable authority of the artist gives it more credibility in the eyes of the professionals.

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The Participator in Contemporary Art

Conclusion Projects in the ‘Co-creator’ category differ from those in the other categories in the importance that they grant to the participants’ active role in the production. As opposed to the ‘User’ projects, which also rely on active participation, in these projects there is usually a clear separation between the participants and the secondary audience; only a preselected group of people is entitled to take part in the creation process while others are the audience of whatever is produced. This is in common with the previous group, but compared with participants as ‘Material’, ‘Co-creators’ have more influence on the unfolding of the process and its outcome. The specific feature of the ‘Co-creator’ group, the participators’ active input, creates tension in the art world which is to a large extent based on single authorship. Artists adopt a range of solutions in order to acknowledge the participators’ input: in the Complaints Choir, the names of the singers are listed at the end of the video as in the end credits of a film production. In longer projects that evolve over several years, such as Immigrant Movement International, the participators work in teams and the totality of contributors may not even be known at any one moment. In Voracidad Maxima, the identity of the interviewees is kept secret for other reasons. In the final instance, the work always goes under the name of the artist and the rights of the participant are arranged with various contracts, as will be discussed in the chapter about contracts. In conclusion, regarding the theoretical background of the various types of participation, it can now be seen why so much disagreement exists about the function and values of participatory art. The three most prominent writers, Nicolas Bourriaud, Claire Bishop and Grant Kester, come to participatory art from different angles. In the light of this investigation, their positions can be matched with the different groups in the typology. Adhering to differing theoretical and philosophical positions, the three writers find resonance with a specific model of participation, and are hostile to other models. They choose different artists and projects to suit their approaches and correspondingly fail to see value in other types of works. Bourriaud and Bishop do not appreciate socially engaged, activist or community art, and Kester, reciprocally, dismisses relational art and Bishop’s position as ‘textual’, spectacular and imposing preconceived ideas for the consumption of the audience. Bourriaud’s and Bishop’s reference

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Typology of Participatory Art points can be found rather in installation art and contemporary forms of art and art events (interactive and media art, platforms, biennials etc.). According to Bishop ‘relational art works are an outgrowth of installation art’.229 Kester has more references to public art and community participation. He gives an accurate description of relational aesthetics and Bishop’s position – saying that Bourriaud’s projects are structured as events choreographed by the artist, or that in art projects promoted by Bishop, the artist remains as the ultimate control of the artwork – but simply does not agree with these approaches.230 On the other hand, Bourriaud and Kester, as opposed to Bishop, see art as a potentially beneficial ground for constructing relationships between people and creating new models of social interaction. Bishop, for her part, sees this as fake promises of conviviality that ignore the antagonisms and inequality in society. The differing standpoints lead to varying and partly contradictory understandings of aesthetics and politics. There are obviously other writers discussing participatory art, but these three demonstrate well the structure of the positions. In addition, the discussions are in part conditioned by the fact that the writers are engaged in the world they are writing about as practising professionals and thus have vested interests in it. They explicitly take sides for and against certain approaches and artists, to the point of becoming polemic and promotional.231 This also reflects the general situation in contemporary art writing where curating, art criticism and academic research are practised by the same people and in the same forums. To put it roughly, the writers play their artists against those of others and write about artists they also work with and include in their exhibitions. In a sense, each actor has their own ‘stall’ of artists, in the manner of gallerists, although perhaps not as officially. To note this is not to say that the writers would be consciously dishonest or corrupt but simply to point out that they all write from some position that necessarily affects their point of view and approach – it is natural that curators would write about artists they know and work with, and it should be acknowledged that the engagement with the subject allows the writers to talk about it with passion and detailed observations. However, recognition of the lack of distance and the absence of disinterestedness is necessary to guard against any face value readings.

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3 Artwork as a Network

Participation opens up the tripartite setting of artist –object –viewer. There seems to be little point in discussing this type of art as a direct expression of the artist’s subjectivity, nor is it enough to analyse the spectator or observer position alone or in relation to an artwork as if it were an isolated entity. It is the shifting positions of artists, spectators and participators and their interdependencies that are essential in understanding the dynamics of participatory projects. In addition, contrary to the tendency to treat ‘participation’ as a general term and a unified artistic strategy, the typology shows that introducing the participatory aspect in art may have several functions and serve various purposes. In the light of the typology, participatory art projects unfold as dynamic situations and as networks along which agency is distributed. The projects are processes in which individuals make decisions about their actions in relation to and in dependence on others. The connections between different actors can be loaded with varying levels of power to act and influence other actors and the whole, that is, the agency of an actor depends on the structure of the figuration and the rules that apply. None of the subject positions can be understood independently, as they are conditioned by the other players in the figuration – to use a term by Norbert Elias. What can be done by an individual participator is both enabled and limited by other actors in the process. The artist structures the 93

The Participator in Contemporary Art setting and the conditions for interaction, but is him- or herself also part of a network of dependencies. There are also other players in the game outside the artist – participator –viewer formation – both individual and institutional participators. For the participator, the vertical division in the typology is the division between heteronomous and autonomous participation. It is the line that defines the participator’s autonomy or the lack of it; in the linguistic sense it is the opposition of active and passive mode: doing or being done to. In sociological terms, we could talk about agency as the capacity, or the lack of it, of human actors to act autonomously. The horizontal line, on the other hand, is significant from the spectator’s perspective: with the two types below the line, ‘Material’ and ‘Co-creator’, the spectator is safely distanced from the work, but with the projects unfolding as live events, ‘Target’ and ‘User’, she or he risks being drawn into a participator role. The degree of agency and the dynamics between subject and object (or active – passive, autonomous –heteronomous) positions set the tone of participation. The object position is often loaded with negative value, as it contains a possibility of humiliation and exploitation. The situation is not black and white, however. In Spencer Tunick’s projects, for example, the participants, even though used as material, feel empowered. The parameters of activity are set by the artist but the outcomes cannot be predicted in detail. The participators, even as ‘Material’, may also have their own agendas and interests independent of the artist. Spencer Tunick’s practice has created an entire shadow activity, a virtual club of people with an online platform to exchange experiences and photos of the shoots. The two participants, or intruders, in Beecroft’s project had their own aims for the project although eventually they did not carry out the planned sabotage. This is the hidden side of participatory art; the moments of stolen agency and undercover stories are by-products of artistic processes that pass under the radar of both the author and the interpreters of the artworks. In very successful projects, such as Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project, visitor activity can take surprising dimensions: some visitors spent hours in the Turbine Hall, ‘sunbathing’, while others were interacting with strangers in order to arrange their bodies to spell out words that were reflected in the mirrored ceiling.1 By using it, the participants were also producing the work. One of the ways Lin’s Day Bed (2001) was used in the museum was

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Artwork as a Network as a platform for guided tours: the guides stopped with their groups to have a rest and relaxed discussion.

Participators as ‘Produsers’ This kind of intertwinement of consumption or use and production, or use as production, is conceptualised in theories that discuss alternative forms of (capitalist) consumer society and, in particular, the content production on the web. The hybrid concepts of ‘produser’ and ‘produsage’ – amalgamating production and use – developed by Axel Bruns, spell out the principles of a user-led and collaborative production model.2 The model does not follow the traditional producer– product – delivery – user chain of a production process. In produsage, the users are not at the end of the chain as passive consumers but actively take part in co-developing the products and services. The principles apply to various fields of human activity, from citizen journalism to iterative improvement of goods and services, from open-source software development to multi-user online games. There are other similar ideas describing participatory content production such as pro-am, crowdsourcing, citizen-consumer, or commons-based peer production, but the concept of ‘produsage’ is well developed and serves best to examine the parallels between participatory art and participatory principles in other fields.3 Bruns defines four characteristics of ‘produsage’: it is communitybased, entails fluid roles, produces unfinished artefacts and builds on a combination of common property and individual merit.4 The first principle means opening up the model of (industrial) production by a specialised team into a collective process by an open community. Bruns does not define ‘community’ but it is clear that for him it does not mean a predefined closed community but interest-based collaborative engagement by a group of people. This requires – the second principle – a flexible model of ‘produsers’ who can shift between different positions depending on their skills and interests. These two principles describe well the platform-type art projects in which visitors to an exhibition form a loose group of interested participators who move between positions as active user of the exhibit and observer. They also characterise the production process of the ‘Co-creator’ group as described in the Complaints Choir case study. The participants as well as the artists changed roles during the 95

The Participator in Contemporary Art workshops – participants acting as ‘experts’ and artists taking their place among the singers. Dias & Riedweg’s Voracidad Maxima was also based on questioning the fixed outsider-insider positions: the artists entered the environment, took the physical position of the ‘marginal’ and interviewed the chaperos as experts. Equally, intervention projects (group ‘Target’) are collectively produced and the positions of participators are not fixed.5 Fluidity of roles does not mean total equality of positions. According to Bruns, produsage communities may have leaders, but their power is limited by openness and consensus on the general principles.6 The projects’ structures are heterarchical rather than hierarchical. The last two characteristics of produsage focus on the outcome. In the produsage model, the concept of product in the usual, industrial sense is obsolete. Because users are producers of content, produsage projects are in constant development and distribution is synchronous with production. This is characteristic of the whole open-source philosophy and the Web 2.0 environment, which has largely become a symbol of the participatory model of production and collaboration. There is no advance control of the content production and a new entry simply replaces the old version, which again can change or revert to the previous one. The archetype of this model is of course Wikipedia, which can no longer be described as a product but as an ongoing process. In art projects like Eliasson’s Weather Project or Antony Gormley’s One & Other, no particular moment is more complete than another, and the end of the project is just a time limit of the activity that potentially could go on endlessly. In Bruns’ terms, they are permanently unfinished.7 This applies equally to Free Shop as a series of recurring situations to which new participants and events add new layers but which can never be defined as complete and final. The participants in Free Shop may not be aware of their role as art produsers, but being consumers exposed to an art intervention, that is what they are. With projects such as the Complaints Choir, which can be seen as having a finished end product, the video, the process itself, still has intrinsic value and follows the produsage model. On the whole, the individual choirs are just subprojects of the Complaints Choir umbrella, which continues globally and online as long as new choirs are made and added to the database. The temporary outcomes, however, are not only intangible processes but also distinct constructions, even commodities; an outcome of produsage is process and artefact at the same time.

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Artwork as a Network Finally, and this may be the most challenging aspect for the visual arts field, the fourth characteristic of produsage is a changed attitude towards legal and moral rights of intellectual property and the profit gained from it. Produsers, as opposed to producers, cannot claim copyright for a collective iterative process. In produsage environments, the issue is most often settled with open-source or creative commons-based licences. In the art environment, which is strongly built on individual authorship,8 this is unusual and against not only the logic of the art market but also the merit structure in general, in which an artist’s name or ‘signature’ is the guarantee of the value of the artwork. The open licence offered by the Complaints Choir is therefore an exception in an environment that usually tightly controls copyrights and reproductions. On the other hand, in individual choirs directed by the artists, the participants signed away their rights to the material produced during the workshops. As Bruns notes, produsage as such does not exclude corporate and institutional operators. According to him, in produsage environments intellectual property rights are sometimes completely ignored or else participants are required to sign away their rights beyond what would in fact be required.9 This opens pathways to commercial exploitation of intellectual property without acknowledgment of the produsers who contributed to it. For produsers, the reward for contributing to common property is not primarily financial profit but recognition by their community of peers. In art projects, in a similar way, the participators cannot expect public fame or profit; the motives and compensations are of a more immaterial kind. Being appreciated and useful for a purpose is a strong psychological incentive. Eric Raymond calls the reward in opensource software development ‘egoboo’: the sense of satisfaction at being able to contribute, at being part of a bigger structure, and being recognised as such.10 In general, at least in projects organised by art institutions, the legal and moral rights and the terms of participation are made explicit and regulated with project-specific contracts. There is, however, also potential for misuse or exploitation of participation.11 Despite many commonalities, projects in different fields of activity, and even within one field, have distinct aims and are structured differently. Contributing to a digital software development project with a specific goal is not the same as stepping onto the platform in an open-ended art project. Yet they share enough features and an ethos of participation to be

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The Participator in Contemporary Art compared with each other. The produsage-participatory approach – or the bazaar method as Raymond calls an open, collective software development process12 – is based on a fluid and open understanding of competence and expertise, and on the intertwinement of process and product. When using a work is also producing it, the question arises whether any use is the right kind of use or are some ways of using more correct than others. Is there such a thing as misuse, and can produsage fail? Although some artists’ projects have ended in hazardous situations (as was described in chapter ‘User’), Thomas Hirschhorn nevertheless does not consider unintended use of his works as failure. Miwon Kwon, on the other hand, is unhappy about how the audience handled posters, to which they were invited to help themselves at the opening of Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2009. She describes the excessive mass of posters that were taken and then abandoned at the door of the museum and the trash spreading into the streets nearby, and claims that the audience had not understood the nature of the exhibition.13 Whether the artist would share her opinion we cannot know, as the event took place after his death. In the logic of produsage, however, and if no additional rules or instructions were given, all outcomes would be acceptable. If a situation is opened up for participation, then the outcome cannot be predetermined. Hirschhorn’s non-judgemental attitude, therefore, is more true to the openness of participation as produsage. Participators may produse a different work from the one the artist (or other observers) had in mind. One of the most surprising produsage moments could be two artists who visited a Rirkrit Tiravanija show, stole a car from the exhibition space and went for a short ride, claiming that they understood it as a part of an interactive exhibition where you were allowed to use the objects.14 They managed to ‘produse’ the car, which was not part of the exhibition, as art. Moreover, as produsage is collective, no one participant defines the content and participants may alter or contradict previous produsers’ contributions. This happened in Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 in which other participants interfered when one member of the audience was pointing a loaded gun at her head. A similar interaction among participants developed during Shoot an Iraqi, a project by Wafaa Bilal, in which the artist lived in a gallery for a month, a paintball gun pointed at him, and a web cam surveying him and enabling the audience to shoot him

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Artwork as a Network 24 hours a day. While some participants tried to hit him as much as possible, others started protecting him by occupying the gun for a long time and aiming it at the walls and not at the ‘target’.15 The only category in the typology that sits ill in the produsage model is ‘Material’. In this group, the artist’s role is closest to the traditional author model; the participators are not invited to make a creative investment in the project; there is least space for unintended outcomes as the flow of events is fairly closely choreographed and the participators do not make decisions about the work. These projects follow the industrial producer – product– delivery model. The difference from other groups, however, is one of degree and not categorical, and there is variation within the groups. The decentralised method corresponds to the underlying structure and culture of the web. The culture of sharing acts as a counter force to the prevailing pattern of organising everything as private property and to the model of formal managerial hierarchy. Some writers see this as a new way of organising collaboration and developing new habits of participation, sharing and collective responsibility.16 The temptation in speaking about a cultural sea change is to succumb to a totalising approach and too simple solutions, marketed with catchy slogans.17 The world is polarised into the old model and the new, presumably preferable model, and often this type of division is loaded with moral or value judgement.18 The four modes of art participation in the typology are not intended to include moral or quality assessment per se, nor are the ‘Target ‘or ‘Material’ groups considered outdated. The groups in the typology simply describe four different ways in which relationships between actors are arranged. As such, they do not as yet allow further conclusions about the quality of participation.

Multiple Authorship and the Network Perspective Regarding the work as a process, not a product or an object, allows for a more open and flexible understanding of the creative action and its outcome: the artwork is a network of multiple actors, and connections between them. Nothing compels us to limit the observations to the participator alone; we can widen the perspective to include other factors and actors in the process.

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The Participator in Contemporary Art What follows is an attempt to trace the connections between various elements in one work of art, Santiago Sierra’s Person in the Ditch (see Figure 2.11), to analyse it as a connection point for the work of various actors, and to compare it to some other works. The process is inspired by actor-network theory (ANT) but does not follow any specific pre-fixed method. ANT perspective, in brief, views the world as networks of various human or non-human ‘actors’, also called ‘actants’, that connect and affect each other. Something is considered an actor when and so far as it exercises influence on other elements. They in turn are networks themselves, constructed by various forces and elements. The concept ‘actor-network’ describes this duality.19 ANT perspective has already been introduced in connection with the ‘User’ category in which participants interact with objects and space. In this example, the approach is expanded to include a work in the ‘Material’ category. Sierra’s project lends itself well to this experiment because the separation between humans and objects – and, as we have seen, humans used as objects – is already less marked than in other categories. The aim of the network description here is to take stock of the elements that have been assembled in the work and the forces that have produced them.20 Through its components, Person in the Ditch is a complex intersection of material, social, cultural and financial actors; it is made of and it creates connections. It is a node of threads that are attached to each other and lead to other actors. Only some of the ‘multiple authors’ are recognised by the art world as real authors, and others are seen as support persons or support functions. For the network analysis this does not matter; any actor (or actant) is equally important and no hierarchy can be established in advance.

The Participant The man sitting in the ditch is the concrete, bodily material of the work. He obviously has a personal life history and connections, but mainly one aspect of his situation, homelessness, is activated in the project and disclosed to the public. He is chosen for the project because of this attribute, a contingent aspect of his life, which is a deficit: the fact of having no home. The default state is that a person is connected to a home; when this is disturbed, the new situation is charged with additional meaning, it

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Artwork as a Network becomes an anomaly, and the non-existing home is an element in the work. The only other personal feature that becomes apparent is the gender, linked to the fact that most homeless people are men. Through these aspects he is connected to other people in a similar situation: homeless men in Helsinki. The man in the ditch is in fact several men, who take turns sitting in the pit. They have been selected and introduced into the project by a worker in a homeless people’s organisation.21 Already the most concrete ‘object’ of the work proves to be a social group or network rather than one entity. Through this association the sitters are part of an organised network, which is based on a legal decree defining the status of homelessness. The legal definition of ‘homeless’ and the related terminology vary from country to country. In Finland, homelessness as a statutory position refers to a person without permanent address in the population register. According to the Finnish Municipality of Residence Act,22 a person is defined as of ‘no fixed abode’ if she or he does not have a domicile and an address in the national population register.23 ‘A homeless person’ is hence a social and administrative description and it is to this information that Sierra refers in the work title. The individual men are nodes in juridical and social welfare networks: their existence as ‘homeless’ is defined by legal decree and acted upon by the homeless organisation. The organisation was instrumental in creating the artwork on a practical level. The legal and administrative structure is directly present in the work: as part of his installation, Sierra quoted statistics from the Finnish Ministry of the Environment (albeit incorrectly as seen in the ‘Material’ section, n.120). The theme of homelessness was chosen by the artist based on information that was passed on to him by the museum curators. As noted, the artist misunderstood some of the information and considered homelessness a more serious issue in Helsinki than it actually was. The question, as such, is in connection with the concept of the Nordic welfare state and issues of marginalisation within it. As homelessness is not directly visible, it is announced in the title. In the label, Sierra also brings in the aspect of alcoholism and suggests a degree of self-inflicted marginalisation by noting that the homeless mostly refuse the help offered by the state. It is not clear where this information would be retrieved from; in reality it is misleading.24 In the catalogue of social injustices that Sierra’s projects present and collect on his homepage – illegal immigration,

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The Participator in Contemporary Art prostitution, drugs, poverty – homelessness seems a minor issue. As a selfstanding work, it is still grounded on social exclusion and withdrawal, and staged as a spatial structure to underline and sharpen the distance between the marginalised group and the rest of society. The audience, the observers at the edge of the pit, become complicit in marking the border of the social divide by creating a social situation where one person is staged as a human specimen. It is hence this relationship that Sierra exhibits, the situation that allows someone to make another to perform this absurd or humiliating task. Homelessness is a social matter, a function of a network, not a characteristic of an individual. This applies to Sierra’s work in general, as he operates with the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, be it connected to migration, prostitution or any other feature related to marginalisation and poverty. Voracidad Maxima by Mauricio Dias and Walter Riedweg was also built around a marginalised group of men, the male prostitutes in Barcelona. They were not united by any social association but through sauna parlours that served as a mediating point between the men and their clients. Compared to Sierra’s project, the artwork operated on very different premises, relying on the participants communicating their point of views about their own life and social situation. Whereas Sierra aims to underline and sharpen the distance between the marginalised group and the rest of society, Dias & Riedweg worked towards obfuscating the difference. The homeless man as a person remains invisible; his personal life story and the experiences that led to his homeless status are not registered or revealed to the public. As a sitter, he can be substituted by someone else and any other homeless man will do; hence, as a person, he is not present, not an actant at all; the work turns him into a shallow ghost. He is needed as a body and a representative of a social category, an embodied number: one of 10,000, as specified in the caption. The participant has many other roles, but the work activates one of them, homelessness. Each sitter, however, is a network of his own, and from his point of view, sitting in the ditch is part of a distinct chain of events. For one of them, Reijo, it was the combination of a failed relationship, divorce, losing his family including children, losing his job, alcohol problem, lack of money, losing his flat. In the end, he was in the street and temporary shelters. The offer of earning some money by spending four hours a day in a ditch was a welcome opportunity to buy more beer, Reijo’s main

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Artwork as a Network distraction; he usually did not drink strong alcohol.25 Reijo became an element in the artwork. A viewer may or may not be able to imagine a life behind the sample homeless person. The setup does not encourage thinking about this side of the sitter’s presence and no names or personal details are revealed; instead, the information details structural and statistical facts as well as the monetary compensation for the sitter. Although the above listed facts are essential to the construction of the artwork, in the final work they are fenced off as not important by the artist. This is different from works in the ‘Co-creator’ group, such as Voracidad Maxima or One & Other, in which personal interests and stories are defined as an essential part of the work’s content.

The Ditch The 3 £ 5 £ 3 metres hole in the ground serves as a frame or a ‘reverse plinth’ and at the same time is a material part of the work. The negative plinth sets the sitter apart from the spectators who gather around the edge flanked with a barrier. The hollow, carved by the facilities team who usually build structures in order to present art, acts as a counterpart to the lack of home in the definition of the homeless, and creates a physical, vertical distance between the man and the audience. The material production of the installation was not carried out by the artist; the facilities department was in charge of the work and commissioned if from the Public Works Department of the city of Helsinki, which subcontracted it from a private entrepreneur, who dug the hole; the facilities department then provided the equipment: a chair and a marquee. The construction had to comply with municipal building regulations as instructed by city officials and the pit had to be supported with steel pillars – it was not the artist’s aesthetic decision. The location was a compromise as it had to be within the museum’s boundary; the artist originally wanted the ditch closer to the nearby Parliament house, intending to place it directly in front of the legislative body. Additionally, the choice of the site was limited by bedrock, which in that area is close to the surface, preventing the digging of the hole in many places.26 In this work, the bedrock, laid down 3,000 to 1,400 million years ago, acted together with modern safety regulations, to define the space and the positions of the sitter and the viewers.27

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The Participator in Contemporary Art For comparison, a project in which geological structures and construction elements were raised to a symbolic role is Ai Weiwei’s work on the 2008 Sichuan earthquake that resulted in two installations, Straight and Forge. For these works, he gathered almost 200 tons of steel bars from destroyed houses. The bars were bent in the quake killing more than 5,000 school children. Ai had them straightened and arranged in a sculptural installation. As part of the process he led a citizens’ investigation to list the names of the dead pupils and to uncover the government corruption and substandard construction that led to the collapse of the school buildings. In this case, the bedrock trembled and the steel constructions failed to protect people; they were elevated as significant content of an artwork.28 In Sierra’s work, these elements were decisive for the form that the installation took but were nevertheless circumscribed as the outside: as part of the background and not part of the artistic creation. In works that function as a platform, such as Michael Lin’s interiors, it is impossible to keep the material support of an artwork and the artwork separated. Or, rather, what is usually defined as insignificant to the artwork – the floor, the chairs and so forth – is framed as part of the work. This confusion can even extend to human beings, such as the guards in Sehgal’s This is So Contemporary. The homeless person and the space together create a ‘hybrid’ or ‘quasi-object’, to use ANT terminology: a combination of human and non-human entities.29 Neither the person nor the empty space alone would be the same as the two together: a person-in-a-ditch or a man-inthe-hole is a new assemblage, actant, generated in interaction.30 This new creation affects the viewers gathered around it and the way they move and look at it. Comparable assemblages are Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Peña in their cage in Undiscovered Amerindians or the participants on the Fourth Plinth in Antony Gormley’s One & Other. They both form a person-cage or a person-plinth hybrid that is effective only as a combination of the two elements. They also produce the person as a showpiece as does the Person in the Ditch. While the cage and the pit do this by incarcerating the person as a specimen to be looked at, the plinth makes use of a framing convention in art, turning it into a platform that allows the persons to be both seen and heard.

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Artwork as a Network

The Viewer The man-in-the-hole hybrid transforms people, the non-participating visitors to the exhibition, into viewers; it behaves as an ‘actant’, an entity affecting the behaviour of others. Furthermore, it makes them complicit in a hierarchical structure: the viewers are needed to complete the social inequality and humiliation translated into a spatial setting. In this way, the man-in-the-hole behaves as works defined in the typology as interventions, treating the secondary participators, that is, the audience as ‘Targets’. For the viewers, the encounter with the work takes place in the context of the exhibition visit, which means they have already assumed their roles as museum visitors. The pit was located outside the museum, behind the building, so it is also possible that it attracted visitors who ignored the exhibition framework. There, the encounter with the work becomes a social situation. The spectators are necessarily aware of the others around the ditch and of the unusual social setting. The installation could also be seen from inside the museum whereby the whole scene, including the viewers by the side of the ditch, became an object of observation. Reijo was occasionally bored with idleness and tried to communicate with the onlookers by waving to the people inside the museum. The installation turned into a social situation of mutual observation. The viewers were participating in creating an art event as well as being created by it as an audience. The viewers are essential elements in the construction of the piece. Whereas a painting or a sculpture would be more or less the same work of art whether in the gallery or in the storage room, Person in the Ditch would not exist without the spectators at the edge of the pit. It needs an audience to create a live event. This is characteristic of the ‘relationality’ of participatory art. Each viewer again is a node with his or her personal network, just as the homeless person is, and has his personal histories and experiences. In this work, this dimension remained invisible, and the visitors were not asked to reveal their reactions or give their opinions about the work. What people bring to the encounter with art – their previous experiences, knowledge, expectations, state of mind – has an effect on what the artwork becomes for them, but it is seldom considered as part of the artwork or made visible. There are exceptions such as Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds at Tate Modern

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The Participator in Contemporary Art in which the artist encouraged the visitors to enter into a dialogue with him about the work. The installation included equipment with which audience members could record video messages and questions to the artist. Ai’s responses were posted on the exhibition web page.

The Artist The artist as part of the actor-network has a double role. He is a private person, like the sitter in the ditch or the viewers by its side; and he has his professional history and connections. The media is often interested in the personal life of artists, but Sierra holds his personal life away from his art, unlike for example Jeff Koons, and mostly keeps the contact with the press and the audience to a minimum. Regarding Person in the Ditch, he was not present at the press conference or when the work was inaugurated. Professionally, he is connected to many other artists, art world professionals, galleries, art schools and so forth. In the art world, Sierra’s name represents a whole network of connections and actors; ‘Santiago Sierra’ is a brand, a ‘black box’ built of the person, his many connections to curators, and appearances in previous exhibitions, catalogues, articles and books. An artist with a ‘name’ is the tip of an iceberg, he ‘sticks out’ from a bigger group of art students and practising artists who are less known than he is but who form the professional art world that supports those who ‘make it’ and become known or even famous. Gregory Sholette calls this invisible reserve ‘dark matter’.31 The hidden work of the multitudes is benefiting the few, because in the reputation economy ideas have to be recognised and attributed to individuals – it needs a name. We can therefore think about a network and an amount of collective labour shadowed by Sierra’s name. The common denominator of Santiago Sierra’s work is the use of marginalised people set in an exposed or humiliating situation. An informed viewer or an art professional is able to compare an individual project to other projects by the same artist. In the art historical interpretation, Person in the Ditch could be contrasted with other art projects dealing with homelessness – often with a very different ethos – or his art could be compared to other political works with a similar contentious spirit; this is indeed done by writers such as Bishop and Kester.32 These connections exist

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Artwork as a Network mainly for art professionals, but the exhibition catalogue gives information about the artist’s other projects with illustrations for any visitor.33 The artist’s intention is often cited as part of the artwork’s meaning. In a network description, in which the artist is only one of many producers of the work, it has no exclusive value. Moreover, the description is concerned with what actually happens, not what is said to happen. The artist’s intentions count only if they are made explicit and as far as it can be shown that they affect the way viewers react to the work. In the mind of the audience, nevertheless, the idea of artist’s intention does have a place: ‘What does the artist want to say?’ is a common question, understood as approximately ‘What does this work mean?’ Sierra provides few answers to these questions; the exhibiting institutions and curators are more vocal about his work than the artist himself. New, specific skills are demanded of the artist to coordinate participation and manage people. Miwon Kwon lists ‘to negotiate, to coordinate, to compromise, to research, to promote, to organize, to interview’ as the contemporary artist’s working methods, and Rudolf Frieling adds ‘to generate, to change, to contribute, to enact, to dialogue, to translate, to appropriate, to tag etc.’34 Even the software developer Eric Raymond acknowledges the importance of good people and communication skills, which are not normally associated with software development, but are essential for anyone launching a collective production process and coordinating the work of individual people scattered around the globe at their own computers: ‘To make the bazaar model work, it helps enormously if you have at least a little skill at charming people.’35 Alternatively, as in Sierra’s case, the process and the leadership role can be delegated to a curator-producer. The advent of the participator has changed creative processes but it has not, as discussed in the previous chapter, taken the authorship away from the artist. There are, however, other factors that set limits to what can be produced as art and who qualifies as an artist. According to Pierre Bourdieu, in order to understand cultural production, it is not enough to look at artists creating art but we also have to ask who produces cultural producers.36 He mentions dealers and publishers, among others, as ‘creators of the creator’. In the contemporary art field, this role would have to be complemented with or even given over to the curator. Curators act as ‘symbolic bankers’ who invest their symbolic capital in the chosen artists and guarantee their value; they have the power to consecrate.37

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The Participator in Contemporary Art

The Museum – The Curator The ‘museum’ in this analysis stands for an organisation and a venue, and comprises various units and functions – curators, technical facilities, financial, legal and administrative management, marketing, communication, education, front of house and so forth – that come together in producing the artwork. From an ANT perspective, the museum is, as are any of the other elements, simultaneously an actor and a network. The closest and principal colleague for the artist is the curator. Within art discourse, the curator has pushed in at the side of and even ahead of the artist: if the participator has not threatened to displace the artist, the curator has. Curatorial practice has come to be seen as a creative act, and the curator is regularly compared to and described as an artist.38 A group exhibition, which gathers diverse artists under a single rubric and presents individual works in ‘dialogue’, is considered the author-curator’s ‘text’ or narrative. Curatorial authorship is often also compared to the film or theatre director as someone creating a narrative and giving meaning to a diverse collection of works under a theme.39 In terms of status and importance, the curator is no longer secondary to the artist and the most famous curators are celebrities.40 Artists’ careers depend on being ‘discovered’ by curators and ‘curated’ into the art world. This change in the balance of power has also created professional tensions between curators and artists.41 In the aftermath, artists have also started to incorporate curatorial methods in the making of art and to act as curators. They are ‘curating’ their fellow artists and presenting them as part of their projects; they are also organising events and activities as part of their projects in a similar way to curators.42 The formerly distinct roles of artist and curator have started to merge: authorship and mediation, or primary and secondary production, have started to intersect. Boris Groys takes the analogy to the point of defining the working methods of an artist and curator as selecting: the curator selects artists and combines them in an exhibition in the same way as an artist chooses materials, objects and other elements and puts together an installation. Selection is seen as synonymous with creation and as the default method of contemporary art, and curating as a subjective process and an act of creation. The author authorises, that is, selects.43 Mieke Bal’s term

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Artwork as a Network ‘expository agency’ recognises the power of the gesture of exposing as more than just a proposition: it is a discursive act that creates an object as art and worth exhibiting and studying.44 If we combine Bal’s concept with Groys’ proposition, we might say that curators exercise expository agency as power to select artists and to give them exposure. The selection of Santiago Sierra as an artist for a show is therefore located in a network of professional dependencies between curators, artists and other members of the contemporary art field – to use Pierre Bourdieu’s term.45 The relationship between the curator and the artist is one of mutual dependence. They qualify each other: the artist’s career depends on recognition by curators and on a track record of participation in sanctioned exhibitions and museums;46 the curator’s reputation is validated by a list of ‘interesting’ and ‘emerging’ artists and of curated exhibitions. As a way of establishing a voice of one’s own, creating a brand of sorts, curators work with a number of core artists, not unlike the ‘stalls’ of gallerists. Bourriaud has worked with the same core group of artists he associates with ‘relational aesthetics’ from 1996 and continued writing about them in his publications.47 When artworks are process-based or commissioned specifically for the exhibition venue, curators participate actively in the actual production process of art projects. Hence they have a double role in the art production: they produce artists as well as artworks. Regarding Person in the Ditch, as described earlier, an assisting curator was in charge of the project and collaborated with a homeless people’s association, and the technical department took care of the installation. The ‘curator-producer’ is a key person in creating art, particularly durational, sited and event-in-process projects.48 By collaborating closely in the production process curators have access to knowledge that is not apparent to outsiders or openly disclosed in the work itself. As part of the framework, curators are also creating the discourse about art; they have become the parallel ‘critical double’ to the artist that the critic was before.49 The curators are producers of both art and ‘art speak’: they create the narrative within which the artworks are presented and understood, and generate the rhetoric that gives value to their own products. In this role, curators are joined by critics and academic art writers, such as Bishop and Kester. Meanwhile, catalogues of large exhibitions or individual artists’ retrospectives function as

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The Participator in Contemporary Art extensions to the exhibition and have become the locus of analytical and theoretical discourse. The curators’ statements and commissioned essays frame the works in the chosen curatorial narrative.50 The curatorial statement in ARS 01 catalogue attempted to explicate in what kind of discourse the works in the exhibition should be understood. The chief curator explained one of the key concepts ‘third space’ (adopted from Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture 1998) as ‘situations in which two things encounter each other, and at the resultant interface form a new space, entity, situation’.51 Other elements in the discourse included globalisation, hybridity, translations, globalised popular culture and economic inequalities, discussed in relation to the local exhibition context and connecting Sierra and his work with discussions in the globalising art world. Besides the alliance between Bourriaud and ‘relational’ artists, at times an even tighter relationship is established in the form of curator-artist pairs or ‘a kind of ventriloquist– dummy relationship’.52 This allows for maximum work economy in terms of reciprocal consecration. The increase in discursive practices and ‘discursivity’ in general is a fertile ground for the brokering of what Mick Wilson calls ‘reputational capital’.53

The Museum – Mediation Curating participation is a new aspect of producing art. In this activity, however, curators are not alone but part of a wider mediating practice.54 In art institutions, dealing with non-professional audiences has for a long time been the field of educators. Audience participation has entered museums first through the back door, as part of educational activities.55 When curator-led and educator-led practices use similar processes, some confusion is created between the professions. Participatory projects that are most in line with educational activities are those in which participants have considerable autonomy and contribute to the making of the work (‘Co-creator’ group) or those that unfold as platforms for participation (‘User’). Sometimes it is impossible to judge from a product whether it is the result of a curatorial, educational or artistic initiative. Other types of projects in which participants perform in ways strictly controlled by the artist (‘Material’) operate within a different logic: they come in through the parade door, commissioned by curators and created by artists, with no risk

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Artwork as a Network of being confused with education. Person in the Ditch was of this kind. Along with the other works in the exhibition, it was included in the educational material produced by the learning department. As a new field, curating has to guard its borders and to mark the distance from adjacent fields. One field to keep at a distance, in terms of territorial marking, is education. The hierarchy of the two fields has been noted by several writers.56 The friction between the two strands of participatory art – community-oriented or co-creative practice and more assertive artist-led projects – arises from the same division as the tension between curatorial and educational activities, namely the clash between professionals and lay audiences. Curators align themselves with artists, whereas educators align themselves with visitors. This leads to unequal accumulation of ‘symbolic capital’ in these positions.57 Educators do not have the same power to introduce artists into the scene – to consecrate – in the way that curators do. In a parallel way, artists confining themselves within the tight professional field have an advantage over those operating in the margins.58

The Museum – Documentation The afterlife of site-specific installations and event-based works such as participatory projects lies in the documentary material, the press images, the catalogues and other publications produced by the exhibiting institutions. This second life affects how these works are talked and known about, and hence partly defines their existence as artworks. As seen in the chapter ‘Material’, Sierra’s installation was turned into a tangible piece of art, a photographic print. The image, extracted from the documentary video, was assigned the status of an artwork by the artist. He decided which still would be used and that the information would be reduced to a low-definition black-and-white image. The museum was also responsible for the documentation, but the photographers in the institution have no ownership of their work. The prints became the tangible afterlife of a process, and are shown in exhibitions and reproduced each time the project is talked about – accompanied with the incorrect facts about homelessness. One print was bought by Kiasma and is now part of the museum collection. As art objects, the prints are sold by Sierra’s gallerist.

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The Participator in Contemporary Art By way of a concrete image as an art object, the project is connected to the art market. In Tunick’s projects, the participants get a small print signed by the artist, which is intended only as a souvenir. Some of these are nevertheless sold online as artworks. Erwin Wurm had a different approach to documentation: Polaroid photos taken by a museum guard of participants’ One Minute Sculptures could be sent to the artist. For 100 euros he signed them and guaranteed them as his authentic artworks. Sehgal, on the contrary, is known for resisting this reification of his live works and prohibits any documentation. With all site- or situation-specific or ephemeral art, the relationship between the live situation and the documentation is complex. Even without the status of an artwork, the documentation is easily taken for the work, without questioning the relation of the image to the situation in a distant past or distant location. The reproductions become strong actants in their own right.

The Wider Field: Structures of Production The direct connections of an individual art project with underlying art production conditions, such as increasingly globalised exhibiting institutions, funding structures or cultural policy agendas, are harder to demonstrate; ANT, which traces immediate connections between elements and actants, proves less effective, but on a more general level these wider structures certainly affect what kind of art is produced and how. The artists studied in this book mostly create their work at temporary exhibition sites and in the framework of international exhibition events – biennials, festivals and recently also art fairs – or international exhibitions arranged by museums. Often the production process takes the form of a residency, either through an established artist residence programme, or provided by the hosting institution. For example, the Complaints Choir was first produced during a residence in Birmingham, UK, and then as part of large international exhibitions organised by museums (Helsinki, Tokyo); many of the subsequent choirs were arranged in connection with festivals (Chicago, Singapore, Copenhagen, Edinburgh). Pilvi Takala often works in international residencies, and one of her latest project is produced by an art fair;59 Santiago Sierra is a

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Artwork as a Network regular invited guest at international biennials. Right before working on Person in a Ditch he had staged a project with street vendors (133 Persons Paid to Have Their Hair Dyed Blond) in Venice. The global biennial culture, art fairs intermingling with non-profit institutions and artist residence programmes encouraging mobility have an effect on what type of art is made. No systematic research exists, to my knowledge, on how these structures and programmes influence art production, but some writers see, for example, that biennials are behind the increase of video art and large-scale monumental installations.60 Projects such as the Complaints Choir travel well in various local settings: it works with a set format, a choir, which can be adapted to any context and filled with local material. Other artists, such as Sierra, Dias & Riedweg or Takala, start their projects in situ by researching the environment and social context. Participatory productions are often long-term processes and in contradiction with the organisational structures and event-based cycles. This means building a residency module into an exhibition production or using an existing residence programme. In terms of material production, the increase in scale of contemporary art projects has led to artists’ studios becoming small factories and given rise to specialised production houses.61 Some participatory projects such as Höller’s slides or Eliasson’s Weather Project are demanding undertakings in technical and engineering terms, or Gormley’s One & Other, which is a logistical and technical challenge. Specialised agencies also produce temporary public projects, such as Artangel (UK) and Creative Time (New York) among the most established and best known. Exhibitions and independent art projects are increasingly conceived as events. Even in museums, which are built on collections, preservation and continuity, the emphasis is on temporal shows and unique events, and the presentation of collections is conceived in the form of thematic exhibitions rather than permanent displays. The rise of independent curators was simultaneous with temporary exhibitions becoming the main forums for contemporary art. The short-term focus is partly conditioned by funding structures and the need for organisers to rely on project-based funding. More broadly, event culture and the ‘experience economy’ lead institutions to build up a cultural offer of temporary events and happenings marketed as experiences and sensations.62

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The Participator in Contemporary Art Kester and Bishop agree that the growth of biennials and art fairs has produced a new environment more sympathetic to the logistics of participatory art projects than the traditional gallery or museum space.63 As participatory projects are social situations rather than physical objects or installations, they are well suited to the event nature of temporary exhibitions and are easily co-opted in their marketing.64 For biennials and other so-called global events, which have been accused of exporting international art and artists to remote places without any real contact with the event’s environment, they also provide a solicited connection to the site, as they engage local inhabitants as participants. On the other hand, even participatory projects have been criticised for parachuting artists into foreign environments without any understanding of local circumstances.65 From the viewpoint of the locality, the exhibition-as-event is related to cultural tourism; on the level of the international art world, the production of art and exhibitions employs nomad artists and curators as well as local work force and participants. Particularly with biennials outside Europe and the USA, inequality of the global market prevails: the production takes place in the zone of cheap labour but the validation and consumption of the product still depend on the economic and cultural centres.66 Santiago Sierra and Dias & Riedweg have made this imbalance an explicit theme of their art; for others – such as Francis Al€ys’ When Faith Moves Mountains or Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds – it remains a concrete, at times unquestioned condition of production. Global ‘biennialisation’ is accompanied by an expansion of art fairs. Vasif Kortun sees that ‘biennials have been the central vehicles that have validated the circuit that is now [. . .] moving over to art fairs’.67 Biennials have prepared the art world for the global market; fairs, on the other hand, are simulating biennials and other art festivals by organising talks, seminars and other forms of ‘intellectual programme’ and also commissioning participatory works. Art world and art market are further integrated when art institutions participate in art fairs alongside commercial galleries. The dissemination, production and buying of art merge. Funders, private or public, are actors in the production network too. Commercial sponsorship has become all-important for any major show, and participatory projects are produced along with other large-scale works within private funding schemes;68 for example, Höller’s Test Sites, Eliasson’s Weather Project and Tino Sehgal’s These Associations (2012)

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Artwork as a Network were produced under the Unilever series in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern which calls for a particular type of art on a spectacular scale. In the case of Takala’s Trainee, the whole project was produced with and inside the sponsoring company: in an unusual manner, the sponsor was part of the core of the project. Public funding for cultural institution is dependent on cultural policy agendas. Audience participation and forms of art-based activity are increasingly supported for promoting social inclusion, community development, health, coaching, work place team-building, and well-being in general.69 These applied uses of art come close to projects in the ‘Co-creation’ category, and significant amounts of funding have been allocated to educational programmes that employ artists in participatory projects.70 This type of political management may be perceived as compromising art’s autonomy in ways that does not happen with other categories. In the case of Person in the Ditch, by placing his work outside the museum in front of the Parliament House Sierra wished to make a point about the social issue of homelessness via a publicly funded museum: a visible reminder for the parliamentarians about two aspects of welfare that come out of the same state budget.71 Finally, the network aspect can be also directed towards this very text. As the artwork produces its audience and users, it also creates its critics, historians and other commentators; researchers position themselves and justify their work in relation to the art they study. At the same time, in a mutual process, they (we) construct the object of research by means of directing and limiting the focus on certain aspects of the work rather than on others.

Defining an Artwork as Cutting the Network The Person in the Ditch installation as well as the picture that became an art object were produced by someone other than Sierra. They are the product of a large number of actors, set in motion by the artist. The challenge of using the actor-network approach is that there is no rule about how far each chain of actors should be followed – the network is theoretically endless and each actant is a network of its own. In the case of Person in a Ditch, it could extend to the supplier of the steel walls, the homeless person’s partner and her personal history, the architect of the museum 115

The Participator in Contemporary Art building that allowed a big window opening towards the Parliament House, or the artist’s childhood experiences. Which elements are essential and which can be left out?72 Howard Becker has theorised the production of art as a cooperative activity in which a number of people are involved. His description of collective art production starts with a predefined set of assumptions that divide some of the activities and contributors as artistic and others as support.73 Sociology in general differentiates between the artwork and the ‘background’ and claims to say something only about the latter. If no such assumptions are made in the beginning – and with contemporary art these distinctions in any case are not undisputable – the definition of a work of art is open to discussion. Viewed within the actor-network framework, it is the role of an artist to decide about the connections and where to put the end of the actor-chain: how to cut the network.74 There are no absolute rules about how this should be done and the cutting is contingent. For example, Sierra makes a clear cut when it comes to the identity of the participants in his works; the homeless person as an individual is ‘off-stage’. In Gormley’s One & Other (see Figure 5.1), on the contrary, the individual is very much ‘on-stage’ with his or her own personality and interests. As a further example, in Sierra’s project, the steel structures were installed as a security requirement and technical support; in Ai Weiwei’s Sichuan earthquake project the steel bars were part of the content. The artist is using the power to build and cut networks. Defining art is forging connections and cutting networks: deciding what belongs to the work and what is not considered as art. Sierra brought together previously unconnected actor-networks, and convinced them to work together and to form a new hybrid that does not need the presence of the artist any more; the work was performed by its elements – the sitter, the viewers, the pit, the museum – allowing us to see it as a single object. A hybrid needs to be performed, or it ceases to exist. On the other hand, he obstructed other aspects, such as the sitter’s personal life, from becoming part of the work. The process of including and excluding is obviously a political act, and as such it can be debated. Helena Reckitt, for example, asks why gallery assistants who replenish Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ candy piles, or staff cleaning after Rirkrit Tiravanija’s dinners are not considered as part of the

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Artwork as a Network artwork (and are kept off-stage) but visitors who consume them are.75 This setting perpetuates the invisibility of maintenance work, which to a large extent is performed by women. Other artists, such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles, have decided to draw the cutting line elsewhere, brought the maintenance work to visibility and ‘performed’ it on stage.76 With this transformation, the verb ‘to perform’ changes from carrying out a task to presenting a spectacle. Sehgal’s This is So Contemporary also brought the maintenance work inside the artwork. In the Manet-project (1974) Hans Haacke used his power to bring into attention aspects of an artwork that are not usually considered as art. He exposed the provenence and the prices of acquisition of Manet’s Bunch of Asparagus as part of his artwork. In his installation, the factual information on the panels accompanying the painting showed its donor’s Nazi connections.77 The project was rejected by the commissioning museum, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne. In Haacke’s project, aspects of a painting that are not considered as part of the art were brought inside the cut, and material processes were not separated from the symbolic production of art and the production of meaning. His installation brought part of the ‘support’ inside the ‘art’ and showed that making the cut at one point rather than another is a meaningful decision. The participator is part of the artwork, whereas people who work for it are not: they are not supposed to be seen – unless the artist decides otherwise as in Sehgal’s This is So Contemporary. Erwin Wurm has even made his curator a part of his work in Be Nice to Your Curator (2006) in which he carries or feeds the curator. The names of the participants are not necessarily acknowledged; neither are assistants or other staff or employed people. Different art forms have varying conventions for mentioning collectives: unlike art, the film industry lists every individual who has participated in the production. Complaints Choir follows this convention and credits the names of all the participants at the end of the video. By cutting out all information related to persons – the sitter, the viewers and himself included – Sierra directs attention to impersonal, structural relations. He is exercising the work of an artist as bringing together actors and material from various sectors of life and, in an opposite move, delimiting the potentially endless network by defining the boundaries of the artwork. The decisions about which aspects count and

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The Participator in Contemporary Art which are irrelevant are essentially contingent and therefore meaningful; they are choices. In this study, social relations are part of the work, and the network perspective has been used to shed light on the total network of material, individual and institutional actors. A myriad of human and non-human actants participate in the making of an artwork but it remains the work of an artist to cut the network.

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4 Contracts of Participation

Human relationships are based on agreements. In the anthropological view, societies are built upon social contracts based on exchange, and social life is essentially a network of exchange relations and of contracts that regulate these relations.1 Participatory projects create networks of relations between people, and they forge or alter contracts, tacit or explicit, that human relationships are based on. The ways in which the elements in a network connect with each other are regulated by protocols and procedures. In everyday life, social agreements are unwritten and the need for explicit contracts becomes urgent only when relationships cannot be trusted to rely on social conventions. In particular, when economic value or a risk of dispute enters into the relationship, a more formal contract is crafted. Participatory practices and particularly the principles of produsage are sometimes in conflict with customary modes of art production and create tension within the producing and exhibiting institutions. This chapter looks at the contractual aspects of participatory art. Contracts are powerful instruments for managing social interaction and organising relationships beyond immediate acquaintances: a contract promotes cooperation between strangers, and allows individuals to form associations without them being a member of the same family, group, party, club and so forth. In contract theory, contracts are regularly compared to promises as principles creating obligations 119

The Participator in Contemporary Art between people.2 The theory of contract as promise is, however, critiqued as too abstract – it does not consider the context of the contract – and limited as it regards contracts as self-imposed and based only on moral grounds when they in fact, unlike promises, are enforced by the power of the state.3 On a formal level, contracts are analysed as consisting of specific structural features such as a proposal and its acceptance. In this book, the notion of contract is not bound to one specific theory but used as a fairly general idea of obligations and associations between people and in varying degrees of explicitness.4 On a general level, the contract as a means of regulating relationships has two sides: a moral or normative aspect and an economic aspect; hence, a contractual situation can be studied through philosophy or economics.5 Moral and economic ownership concern the artist’s work, too, in the form of the contracts that regulate relationships between an artist and an institution or other individuals engaged in producing, exhibiting and selling art.6 The process of the production and presentation of art has traditionally included negotiations and contracts between the artist and the institution. The participator role has brought a new element into this process. As opposed to professional relationships, such as negotiations and contracts between artists, art institutions and collectors, in participatory projects we are dealing with ways of engaging non-professional participators and setting the parameters of a social situation. Managing the involvement of outside participators is a new and relatively unregulated domain. Contracts of participation often remain tacit and unwritten, sometimes leading to misunderstanding or even conflict when the role of the participator has not been clearly defined. Some projects even make use of such ambiguity of contractual situation and deliberately create confusion as part of the artwork, as discussed in the typology. Most of the relationships that participatory projects create among participators are conditioned by unwritten social agreements. Social contracts, as opposed to formal contracts, are based on trust and guarded by strong socially constructed affects, such as shame and embarrassment, and no legal consequences are needed. It may seem that social contracts are less severe than written contracts but in fact the consequences of not complying with them – the punishment for breaching – are harsh and quick.7 Goffman compares the ways in which we protect our property

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Contracts of Participation and how we protect norms, that is trespassing on customs (social contracts) and laws: Just as we fill our jails with those who transgress the legal order, so we partly fill our asylums with those who act unsuitably – the first kind of institution being used to protect our lives and property; the second to protect our gatherings and occasions.8

Sometimes unwritten contracts are not deemed sufficient and, increasingly, participatory activity becomes regulated by explicit contracts. Visitors as viewers do not need contracts, as the rules and conventions of a traditional exhibition visit are assumed to be known without the need to make them explicit. Participatory works create tension because participator behaviour deviates from conventional visitor behaviour. Written contracts for participators are of two kinds: regulating the use of artworks, comparable to company disclaimers transferring user responsibility to the consumer; or regulating the production of the work and defining the relationships in terms of labour, content production and copyright. These relationships between participators and the artist are often mediated via an institution. The two types of formal contracts correspond roughly with the horizontal division in the typology: participation in the display and participation in the production of the artwork.

User Contracts: Liability Projects that are created by artists and opened for visitors as live events, encouraging and expecting participation, create situations in which implicit rules may no longer be adequate or sufficient and the behaviour of the visitors cannot be trusted. In Goffmanian terms, they create ‘situational offences’. Museums and exhibition sites face the new situation of receiving participators instead of viewers. As a consequence, they feel the need to take the visitor agreement onto a more explicit level by issuing written warnings and asking visitors to sign waivers. Visitors to Carsten Höller’s installation at Tate Modern in 2006 and his exhibition in the New Museum, New York, in 2011 were faced with warning signs telling them not to use the slides if they were pregnant, had heart,

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The Participator in Contemporary Art respiratory, neck or back problems, were suffering from vertigo, claustrophobia or motion sickness, or susceptible to bruises or fractures. They were also advised to remove any items from pockets and leave all bags, purses or loose articles of clothing at the coat check or in the lockers. They then had to sign a release of liability form regarding any injuries caused. ‘I realized this was no ordinary art show when I signed a two-page waiver accepting responsibility for any injuries I suffered’, reports a visitor.9 Warnings and waivers act as disclaimers, aimed at limiting the responsibility of the institution. A disclaimer is a statement denying responsibility, intended to prevent civil liability arising from particular acts or omissions. In general, the occupier of the premises must take reasonable care to ensure that the premises are safe. In legal terms, occupiers’ liability is a field of tort law, which concerns the ‘duty of care’ that those who occupy property owe to people who visit.10 The greatest duty of care is owed to invitees, who are mainly customers or contractors; they are there because of the invitation extended to them. When required to sign a waiver, the participator is asked, to a certain extent, to give up the right of being protected and instead to take the responsibility for one’s own actions: the waiver is transferring the risk from the institution to the visitor. This transfer, however, can only take place within the frame of law. The actual legislation is different in different countries and the process of application depends on the circumstances under which the alleged breach has happened, but no ‘at own risk’ disclaimer will negate the duty of care required by law, and often liability waivers are found to be unenforceable. Despite the precautions, two compensation claims arose from injuries caused by Höller’s slides.11 At the extreme, art exhibitions are now comparable to sports resorts and gaming arcades, in which visitors engage in high-risk activities. This presents new challenges for risk management in museums (and opportunities for insurance companies). The change is illustrated by Robert Morris’ sculptural interactive work Bodyspacemotionthings, exhibited for the first time at the Tate Gallery in 1971 and restaged in 2009 at the Tate Modern. On the second occasion, the gallery stated, The 1971 exhibition was built using raw, unfinished materials, but Bodyspacemotionthings will be made using contemporary design methods and materials, including plywood, rubber elements and

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Contracts of Participation solid steel structures, which will bring the work up to current health and safety standards.12

In addition, it instructed the public with a seven-point list ending with the clause about visitors participating at their own risk. The press reported 23 injuries.13 The focal point here is not the riskiness of contemporary art or the actual accidents, but the relationship between the visitor-participator and the institution that these agreements aim at structuring. It is not always clear whether the visitors know what they are signing and what the purpose of the disclaimers is. For example, all visitors cannot be assumed to speak English in order to understand the warnings. In addition, there is no checking of what the participants are actually signing, and a signature is binding only if authentic. Even from the point of view of the institution, it is unclear and hypothetical, until a claim is brought to a court, what the decision in each instance would be. Although the disclaimers may have the effect of discouraging users from complaining and making claims, they are rarely legally binding and have few practical consequences. Consequently, if a disclaimer does not protect the institution from liability, in reality warnings and waivers may be more symbolic in nature. The main effect of issuing warnings and signing release forms, however, is that they transform the visitor into a user or a consumer of the art project. What is created is a user contract in a comparable way to, for example, software applications, which are downloadable after the user has clicked an ‘I agree’ button, or buying a toy or a household item with warnings on the packaging. The disclaimers use legal rhetoric which is familiar to consumers from various fine prints of ‘terms and conditions’ we routinely tick off. The exhibition visitor is made to acknowledge his or her participation as a cultural consumer.

Production Contracts: Ownership and Economic Rights The most explicit form of contractual relationship is formed when participators take part in the actual process of the making of an artwork – when they act as workforce or co-creators of a work. The participants can lend their presence or labour for the artist to create the work (‘Material’) or 123

The Participator in Contemporary Art they can actively take part in the production of the content (‘Co-creator’). The aspects to be agreed upon in a contract are the dimensions of authorship and ownership. Compared to the above user contract, this agreement is a work contract defining the labour of the participants, or a producer contract that regulates issues of copyright and ownership of the work. In the realm of work and labour, the relationships between the artist and the participators are articulated as those between an employer and employees or volunteers. The most straightforward relationship is a paid contract, as in Sierra’s work – the participants are remunerated with the minimum hourly pay for their contribution – or in Dias & Riedweg’s Voracidad Maxima. In other projects such as Tunick’s Nude Adrift or the Complaints Choir, participants are volunteers and, instead of a work contract, their role is defined by other agreements, such as the participants giving their consent to the use of photographs and declining all rights to the material produced during the process or to any claims concerning the content, hence signing away any potential economic rights. Their compensation takes place in the immaterial sphere, in the form of personal experience and fulfilment. When the relationship is mediated via an institution, the institution may have a commission contract with the artist and separate contracts with the participants.14 The interesting aspect, again, is the relationship that is formed between the actors. If the previous model, the user contract, defines the participator as a consumer, this type locates him or her either as a worker or as a creator. As a worker, the participator is comparable to what Howard Becker defines as ‘support personnel’.15 On the other hand, the fact that a contract is needed at all is a proof of the (potential) creator status of the participator; it recognises the participator as a maker (or at least the potential or the ‘risk’ of such recognition) and therefore strips him or her of the rights to authorship.16 Collaborative production and the opensource content production model, in which the users actively take part in co-developing the products and services, and in which participation is in itself part of the creation of the work, build tension in the art-producing institutions. The signed contracts stand as proof that in most of the cases the art world is not an open-source environment: the contract transmits the ownership to the artist and she or he still controls the authorship of a work. The art world is against the fourth characteristic of produsage, as

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Contracts of Participation discussed in the previous chapter. In an open-source world and collective production, the ownership can be shared and the reward for co-production is fame and peer recognition; this is not enough in the art field, which is structured as a system with clearly defined ownership. In art, the participatory production model is so new that sometimes the terms of participation are not clearly defined or, in other words, there is ambiguity about the nature of the participator contract, that is whether it is a question of participating in a project as workforce or as content producer. One such instance was Antony Gormley’s Waste Man (2006, Margate). For the artist, building a huge figure out of waste materials and then burning it was a community project, intended to strengthen community spirit and to provide a channel to express it. The inhabitants, however, rather than participating in the collective building of the giant, used the pile of lumber to take wood for their fireplaces; and some of the refugees whose experience it was meant to honour thought instead that burning represented a punishment. The terms of engagement and reward did not meet: no contract was established.17 Rirkrit Tiravanija’s free Thai food meals are also open to opposite interpretations. His works have been connected with the idea of the gift. According to Miwon Kwon, the artist gives up his authority of authorship as an act of generosity.18 A gift, as opposed to commodity exchange, is characterised by the absence of money. Money abstracts the relationship and does not create a bond between the transactors, but a gift is connected to the person of the giver. It therefore expects reciprocation, placing the receiver in debt. The so-called poison of the gift is that it stigmatises those who are forced by circumstances to accept a gift as charity. The Free Shop installs the customers in this position – they are forced to accept a gift – which explains some of the annoyed reactions, although most people do not interpret the situation as a humiliating position but accept the surprise gift with pleasure. Tiravanija, however, counts the participants in his projects as his material, as he specifies in the labels of the works, and not as his guests, and in this way seems to recognise a reciprocal exchange occurring instead of a one-directional act of giving. The concept of gift directs the attention to the exchange between the artist and the participant only; the artist gets his share in the form of recognition by the wider art world. Preparing meals as art or other forms of sharing, nevertheless, in their limited scope create

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The Participator in Contemporary Art incidents of unconditional generosity, which function outside or against the prevailing logic of (capitalist) society.19 There can be no exhaustive list of participators’ motives – be they economic, social, psychological, personal or political – but they are numerous and the reward that the participators take from the projects may be different from the artist’s original idea and may go unnoticed by him or her. This makes it hard for the artist to forge contracts with the participators, and part of the process always remains outside the artist’s control: the terms of the contract and the content of exchange remain partly undefined. There exists a ‘grey economy’ and space for individual agency that is not controlled by the artist.20

Contractual Culture The advent of the participator has complicated the relations between various actors in art production and mediation – artists, curators, producers, viewers – in a way that has made it necessary to agree upon roles, rights and responsibilities in a detailed and explicit manner. The occasional confusions and misunderstandings around the role of participators show how new and still unstable the role is. Based on the case studies and other material in this study, it seems that with the rise of participatory art there has been a movement away from informal contracts – based on conventions and assumptions – to more formalised and signed contracts concerning the non-professional public. A factor in the increase of written agreements is certainly also the general commodification or marketisation of contemporary art. Despite its immateriality and ephemerality, participatory art is by no means exempt from property and exchange value; even time-based performative art like that of Tino Sehgal is sold to museums and collectors. There is thus a need to define explicitly the terms of ownership of each artwork. The participator’s signature has come to replace that of the artist. This signature, however, does not safeguard the signatories’ rights but those of the artist or the organising institution. It assures this in two opposing ways: either by applying restrictions on the participator’s rights or by increasing his or her responsibilities, touching on the two essential features of authorship as defined by Foucault. The production contract relates to ownership rights. It guarantees the property right (or copyright), that is, 126

Contracts of Participation the monopoly over exploitation of works and the right to control the reproduction and exhibition of them, to the artist. At the same time, it protects the artist’s moral right as a legal expression of the intimate bond between an artistic work and its author’s personality. The artist’s authorship guarantees the value of a work of art and allows it to be positioned in the marketplace as a branded product. The user contract, on the other hand, is relevant to the second aspect of Foucault’s model: the disciplinary aspect of the notion of authorship and the liability of the author as someone who bears responsibility for the product. By signing, the participator here limits the artist’s authorial responsibility by accepting accountability for his or her own participation. In summary, the individual participator does not get credit for the content but assumes some responsibility for the work. This development follows the general trend of contractualisation of society: social relations are no longer based on trust but defined by rules and regulations. Robert Putnam phrased the development as the decline of community and of social capital, most notably in his book Bowling Alone.21 His analysis is located in the USA, where the legal culture is already based on the strong rule of law as opposed to trust and informal rules.22 In other accounts, the present atmosphere since 1970s is described as atomisation of society, disintegration of social bonds and, among other things, short-term commitments both in work and private life.23 Research on managerialism further shows how the public sector is increasingly introducing contracts with individual citizens to regulate for example job seeking, education or parental support.24 In the arts sector, the replay of Robert Morris’ Bodyspacemotionthings is a demonstration of the change, and it is easy to see how presenting anything as high-risk as Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 in 1974 would be impossible in any public gallery today.25 As opposed to contracts that aim to guard a person’s rights and empower the undersigned, contracts are increasingly used for control purposes. Niels Andersen, who studies the relationships between the social services and their clients in Denmark, notes how contractual language is appended to human relations: what formerly was called ‘a plan of action’ is replaced by the notion of contract. These citizens’ contracts are contracts between the social services department and the citizen that, according to Andersen, are employed to commit clients to a specific behaviour. The contract is an educational tool used to impress responsibility. They are claimed to be ‘voluntary contracts’ but failure to sign would lead to a cut of

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The Participator in Contemporary Art the benefit.26 An art exhibition visitor can also refuse to sign but as a consequence would not be allowed to experience the work. This examination suggests that more explicit forms of contract that require the participator’s signature or at least his conscious appreciation are put in place in order to protect companies and the producing or exhibiting institutions. The move from unwritten social contracts to formal and written contracts has occurred as economic interests have become more pertinent in the form of art’s monetary value and actual gains, or through the risk of potentially involving losses in the form of compensation payments. The participator is asked to sign away or agree on restrictions to his or her rights.

Art About Contracts The general aversion to risk at present runs counter to the exploratory and transgressive tendency of art which leads to its fundamental unpredictability. Whereas law attempts to exhaustively cover any imaginable situation and exception, art advances randomly, experimenting as it goes along, finding loopholes and subverting well-formed systems. Contemporary art and particularly participatory projects create tensions and challenge contractual culture. Art institutions are struggling between the mission to support the freedom of art and the restrictions imposed by risk management and visitor control. Projects such as Höller’s slides are a nightmare to organise, and as the Sunflower Seeds example shows, such works can create an internal conflict between the sectors that are responsible for different aspects (artistic content, visitor safety) of the museum. The intensification of contractual culture has not escaped artists’ attention: both tacit and explicit contracts have also provided material for art production. There are works that exploit the form of a contract, and there is art that comments on the contractual culture in general. Superflex have used the instrument of the contract in several works. In 2009 they signed a legally binding contract with the ANZ bank in New Zealand, which forbade the staff of a branch to say or use the word dollar for a day during trading hours (Today We Don’t Use the Word Dollars).27 They had to come up with other words of their own choice to explain themselves to customers and co-workers. If any staff member breached the contract they had to pay one dollar into a staff social fund. The signed 128

Contracts of Participation contract was printed, framed and displayed in the staff room during the day. Superflex’s art projects create real economic, cultural and political relations between people. One strand of their work is to use prohibitions and regulations upon people to produce concrete effects. The Dollar project installs a real contractual situation; other projects such as Free Shop dismantle them. These projects blur the line between the real and the symbolic and explore how value is created and how it is based on agreements. A project that is explicitly balancing on the edge, abiding by or subverting rules, is Superflex’s Supercopy, a series of works that consist of adding a screen print with the wording ‘SUPERCOPY’ on to counterfeit objects and turning them into a Supercopy, a new original.28 This category of projects takes advantage of the privileged status of art and uses art’s social contract as an intervention against the capitalist system. Carey Young has made law one of the founding elements in her art. She creates her work with the help of lawyers, and studies ‘how contractual structures and their linguistic markers progressively pervade and reshape all domains of life’.29 Her work produces a series of legally enforceable contracts with audiences. In 2005 in her exhibition in New York, in order to enter the space, the visitors had to agree to provide a fingerprint and to sign over copyright interest in their imprint to the artist. Another work consisted of a corner of the exhibition space marked with lines and a wall text declaring that by entering the marked space the visitors agreed that the US constitution did not apply to them. Donorcard made use of the legal power of signature: the card was offered free to visitors, who only had to add their signature to Young’s on the back to turn it into a work of art. Artists’ somewhat ironic stance towards the rules-based culture blurs the lines between the real and the symbolic: the dollar contract did not operate only on an aesthetic level but actually changed the bank staff’s behaviour. Art has performative power in the Austinian sense: it makes things happen instead of just describing them, it changes rather than depicts.30 The marked space, separated from the rest of Young’s exhibition, on the other hand, highlights how arbitrarily drawn lines affect people’s lives and questions the possibility of free choice for people to comply with them. In practice, signing a contract presupposes two autonomous, free parties. As a means of enabling people to organise collaborative structures, a contract is praised as one of the foundations of a functional society. According to the liberal view it guarantees a free society, which is not based on status given by

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The Participator in Contemporary Art birth but on associations between autonomous individuals. This view obviously does not take into consideration the potential restrictions set by the signatories’ unequal socio-economic positions. Some artists, including Sierra, make their art about these positions and subordinating contracts. The participators consent to the work as – in theory – free and autonomous partners, but the viewers of the works are put in a situation where they have to acknowledge their place in an unequal contractual relationship with people in a vulnerable or marginalised position. As opposed to the lighter ironic strategies, Sierra over exaggerates the contractual relationships to lay bare the conditions behind them. Compared to the artists above, Angela Bulloch takes a more discursive approach. In Rule Series, begun already in 1992, she collects rules and regulations and transforms them into wall paintings. One of the texts in her collection is the instructions to Bodyspacemotionthings at the Tate in 2009. The realisation of Bulloch’s work is also based on an agreement. The actual work consists of an A4 sheet with the Rules text, accompanied by a certificate. The text can be reproduced in any medium or form by the owner. In this process, Morris’ original work from 1971 is recycled into the tamed 2009 version and further into Bulloch’s textual work in which no physical construction is maintained – the only thing left is the rules and the contract they imply.31

Working for The Art(ist) Projects in which the participators are engaged in the production of the work entail labour and exchange relationships that merit specific attention. The projects in which there is money involved between the artists and the participators mostly fall in the group ‘Material’, although, as seen in that chapter, artists have differing viewpoints about paying their collaborators and only some of the works in this category offer paid compensation for participating. A paid transaction makes the relationship between the artist and the participator visible and objective, and the input of both parties is settled in advance; the participants work for the artist and help the artist to make his or her art. The alienating effect of introducing money dissolves any personal bonds and dependences created by a gift or voluntary work and avoids establishing a relation in which reciprocation is expected. 130

Contracts of Participation When the participants are not paid, the assumption is that they have some other motivation to take part. They may want to help the artist without compensation or they might feel they get something else out of the project instead. A monetised relationship may even feel corrupt, if the idea is to join in a collective effort, such as the one Al€ys had in mind with When Faith Moves Mountains. In such a case the ethos of the project is constructed around the idea of the artist offering an opportunity to people to experience something that enriches their lives; the recompense is not economic but experiential or spiritual fulfilment. Experience, instead of money, is used as currency, as a means of exchange. In some open call projects, in which people participate out of their own interest as individuals and not part of a predetermined group, participants are even prepared themselves to invest time and money in participating.32 Sometimes, as with Gormley’s Waste Man, the nature of the exchange may be ambivalent and it may even be difficult to define who is giving and who is receiving in the project, or as to whether the exchange is a free gift or in fact free labour.33 Claire Bishop defines participatory projects as ‘outsourcing’.34 The term, however, seems to capture only partly the nature of the exchange relations. In business, outsourcing means an arrangement in which a company contracts out services or work that could also be or usually have been provided in-house. The outsourcing provides support which frees up cash, personnel, time and facilities to focus on core activities. Engaging people as the centre of an artwork can hardly be called non-core activity. Besides, in most cases the tasks and roles performed by the participants could not be carried out by the artist – and that is exactly why they are hired. As discussed in the ‘Material’ section, comparing these works to performance art and considering the participants as the artist’s proxies is not the most accurate way of conceiving the projects; rather, the participants are comparable to artist’s material: human ready-mades. These relationships cannot therefore be described as outsourcing: they are not service relationships but purchases. Other projects, such as Tino Sehgal hiring dancers or other performers to appear in his pieces, compare to any independent theatre or dance production employing performers – also hardly outsourcing. A project to which the concept might apply is the Sunflower Seeds (2010, Tate Modern) by Ai Weiwei although even then the correct term would probably be subcontracting. Ai employed the whole artisan community of Jingdezhen to produce the porcelain seeds for his piece for five years – a huge manufacturing undertaking.

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The Participator in Contemporary Art The exchange in participatory art is not confined to the relationship between the artist and the participators; it takes place within a framework of power dynamics, and the positions to negotiate may be more or less symmetrical between the parties. The work contract depends on whether the exchange relationship is created between equals or between persons in unequal positions. Santiago Sierra’s projects are among the most cited examples of art that experiment or verge on exploitation based on inequality. Some of his projects, such as Person Saying a Phrase, expose a classical asymmetrical relationship in which the artist, the employer, takes advantage of the subordinate position of the worker, and the phrase he is saying to the video camera, ‘My participation in this project could generate $72,000 profit. I am paid £5’, points out the surplus value that the artist potentially collects. This inequality becomes acute especially, but not exclusively, in projects that take place in countries with so-called developing economies. The accompanying video to Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds presents the economic impact of the project but, as opposed to Sierra, the artist comes across as a benefactor of the village, giving work to a struggling community. Sierra definitively does not want to be presented as a dogooder. On the contrary, he is explicit about his position as the exploiter of other people’s work; he makes clear that he pays as little as possible and acts as the ultimate capitalist, making profit from other people’s work and the surplus value it creates. The level of explicitness of Sierra’s Person Saying a Phrase is rare in art. In Ai Weiwei’s film we are shown how the project gave work to a whole village and a worker tells us with glee that the project has allowed her to earn 2,000 – 3,000 Yuan (less than e400, about £300).35 On the other hand we know that part of the Sunflower Seeds was purchased by the Tate and that at Sotheby’s in New York in May 2012 a small portion fetched $782,000.36 Ai produces his work in a developing economy, where labour is cheap, and sells it in the global art market. Before alleging that he resorted to ‘Made in China’ sweatshop trade by making a profit from the porcelain craftsmen’s work – a position presented in some reader comments to the above-mentioned news reporting the selling of the work – we need to take into account that we are dealing also with ‘rhetorical economy’, with how the projects and their creators are presented: one as the conscious patron, the other as a deliberately arrogant exploiter. The

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Contracts of Participation apparent transparency in both cases is only partial: the £5 is certainly not the only production cost incurred for Sierra and the $72,000 is purely speculative; neither with Ai Weiwei are we presented with the total balance sheet or the breakdown of the project budget. Lacking the total picture, we cannot be sure that the presented images are not at least exaggerated, each in its own direction. They both want to establish a relationship between the maker and the material/workforce, and to present it in their chosen manner. Particularly in Sierra’s case, the financial arrangement is not just compensation for the participants’ time and effort, but is itself the theme of the work. Although physical labour also plays a central role in Francis Al€ys’ work When Faith Moves Mountains outside Lima, his 500 college students who shovel dust to move a sand dune were unpaid. They were summoned by the artist (or his curator and collaborator) to make a film: to perform in both senses of the word. Al€ys’ work is articulated around the concept of futile, unproductive labour and is usually interpreted as a critique, albeit a poetic one, of the failure of modernism’s belief in productivity and progress. The fact that the students participate as volunteers in their own time moves Al€ys’ project towards more cooperative or community-based art projects, which are built around processes that allow the participants to express or produce something or to experience being part of a creative project. In Faith, the participants’ labour, however, is as alienated as Sierra’s workers’: they have no control of the process or any contact with its result; they simply consent to do the work and quit. The mission of moving a mountain in a desert by a few inches is comparable to the tiresome meaningless tasks assigned to Sierra’s workers such as holding a pillar above the ground or keeping a wall tilted at a certain angle. For Al€ys, however, it was essential that no instrumental motives (earning money) should be present in order to safeguard the purity and poetic nature of the project and to keep it outside the capitalist system, of which it is assumed to be a critique. Even here, however, there seems to be a tension between the artist’s poetic vision and the actual production conditions: Al€ys managed to persuade his collaborators that participation in a communal effort was worthwhile as such, and by doing this shifted the nature of the project towards a community project, but the process could as well be seen as using free local labour to produce art for the global art scene.37

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The Participator in Contemporary Art A uniting point of reference between the works above is that they are based on physical labour or on some kind of heightened bodily presence. The physical labour is used as material for the artist’s ‘immaterial labour’.38 Through this process, bodily work is brought into the realm of aesthetics and the spectacular, and material production is turned into symbolic production. Furthermore, the physical labour is staged while the artist’s immaterial labour stays invisible, behind the scenes. Put side by side, the projects seem to adhere to a longing for, if not fetishisation of, the sweating and suffering body, the rejected, undesired body, and body as raw material. They also resort to pre-modern techniques or undemanding working methods. In Ai Weiwei’s film, work is presented almost as a ‘museum of work’, with its traditional obsolete tools and methods – that is, obsolete in the Westernised industrial world. The encounter of the two worlds is put in perspective, twisted with irony, when the result of the physically demanding toil under no health or security protection arrives in the exhibition site and, to protect western museum-goers, is closed to the public because of the ‘health and safety’ risk of dust emanating from the seeds.39 Labour and exchange are staged in different ways. Ai turns to a model of cottage industry based on traditional craft and shows working for the international market as beneficial; Sierra bluntly exposes the degrading effects of menial toil and lack of choice; for Al€ys, staying outside the system altogether is the ideal option. His vision is perhaps the most romantic one, a collective selfless effort with nothing but spiritual recompense, and a dramatised scene with almost biblical imagery. Each project represents the terms of exchange and the economic relationship in a specific way, although the actual production conditions for the participants may not be so different. The labouring body is staged as a spectacle, contrasting creative work and alienated work: it is the artist’s immaterial input that adds value to meaningless bodily drudgery. If the roles of participators in the above projects reflect a preindustrial world of physical or artisanal labour, the characteristics of post-Fordism or globalised, neo-liberal economy – flexibility, short-term commitments, immaterial production, precarious employment, entrepreneurialism, global mobility – are exemplified in the working conditions of artists and curators. The contemporary art world has in fact been predicated as the model of the new economy.40 Artistic labour is intellectual,

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Contracts of Participation communicative, knowledge-based and image-oriented; material labour production has been transferred to the ‘global South’.41 The dilemma of such production is whether it is possible to take a critical position towards a system while at the same time using it. If the global labour market is unbalanced and unjust, is it ethical to produce works, albeit critical, by making use of its structure and resources? In general, the production of artworks within the international art field – and art market – introduces the project into a circulation system in which value is generated from speculation and financing rather than production.42 An outsider position seems untenable and complicity is therefore unavoidable. Two possible strategies worth testing emerge: one is to oppose to a large extent the commercialised and market-driven art production system by creating relationships that contradict its functioning principles and capitalist relationships in general; the other is to make a point by caricaturing those relationships and making them present to the art audience. Some works, such as Tiravanija’s meals, When Faith Moves Mountains or Free Shop, avoid monetised exchange. Instead, without any mediation by money, the situation forces participants into a direct personalised relationship. Other projects such as Free Beer by Superflex or the Complaints Choir promote free sharing or subscribe to Creative Commons licence. The opposite strategy is to exaggerate the monetised exchange as Takala’s Bag Lady does when she walks through the shopping mall displaying a lot of cash in contrast with abstract and invisible business transactions, or Martha Rosler’s Garage Sales that she has organised in art venues since 1973.43 Sierra’s projects bluntly expose unequal power relations to the point where it feels perverted although he only uses existing economic structures. The approach resembles what Renzo Martens calls a ‘critically mimetic’ strategy, which attempts to avoid repeating and reinforcing the unequal relations that it seeks to impede.44 His film Episode III, Enjoy Poverty is a project in which he encourages Congolese photographers to capitalise on their biggest resource, poverty, and to produce for themselves images of poverty and disaster, rather than leaving it to international press to profit from. He defines it as one of the films that ‘by enacting their own parameters, try to make visible their own complicity in a world obscured by depictions of it’.45 (The opposing strategies that comment on or critique the prevailing systems, or that aim at effecting a change and producing alternative models of exchange, will get more attention in the chapter about democracy.)

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5 The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation

Participatory art presents an unforeseen aspect in art: the role of the participator, as argued throughout this book. The introduction of a layperson who engages in the use and production of art gives rise to many changes and adjustments in the dynamics of the art world, and presents new opportunities for people to get involved. A more complicated question is whether this new activity has repercussions or parallels in wider society. As discussed in connection with ‘produsage’, participation in art has many similarities with online media and digital production. Participatory culture is a concept that is extensively used with reference to digital media but has many wider meanings too. For media theorist Henry Jenkins, participatory culture is not only about creating and sharing content in online media; on a more general level, [a] participatory culture is a culture with relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic engagement, strong support for creating and sharing creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby experienced participants pass along knowledge to novices. In a participatory culture, members also believe their contributions matter and feel some degree of social connection with one another.1

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The Participator in Contemporary Art This final chapter asks what connections exist with other fields of life, if there are any, and how might participatory art dovetail with civic engagement. The discussion revolves around the key concepts of democracy, models of togetherness and strategic uses of participation.

Participation and Democracy Participation entails an idea of democracy, and participatory art is often loaded with expectations of its democratic nature. Claire Bishop, among others, claims that in the general understanding, participation is equated with democracy and more participation is understood as better art.2 What the concept of ‘democracy’ in this context means, however, often remains undeveloped and vague; it is referred to in passing as if assuming a shared understanding that needs no explanation. Often the notion of ‘democratic’ carries positive undertones and is mentioned in connection with participatory art as a recommendation and in a promotional sense.3 In other instances, the idea of democracy in the art context, and consequently of participation, is strongly criticised. Markus Miessen serves here as a prototype of the latter tendency.4 The critics of participation and democracy claim that participatory art is always presented as something positive and democratic, and therefore can never be criticised. Furthermore, there is among them an underlying and, in Miessen’s case, explicitly articulated perception that democracy, generally, equals consensus and majority vote. Miessen and other critics accuse the advocates of participation of promoting a fictitious harmony and of a naïve and blind belief in participation as a beneficial process – Miessen calls this ‘the innocence of participation’. At the same time, there is an assumption that participation and democracy compromise the quality of art by submitting it to a popular vote and to the majority principle.5 Where exactly this reduced concept of democracy is cultivated remains unclear as Miessen gives no examples, hardly refers to any texts and writes in a passive voice or uses enigmatic epithets, as in ‘particular practices have hijacked the notion of participation as a positive, unquestionable means of engagement’.6 On a more general level, the source of what Miessen calls ‘social romantic’ democracy is identified as New Labour.7 According to Miessen, participation is uncritical, unquestioned, consensus-oriented, even fundamentalist ‘on the scale of national policies, 138

The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation local involvement, projects in the art world, and so forth’.8 The main mission of his book is to show that ‘[s]ometimes, all-inclusive democracy has to be avoided at all cost’. A few lines below, it becomes clear that this is done when ‘someone assumes responsibility’.9 Democracy and assuming responsibility are hence placed as opposing concepts. By encouraging participation, the politicians are wriggling out of their responsibility to make decisions. In the art context, the answer to the question of what assuming responsibility might be and how it would happen, according to Miessen, is ‘the curatorial’. Whereas participation is mostly used for outsourcing responsibility, curating is about choosing, decision-making and exclusion.10 Miessen’s counter-suggestion to the ‘romantic’ notion of democracy is ‘conflictual participation’, which instead of harmony creates dissensus and confusion. This is based on the creation of the role of the ‘uninvited outsider’ or ‘crossbench practitioner’, a free agent and an intruder who acts without a set mandate. The aim of this agent is to produce rupture.11 Miessen finds support for the conflictual approach from Chantal Mouffe’s concept of the agonistic model of democracy. Instead of consensus, this model is built on the concept of dissensus and allows for conflict as part of democracy.12 I am dwelling on Markus Miessen’s book because it crystallises some basic assumptions behind many discussions. One of them is fear of the people: the participation of laypersons in art is equalled with mediocrity and compromised quality, leading to a situation in which no one bears responsibility for the outcome. Second, democracy is understood as the popular vote and the dictatorship of the majority. Consequently, there is strong suspicion of any institutional attempt to boost cultural participation or art that opens up for participation. This line of reasoning seems to conflate different arguments. When democracy is identified with consensus and popular vote and described as total, unlimited participation of everyone in everything, or of anyone in anything, and when people’s participation is deemed harmful and even dangerous because it is irresponsible and leads to compromised quality, the result is the dictatorship of the majority and of the masses. Participation and democracy fall together as part of the same process which leads to the decline of art and society – ‘the nightmare of participation’.13 The part of the statement that condemns laypersons’ presence and hence participatory art as losing of control and as compromising quality is

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The Participator in Contemporary Art a common one. It seems to contain a claim that if any participation is allowed, no one is in charge any longer and no one bears responsibility for the project. In the light of the case studies in this investigation, this is not the case. Even in the projects of the fourth type, ‘Co-creator’, which allows maximum autonomy for the participators, the project is initiated and designed by the artist and the final responsibility for the outcome lies with him or her: even the most ‘democratic’ projects are identified under the artist’s name. As discussed earlier, the participator does not rule out the artist. Ceding of responsibility is therefore always limited, and varies according to the type of project. In summary, people’s participation does not lead to people’s ‘dictatorship’ and the allocation of responsibility is not either-or but a question of degree.14 Whether participation produces bad art is a different question, and to claim that it does essentially disqualifies the artist’s judgement of whether the outcome is ‘good art’ and worthy of being exhibited to the public. In a time when no ‘consensus’ exists about the criteria for taste or quality in art, such discussion is superfluous, at least on any superficial, uncontextualised level. One would imagine, in addition, that there is a long enough tradition of the use of so-called everyday material as art that professionals, at least, would not be confused by amateur-produced material or by the presence of ‘normal people’ in art, such as the ‘plinthers’ in One & Other or a choir of non-professional singers. The statement about the nature of democracy is partly a tactically chosen standpoint and a construction of the opponent. Miessen has picked one specific understanding of democracy as his target and claims that it is the prevailing one. For Miessen ‘the question seems to be: Why is participation mostly understood as a consensus-based, deliberatively positive, and politically correct means of innocently taking part in societal structures?’ Mouffe echoes Miessen’s claim, saying that ‘usually’ and ‘normally’ democracy means everyone’s participation and consensus.15 No evidence, however, of such a hegemonic understanding is given in the art context or otherwise. Mouffe, and Miessen building on her, suggest an agonistic or conflictual conception of democracy instead. Mouffe’s agonistic concept of democracy is developed as a reaction to the deliberative model of democracy, promoted by John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, which aims to reach a rational agreement and moral consensus, through (a process of) public debate. As opposed to Rawls and Habermas,

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The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation Mouffe underlines the central role of emotions and passions instead of rationality: whereas in deliberative democracy passions should be kept out of the public sphere, with deliberation based on rational argumentation, agonistic democracy engages emotions as part of the democratic process. The political, for Mouffe, starts with the separation of ‘us’ and ‘them’, but the agonistic model advocates an understanding of these positions as a tension between adversaries, not enemies. Conflicts should not be denied or annihilated; if the conflict is denied, democracy disappears. The dissensus is permanent, but in an agonistic space the antagonism is domesticated and the adversaries agree on basic principles, the existence of plural values and the legitimacy of the other.16 In the art context, this setting has been mobilised in the advocation of art as creating arenas that allow conflicts to be played out. Mouffe has published around cultural issues herself and she has been invited to write in a number of art publications and to speak at events.17 Against this background, it is possible to ask how these conceptions of democracy and of participation relate to different forms of participatory art and whether the kind of democracy that Miessen and Mouffe advocate would produce different and perhaps better art than the one they criticise and claim is hegemonic; are there projects that comply with the postpolitical consensual model and others that are constructed as agonistic conflictual participation? Mouffe gives a list of her preferred art in an article: the agonistic perspective in art means critical art that foments dissensus in the form of artistic activism and activist art. She mentions projects such as Reclaim the Streets and groups such as Yes Men.18 Of the groups in the typology, ‘Target’ and ‘Material’ would seem to suggest conflictual participation and friction with conventional practices. Interventions such as Free Shop or Takala’s projects could be interpreted in the framework of Miessen’s ‘uninvited outsider’ and seen to comply with the disruptive and interventionist practice that he calls for; Sierra, on the other hand, is one of Bishop’s examples along with other projects that would fit in the ‘Material’ category. ‘User’ and ‘Co-creator’ groups would fall more easily on the side of uncritical and apolitical convivial participation as defined by Bishop and Miessen. Bishop has used Mouffe’s theories to criticise relational aesthetics and community-based projects, and maintains that relationships in them are

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The Participator in Contemporary Art not democratic because they lack friction and are based on convivial togetherness.19 The dividing line between ‘agonistic’ and ‘consensual’, as adapted to the typology, would run between projects fostering participators’ autonomy versus heteronomy. From the participator’s point of view, this leads to an interesting conclusion: agonistic democracy does not support autonomous participation and the agency of the participator, but favours instead projects that demand submission of the participator to the artist’s will. Agonistic democracy corresponds to projects in which the autonomy of the participants is limited. The explanation of this apparent paradox is that the above writers and theories look at the situation from the artist’s point of view. The controversial, critical participator is the artist, in Miessen’s case, himself. In this process, other people may well be included but under the control of the artist. Subscribing to agonistic democracy does not therefore mean more participation from the people but less. The incompatibility of two perspectives of judgement is also behind Bishop’s and Kester’s differing stances towards participation: Whereas Bishop evaluates art projects based on their effect on audiences, Kester values the effect on participators’ lives. Bishop bemoans the ‘ethical turn’ in art criticism, which judges art by the effect it has on the participants’ lives: instead, she assesses projects by their effect on the spectators. Sierra’s work, certainly, is not geared towards improving the life of the participants. On the contrary, it repeats and potentially reinforces the economic structures that keep underprivileged workers in their positions. Kester condemns this type of shock effect on the viewers.20 Advocates of community art, on the contrary, evaluate projects according to the benefit for the participators.21 When Bishop does consider the participator’s point of view and speculates about participation in a humiliating activity, such as in Sierra’s projects, she introduces the idea of a masochistic pleasure as a motive for self-objectification in art projects. She suggests that the performerparticipants experience pleasure in their subordination: a jouissance of reification and self-exploitation.22 This claim remains hypothetical and abstract and is not founded on any actual participator testimonies.23 In her socio-psychological framework, the ‘delegated performance’ is grounded in the perverse pleasure of self-exploitation, completed by the viewers’ pleasure in watching subordination.24

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The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation

Top-down Participation Versus Participation from Below The discussion about democracy as a theoretical approach – whether deliberative or agonistic – is not a sufficient starting point to decipher what makes an art project democratic and in what way; we should also look at how the theory is implemented at the level of processes and procedures such as decision-making. The sorts of projects that the defenders of agonistic participation are the most mistrustful of are those ‘all-inclusive democratic processes, where everyone is invited to the round-table to add one’s point’ which leads to ‘watered-down and weak consensus’.25 The Complaints Choir functions exactly like this (see the section Co-Creator). The process is built on procedures that allow everyone ‘to the round-table’ and direct the participation towards an outcome, a consensus of sorts. A similar example is The Committee by Pilvi Takala in which a group of 12-year-old children was allowed to decide on the use of £7,000, most of the money allocated for the implementation of the commissioned project. The only condition was that they had to reach an agreement about the use of the money. After several meetings and discussions the children decided to create a huge bouncy castle of their own design.26 In spite of the consensus-oriented ethos, these projects do not avoid or negate conflicts and tensions. Complaints Choir has incorporated disagreements in the working process. In fact the whole idea starts with discontent and grumbling, and at least once a public expression of contention proved to be controversial.27 The Committee contradicted social conventions by giving financial responsibility to minors and caused nervousness among the organisers. The starting point of Voracidad Maxima by Dias & Riedweg and indeed many community-based projects is a conflictual and unequal situation between groups of people. Classifying participatory projects according to democratic theory is hence not a viable strategy. From the point of view of the participator, there are clearly more democratic processes in place in projects, which allow more participator autonomy, but it cannot be said that ‘User’ or ‘Co-creator’ type projects would always produce ‘convivial’ and ‘non-conflictual’ outcomes. It seems absurd to defend only certain types of art projects, particularly those that deprive participators of autonomy, as (better) democracy.

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The Participator in Contemporary Art There is, however, another level on which the hostility towards a perceived excess of participation is understandable: on the level of cultural policy and discussion about cultural participation Miessen’s observations hit the target more accurately. He claims that participation is promoted with false motives of ‘political correctness’, not as true participation but as ‘social sedative’. The politicians are using popular opinion as their mandate in power: they are eager to show that ‘the people’ are given ‘a voice’ for their views, particularly a voice that supports the politicians’ mission.28 The same observations about pseudo-participation as legitimation of the powers that be and about the deficit of democracy have been made by others.29 Miessen’s remedy for the (partly) correct diagnosis, however, is problematic. He understands participation as a (consultative) ‘referendum’, which he rightly rejects;30 as a solution, he suggests the function of an outsider, an individual instigator without mandate. For him, this ‘crossbencher’ is the artist rather than a participating member of the audience; so again, more participation for the artist and not for the laypersons. Another solution to counter fictitious participation would be to enhance true participation and claim for better participatory structures, but this is not what Miessen advocates; on the contrary he dismisses efforts such as Joseph Beuys’ initiative for direct democracy.31 In the end, the fake participation that Miessen criticises stems from the same hostility towards people’s participation as his own negative attitude to it. Evaluating participation from the artist’s point of view (as Miessen and Bishop do) is defining democracy from the ruler’s position. It is a topdown view of democracy and of participation, in which ordinary people are considered politically incompetent and excluded from direct participation in decision-making; it is therefore inherently undemocratic. True participation means sharing responsibility and decision-making power as in direct or participatory democracy. In the elitist model of democracy, participation is actually a sham, serving only to legitimise decisions made by those in power. An egalitarian or democratic view of participation means sharing, and that all or any citizens (participators, members etc.) have a significant influence on the decision-making. As to participatory art, only projects that grant autonomy to the participators would qualify in this respect. Complaints Choir allows the participants to share in decisions not only

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The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation about the content but also about the form and structure of the project, and has built into the process means of handling this. These means and the ethos of the project correspond to the non-representative, direct model of democracy, in which participants influence the political agenda and decide about issues directly.32 Bruns, who expands the produsage principle to encompass models of democracy, compares the prevailing party-political representative system to the industrial value-chain production model: there prevails a clear distinction between the producers of politics (politicians, lobbyists etc.), the distributors of politics (journalists, media houses) and the consumers of politics (‘the people’). As in other industries, the ‘product’ is targeted at achieving the largest possible market share (or servicing a small but lucrative minority); in order to achieve this, the producers undertake market research for example through polling (compare: elections).33 In Bruns’ ‘produsing democracy’, as opposed to ‘industrial democracy’, citizen participation in democratic processes is central and politics is based on self-governance structures. The same four characteristics or principles of produsage apply: it is exercised by a community, requires fluid roles, is structured as ongoing process and builds on common property. Produsing democracy, like direct democracy, is based on an opt-in model, in which citizens choose to participate, and those who do not trust in those who do. Deliberation takes place between self-selecting groups of citizens-as-produsers. Everyone is invited to suggest, prepare and finally vote about issues. Direct democracy relies on citizens as knowledgeable and active participants as opposed to citizens as audience or even targets of others’ politics; they change from informed citizens (relying on mass media) to what Bruns calls ‘monitorial’ citizens, and the role of the politician becomes more that of a facilitator.34 This parallels the role of the artist in participatory projects as the initiator, producer and facilitator. In the light of the above examples, participation can be used in two opposing meanings: It can be used by those in power to reinforce their position (as identified by Miessen), in the form of, for example, a consultative plebiscite set by politicians, or casting a vote every few years to delegate one’s political power to representatives. In art institutions, similar endorsement is asked from audiences, for instance, in the form of participating in events or projects as a member of a predefined community or ‘ethnicity’ that is ‘given a voice’.35 For the participator, participating in

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The Participator in Contemporary Art democracy from above is participating in one’s own subjugation. The other understanding of participation sees the participants as competent citizens and participators, and includes them in decision-making processes as active agents, present ‘at the round-table’; this concept corresponds with direct democracy, or democracy tout court. The difference between the two stands on democracy and participation, in my understanding, is the same as in Jacques Rancière’s concept of ‘police’ (la police) and ‘politics’ (la politique).36 ‘Police’ is often associated with politics (parliaments, councils and other agents and structures of official politics), but for Rancière they represent the exercise of power, the foundation of le partage du sensible, the ‘partition of the sensible’. This partition sets the limits of ‘part-taking’ and how it is distributed in society: to whom it is extended and on what conditions; it operates through exclusions and inclusions and defines what is visible and who can be heard. For Rancière, ‘representative democracy’ strictly speaking is no democracy at all.37 Politics, on the other hand, is an intervention upon the visible and the sayable. Politics is not about defined (interest) groups, it is always about those who have no part in such groups. It is ‘democracy’ as a form of governance (police) as opposed to democracy as a universal principle of the self-governance and power of the people.38 Regarding the typology, the division between participation in the making process versus participation at the display of the work approaches participation as an organisational issue; it has relevance when considering how participation is managed and exhibited;39 it also has a bearing on what kind of contracts exhibition venues want the participants to sign. In terms of democratic participation, however, the question of whether participation is open or closed is decisive; instead of classifying projects by the moment of participation – participating in the preparation or when the work is presented – the distinctive variable is the way in which the participants are summoned: Is the invitation to participate made by open call or extended only to a pre-selected group? ‘By invitation’ does not necessarily mean a formal invitation but that the participation is limited to certain people only. Similarly, ‘open call’ can be a public announcement but generally designates projects that are accessible to anyone who happens to be present or responds to the call. Another differentiating factor among projects is the social distance between the artist, the spectators and the participants; this applies

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The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation especially to projects in which the artist works with the participants in the production phase (‘Material’ and ‘Co-creator’). Sierra and Dias & Riedweg work with ‘the other’, that is, groups that are marginalised and socioculturally in a subordinate position; Tunick and Kochta & Kalleinen, on the other hand, reach a culture-consuming populace, people whose sociocultural situation is presumably closer to the artists’ and audiences’ situation. The marginalised groups would not participate spontaneously, therefore they have to be specially invited – or outreached, as the activity is called in art-exhibiting institutions. The division between open or closed group, and the social distance between the artist and the participators, does not conform to the autonomous-heteronomous sections or the categories in the typology. Most of the ‘User’ type projects would correspond to the open mode, because closing the platform is incompatible with the very idea of a platform. ‘Co-creator’ projects can be built on open or closed participation; many community projects tend to be constructed around a predefined constituency but in Complaints Choir, for example, participation was open to anyone. ‘Target’ and ‘Material’ projects can be either open or closed. Across the segments, open-call groups tend to cater for middle-class / culturally active participants. Targeted participation can therefore be used for reaching participants beyond the immediate cultural audience, who would not spontaneously have access to such art projects; it can be compared to affirmative action. Projects in which people already know each other or are pre-selected according to a set definition, typically community projects, enhance bonding and social cohesion – people within a group get closer to each other. Bridging, on the other hand, occurs in platforms where people from different backgrounds interact, connecting with previously unknown people.40 In democratic terms, the key factors in analysing the projects are (a) who can participate – that is, on what principles the constituency is formed – and (b) what they can do – that is, what they can influence and make decisions about. In a democratic system, the possibility of participation should be offered to all who want it. In art, however, there might be rational (artistic or other) reasons to limit or predefine access. Similarly, when the process is totally determined by the artist, it cannot be called democratic, and the more the decision-making power is shared, the

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The Participator in Contemporary Art more democratic the process is. An open call granting autonomous participation best fulfils the requirements of democracy. There is no predefined necessity for art projects to strive for maximum democracy and for the participants always to have full autonomy in their participation. It is unnecessary to criticise a project for the lack of democracy, when that clearly is not part of its structure or, on the contrary, to try to defend it as a ‘different’ kind of democracy. Projects that are closed and allow only passive participation have nothing democratic in them for the participators: they volunteer to give up their autonomy and to work for the theme chosen by the artist. They may still find participating interesting or rewarding in some way, although these projects also risk being exploitative. Nevertheless, they can present an important contribution and trigger discussion precisely because they are provocative. None of the art projects is totally democratic: even when the participants produce the content and make other decisions about the work, the limits of participation are set by the artist and the final responsibility and authorship rest with him or her.

Models of Being Together The next question to be asked is ‘What is the point?’ or ‘What is it for?’ – that is, what purpose does the appearance of art that entails active participation from audience members serve in society? And why are the forms and structures of participation significant? Participatory art can be current and relevant in two ways: in its content or in its form. It can deal with a specific issue (male prostitution, homelessness etc.) or it can structure the relationships within the work in a pertinent way. The case study projects explicitly deal with acute questions about contemporary societies and engage with current debates in their content; they make statements, ask questions and provoke discussion about important issues. The following paragraphs, however, will explore the latter aspect, the form. The difference represented by ‘politics of form’ as opposed to political content can be exemplified by Hito Steyerl’s hint about how to recognise the political in art: ‘Simply look at what it does—not what it shows.’41 She talks about the working conditions in the art field and about the contradiction between this reality and the ‘political’ message included in the works that target their criticism at faraway places and problems but 148

The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation remain quiet when it comes to the same injustices persisting within their own environment. Here Steyerl’s recommendation is used to look at how the projects organise relations between the actors – their perfomative aspect – instead of focusing only on the topic they talk about – the discursive aspect. In their relation to the political, social and economic environment, participatory projects adopt two approaches in creating social situations: they either take the oppressive neo-liberal and capitalist structures and relationships – extensive commodification of just about anything, omnipresence of marketing, subjugating other values to profit making, and precariousness of the work force – as a reference point and mimic them, or they refuse them altogether and instead offer an alternative. The first method shares the same ground with its target and attacks it by exaggerating and over-imitating it ad absurdum. This approach is used for example by Santiago Sierra, Vanessa Beecroft and Renzo Martens (see Working for the Artist in Chapter 4, Contracts of Participation). Their projects do not make representations of repressive relationships but create such relationships and stage them in a blatantly explicit way. The social situations or figurations in these projects are obviously not equal or democratic and therefore raise questions of an ethical nature.42 All questioning of whether we should accept exploitation and injustice in the name of art are directed back to the asker with a question as to why we tolerate injustice in social relations in general. Takala’s Trainee or Real Snow White similarly adopt the roles offered by society and take them to an extreme. This approach does not change the world or imagine a better one; it just frames it and presents it. Instead of attacking the system as directly activist art does, these projects seemingly comply with it and create a parody or a grotesque but arguably truthful portrait of its structures and values. The other option is to refuse to play with the rules of the surrounding world and to create alternative worlds instead. Taking advantage of the art world, projects such as Free Shop or Voracidad Maxima create situations and establish relationships that would be unlikely to take place within the conventions of society. Art is used, as Bourriaud describes, to fill the cracks in the social bond and as ‘new models of sociability’;43 art projects create situations that would not be otherwise possible. Tunick’s Nude Adrift or Höller’s Test Sites also make use of the physical and mental space provided by art to create new forms of togetherness.

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The Participator in Contemporary Art This approach could be called ‘worlding’, to take an expression used in the discourse of social movements. This is what we mean by ‘worlding’: by envisaging a different world, by acting in a different world we actually call forth that world. It is only because we have, at least partially, moved out of what makes ‘sense’ in the old world that another world can start to make its own sense.44

Worlding points to something else, to something that does not yet exist; it means imagining the world and acting it out. Superflex’s Karlskrona2 operates in this way in a real and a virtual environment; their Free Shop acts out cracks in commodified and monetised capitalist social relations. These art projects offer a chance to conceive an alternative world for ourselves in relation to the dehumanising one we find ourselves inhabiting. Both of the strategies outlined above are performative in the sense that they do rather than say, act rather than show. The participants and the viewers are drawn into a situation that affects them on some level. The discussion about art’s political relevance is often formed around the question of whether art can bring about social change: Can art actually have an effect on how things are arranged, can it change the world? When art is understood as forging relationships and social situations, the question about whether art can affect people’s lives or change society is misplaced; by definition, it affects people and objects and the ways in which their interactions occur. The projects in this study present encounters on a small scale and suggest that art may provide opportunities for alternative ways of being together: models of collectives, of sharing space with others and of relationships between individuals. For Bourriaud, art is about real social encounters, not about representations. For the projects in the groups ‘Target’ and ‘User’, into which most of Bourriaud’s examples fall, the formation of the situation happens simultaneously with the experiencing of it, in ‘real time’. In groups ‘Material’ and ‘Co-creator’, there is a delay that allows for a representation to be formed: these projects occur as immediate, real encounters for the participators, but they also produce an image, a representation, of these encounters. For example, Tunick’s photo shoots or Dias & Riedweg’s Voracidad Maxima create situations, which can provide a powerful experience of an unusual form of togetherness for 150

The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation the participants, and they also exist as a recorded document of this situation: as images of collectives. The question of the wider political relevance of participatory art connects with aspects of the public sphere and collective action, and how the works distribute the ‘sensible’ – the possibilities for thinking, acting, being seen and heard – or how they do ‘worlding’, that is, reimagine and remodel a new world. Again, how these dimensions are constructed and managed depends on the type of project. One dimension in the agent/object structure is the allocation of visibility and voice. It is characteristic of the ‘Co-creator’ projects that the participators are also heard and have a voice whereas participators as objects, as ‘Material’, are not. In the Complaints Choir and Voracidad Maxima, the participants are not only seen – and in the latter they are not even seen in a way that would allow recognition – but also voice their concerns, opinions or stories. This type of project can therefore with good reason be called ‘conversational’ – Grant Kester’s preferred term.45 They allow all the parties to be recognised as interlocutors. The experiences of the chaperos during the production process evidence the empowering effect of an opportunity to tell others about themselves in their own words: ‘The interview was also fun. It was an unexpected chance for me to think about my life. To turn the film back. To go back. It was good for me.’ And further: ‘While all the others with whom I spend my days force me to forget who I am, this guy politely asks me to remember it’.46 Some projects based on collaborative participation also reduce the visibility of the participants in order to guarantee a safe platform for their voice to be heard, as was the case with Voracidad Maxima. A comparable example would be Gillian Wearing’s video work Confess All On Video. Don’t Worry You Will Be in Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian (1994), which shows people making confessions, their features hidden behind a mask. On the one hand, visibility functions as a means of control: a body that can be seen can be defined from the outside and remains under control. On the other hand, what is not seen can be ignored, and becoming visible functions as a claim to be recognised and respected. Exposure in public as well as claiming a presence for those formerly excluded and repressed, also exposes them to use and abuse.47 People devoid of voice but exposed to visibility risk being defined as targets and victims instead of full agents. Particularly in the position as

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The Participator in Contemporary Art ‘Material’, exposed bodies become objectified and silenced. This could happen by directly ordering the participators into silence (as Vanessa Beecroft does) or by distancing them physically (Sierra’s Person in the Ditch). An efficient means of silencing is photography (Beecroft, Tunick). The genre of photography showing anonymous persons posing for the camera has been critically compared with ethnographic photography tradition aiming at classifying and controlling its subjects. The other obvious source, fashion photography, is no less suspect with its tendency to commodify the body, the female body in particular, as a possessable object.48 For other artists and writers, however, becoming visible means claiming a presence in the public sphere. The presence of a body in a public place has value in itself: it is a political act.49 In Hannah Arendt’s thought, action can only take place within what she calls the realm of appearance, a necessary space not only for political interaction but for human existence in general. She further compares political action to theatre and outlines the standpoints of actor and spectator as interdependent and indispensable for each other’s existence.50 Therefore, projects such as Antony Gormley’s One & Other have political significance as they create pathways for stepping from the audience into visibility and back again. Activist art – as well as civil activism in general – often operates via display, making visible and directing attention to the presence of a group of people, such as a racial, sexual or ethnic minority. As an example of the 1980s activist art strategies, the well-known Kissing Doesn’t Kill, Greed and Indifference Do (1989) campaign by Gran Fury showed three kissing couples of mixed race and sex, hence playing on the visibility of repressed groups of people.51 In a political struggle, seeing and showing are used strategically. Unlike social and political actions, art projects are mostly an artist’s initiative and decision to bring bodies into public, not a spontaneous or self-organised movement or demonstration. Judging which side of visibility a specific art project falls on is not a straightforward task. Sometimes it is not even clear who is exposed, the participator or the viewer, let alone what impact this visibility has. For example, in Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument in Kassel, visitors to the Turkish neighbourhood had a feeling of being an object of gaze at the same time as they came to visit people who were staged as an art project.52 In Sierra’s and Beecroft’s projects the relationship between the exposed

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The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation body and the spectator becomes part of the work itself. Participatory art projects create concrete experiences as well as intellectual debate about these questions. The use of photography reflects the same division between active agency and a position as object of gaze or photography. The camera in ‘Target’ group is used in a clandestine way, as in ‘candid camera’, and the target is ‘caught’ unaware and ‘natural’. In ‘Material’ mode the photography is used as documentary, either to capture an instance of posing for the camera (Tunick, Beecroft) or to eternalise and document a situation in a ‘realist’ mode (Sierra). ‘User’ category, logically, gives more power to the participators to decide if and how they want to be photographed. In the same way as they can move between the participator and spectator positions, they may take turns in posing for and taking photos. It is no coincidence that Erwin Wurm’s show in 2002 was used as a testing ground for using mobile phone cameras in an exhibition. User projects can also be ‘selfie’ platforms par excellence. In ‘Co-production’ projects the camera is often handed over to the participator and she or he can influence in which direction it is aiming. The device resembles the concept of counter-camera or citizen-TV, a tool of empowerment and protest. Antony Gormley’s One & Other (see Figure 5.1) serves as an illustrative example of how public exposure and interrelational figurations are structured in a project that not only is built as a collective effort in a public space but also presents publicity and collectiveness as the subject of the work.53 As a project that brought 2,400 individuals to a public square, on a par with army leaders and national heroes, One & Other undeniably presents a visualisation of a collective and a political statement. This collective performance happened in time, over a hundred days, and not in one moment as with Tunick’s Nude Adrift, which also brought nearly 2,000 people onto a public square, in front of the Supreme Court in Helsinki, simultaneously. Unlike Nude Adrift, which had no immediate audience, One & Other unfolded in the presence of a live audience on the square. The individuals standing on the empty plinth were juxtaposed with the permanent statues on the other three plinths around it. Visually, the human scale and a living person remain inferior to the monumental size of the sculptures. On the other hand, their presence was enhanced by the video camera that allowed the online spectators close contact with the

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Figure 5.1 Antony Gormley, One & Other, 2009, Trafalgar Square, London. An aerial work platform takes the next person onto the plinth and the previous one down.

person. The ‘monumentality’ of the project was not built by sheer volume – the size of the statue or the quantity of the people – but by duration. The project brought forth a parade of individuals to occupy the plinth hour by hour for a hundred days or for 2,400 uninterrupted hours. Dario Gamboni proposes the concept of ‘composite portraiture’ for an image that visualises a collective entity, such as a state, through its individual parts. Traditionally, the community or the nation has been represented by one person, a ruler, who stands for the people. In early modern Europe, a composite portrait using ‘double mimesis’ was developed, in which a larger figure is composed of smaller creatures. The most famous of these is the frontispiece illustration of Hobbes’ Leviathan: a giant figure of the sovereign composed of a multitude of tiny citizens (Figure 5.2).54 Leviathan presents a theory of state in which all men make a ‘social contract’ and agree to give up their right of self-government to a person or 154

The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation

Figure 5.2 Frontispiece (detail) of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, engraving by Abraham Bosse, 1651.

an assembly authorised to act in their name. The delegation of agency is illustrated via a personification, the composite portrait, which represents this unity or ‘body politic’. Becoming one is understood as more powerful than the multiplicity, more than the sum of its parts. Photography has given rise to two strands of modern composite portraits. Computerised photomontage allows the production of photomosaics that can comprise hundreds of small images. In their form, these pictures correspond to the early composite portraits built through double-mimesis. On the other hand, photography is used for serial studies of the individual and the group, in which members of a specific social group are shot following an unchanging protocol to present individuals in a uniform manner. Gamboni mentions Zhuang Hui and Charles Fréger; other artists working in this method are for example Thomas Ruff, Gillian Wearing or Rineke Dijkstra, whose projects present individuals as part of a collective.55 Even a project such as Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ Touch Sanitation might be considered one of this type, as it depicts a professional group, although the photographs are not portraits in the traditional sense but rather the documentation of an event, of the encounter between the worker and the artist. Unlike in a

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The Participator in Contemporary Art series compiled by the artist, One & Other or Nude Adrift gather groups of people who are self-appointed participants responding to an open call and hence present a more open concept of a collective. The participants in Nude Adrift are facing the viewer like the citizens of Leviathan, but they do not form the figure of a human being. They stand on the square in their own right, albeit at the same time creating an artwork.56 In One & Other, people take turns; the monument is a process in time. In this case, too, it is a question of self-representation in the framework of art. The project, however, was also described as ‘a living portrait of the nation’, hence introducing the idea of a collective portrait in the name of national unity.57 Participation, nevertheless, was based on an open call and anyone was electable; the choice of participants among the applications was made by chance, based on equal opportunity rather than predefined worth or fame as with the effigies of heroes on the other plinths, the official representations of political institutions. People in squares have become a global image of political resistance. Trafalgar Square is also a site for political rallies and demonstrations and for public celebrations. With One & Other, it seemed as if the people usually gathered at the feet of the rulers had finally climbed up on the pedestal. This act, unsurprisingly, attracted criticism; people were transgressing their rank. The accusations were the usual ones presented against participation in general and were brought forward by laypeople and professional critics alike: lack of quality, talent, skill or artistry and general incompetence on the one hand; exploitation of the participants on the other.58 Many commentators compared the project with reality TV such as Big Brother and Britain’s Got Talent and accused the project of exhibitionism and a tendency towards the spectacular. The project attracted a great deal of attention in public and social media. The Guardian, quoting Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, titled it twitter art.59 The online presence was partly installed as part of the work itself. It was further richly documented and amplified in spontaneous social media.60 To a certain extent the physical part of One & Other also functioned in the manner of social media platforms by creating a space for people’s self-presentation. The fact of the plinth providing a place to be seen and heard in public was to a large extent referred to in derogatory terms. Participants were seen as attention-seekers and exhibitionists, aspiring to celebrity. An ordinary

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The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation person claiming a place in the public sphere was hence not viewed positively, even when many ‘plinthers’ did not appear for themselves but for a cause they were supporting. In addition to the mistrust of laypeople, a couple of commentators expressed suspicion about the organisers and the top-down management of the project, calling it ‘Let’s all make the plebs feel special’ art, or observing that it ‘gives the impression that we can only be creative and artistic when the “gatekeepers” allow us to be’. This possibly accurate observation about controlled access to participation does not, however, lead to a request for more opportunities for equality and participation. The thousands of people who embraced the opportunity and applied for a slot obviously felt differently, and some professional critics equally saw the project’s creative and democratic potential.61 The real living persons and bodies are essential in One & Other.62 Despite the stated intention of forming a ‘portrait’, they do not create a personification of a political unity: they are a disorderly crowd, not a recognisable pattern. Rather, they correspond to what Hobbes saw as the opposite of the people: the unorganised, uncontrolled multitude against which the ‘people’ was formed. For Hobbes, this ‘multitude’ consists of individuals outside the social contract – a rabble, not part of the ‘people’ at the core of the state.63 Some contemporary political philosophers have rearticulated the concept of multitude in more positive terms. Paolo Virno theorises the multitude as a middle region between private and public, individual and collective, which increasingly gets blurred.64 As opposed to Hobbes’ understanding of multitude as chaos, for Virno there is a unity, a One, also in the multitude but of a different kind. It is not something towards which things converge (such as ‘people’ or state) but a starting point. In the present-day world the separation between ‘us’, or inside, and ‘them’, or outside, as articulated by the concept of the ‘people’, is no longer possible. The unknown, the stranger or the threat is not the outside, against which the unity is constituted, but around and inside the present multitude – people are united by being exposed to the world and by not feeling at home.65 The multitude is a group of people that cannot be classified under a category such as class, party, ethnicity or nation. Virno proposes the concept of the ‘multitude’ as a mode of being and the new political subjectivity in the present, post-Fordist society; it articulates the relationship of One and Many in a new way.66

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The Participator in Contemporary Art In the light of these thoughts, could participatory works be understood as instances of the multitude? Open participatory projects, at least, could not be thought of as ‘composite’ portraiture, as representing a united collective; neither would participants in direct democracy or a produsage project delegate their agency to anyone or anything to represent them or act on their behalf. The concept of the ‘multitude’ provides an alternative to the model that represents the rule of ‘the one’ over ‘the many’ and organises people in single units such as ‘the people’ or the ‘community’ and which, in Rancière’s terms, are aspects of ‘police’. Projects differ as to whether they have a predefined entity as a starting point or not and how they deal with it. Among the case studies, Person in the Ditch focuses on a social group defined from the outside (the homeless), and treats them as ‘cases’. Voracidad Maxima also deals with a limited group of people (male prostitutes), but it does not address them as a collective but as individual persons. The Trainee was located in a working community, an existing group of people who are connected to each other; however, it had a disruptive effect on the community rather than a uniting one. In projects that operate on an open invitation, such as One Minute Sculpture, Nude Adrift, Complaints Choir or One & Other, there is no unity already there, waiting to be involved or represented. They could be described as emerging from the multitude and creating political communities instead of identity-based or, to use Virno’s vocabulary, substantial communities; in spatial terms, they engage groups that are not connected to a special dedicated location or place but who instead come together to occupy a space and to act for a cause. In this respect, the group in an art project is a political collective, a group that acts together beyond or regardless of any pre-existing unifying principle. It can be claimed that projects taking place in a gallery gather people from similar backgrounds and that, in a sense, we could even talk about a gallery-goers’ community.67 The participants in the projects, however, are people previously unknown to each other and no selection or control of participation is carried out. In particular, participatory art that operates under the title of ‘community art’ has been criticised for a simplified conception, a communitarian and identity-based understanding of ‘community’.68 An alternative understanding is inspired by Jean-Luc Nancy’s (re)thinking of the concept under the heading of ‘inoperative community’ – a line of

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The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation thought that starts from relations, not from subjects, and builds on the notions of ‘being-in-common’ or ‘being-with’. Community is not a product that can be built or ordered into being, or used as a tool to other objectives; rather, being relational is the starting point: being-with is constitutive of being itself.69 The similarity with the discourse on the multitude is striking, and parallel to Virno’s critique of ‘substantial communities’. Nancy talks about ‘exclusive communities’ and what a nonexclusive community would mean. The contradictory understandings of the concept of ‘community’ can be located in the ways in which it is used within different institutional frameworks. Particularly in art projects commissioned by a local or government authority or by publicly funded institutions under pressure to act as ‘centres of inclusion’ (as discussed in regard to cultural policies, see the chapter Artwork as a Network), participatory projects are framed with a managerial predefined notion of community.70 Unquestioned institutional policies may actually contradict the principles of participatory projects. Although governments, local or central, outline their role as to empower communities, in the hands of authorities and when applied from the outside onto a group of people, concepts such as ‘nation’ and ‘community’ appear as means of ruling or managing people rather than empowering them; empowering from the outside, or ‘giving a voice’, is a top-down strategy. Yet, the interpretation of whether it is a question of ‘one’ or of ‘many’ is not always unambiguous. The ‘one’ in the title One & Other could equally refer to an individual on the plinth or a supra-individual unity. In either case, the ‘other’ would then designate another individual, an other, or the other as external to the unity, the other, that is, those not appearing in or represented by the work. Whether the participants are further understood to represent a larger collective, a nation (by pars pro toto rather than by delegation), is a question of interpretation. Gormley’s definition of the work as ‘a living portrait of the nation’ promotes this idea.71 According to Charlotte Higgins, he could also have called it a ‘composite picture’ of Britain, closely resembling Gamboni’s ‘composite portrait’.72 Considering the way in which it was conceived, ‘a living portrait of a multitude’ would perhaps have sounded more appropriate: the plinthers were randomly chosen from a self-appointed list of candidates, and they represented, or rather presented, themselves and things they cared for, not a unifying

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The Participator in Contemporary Art concept or myth. They formed a temporary and temporal community, defined by the parameters of the artwork. A project for comparison in terms of the ambivalence of representing a supra-individual unity is Steve McQueen’s Queen and Country, a cabinet of postage sheets of each soldier who died in the war in Iraq between 2003 and 2008. The work unambiguously refers to a nation united under a sovereign. Unlike giant statues and the personality cults of totalitarian regimes, it is made of individual human faces, miniature portraits in the form of stamps. At the same time the soldiers pictured in the stamps are subjects of a sovereign, visually represented by the profile of the queen in the corner of each stamp. The dead soldiers participate, through the images provided by their relatives, in a representation of ‘the people’. They give their faces – and their lives – to the nation, but everything else referring to their individuality or personal life is screened off (or the network is cut). They are presented as pawns – a metaphor for an individual deprived of agency – in the military order. The private grief of the families, who are the direct participants in the project, is subsumed into the official mission of the nation. To what extent Queen and Country is patriotic or critical of such sentiments remains debatable. The project is presented as a tribute to those who lost their lives in service to their country but, on the other hand, Royal Mail refused to officially issue the postage stamps. Gamboni brings up a comparable ambiguity concerning two photo-mosaics, one representing George W. Bush made of photographs of the American troops who had died in Iraq, the other a portrait of Tony Blair composed of the British service personnel who had died in international military operations since his election. The first one was entitled War President and the latter Faces We Must Never Forget, suggesting two opposite readings of a similar composition.73 Whichever reading one adopts, critical or celebratory, the subject of Queen and Country still gravitates around the concept of national unity and the state represented by its army. The multitude, meanwhile, cannot be represented; it can only act on its own behalf. Despite the respectful nod towards the idea of nationhood by Gormley, One & Other and projects like it provide forms of collectivity and sociability that are different from official monuments or organised structures sanctioned by systems of governance and administration. At best, they catalyse and channel the political energies of non-represented

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The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation individuals (or non-representable multitude) such as the paperless people in New York via Tania Bruguera’s IMI project. Platform projects such as Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures or Höller’s slides may be less obviously political, but they too present unexpected ways of coming together outside existing structures. Participatory projects can create communities rather than rely on existing ones. They gather people together around a cause or simply an art experience. Evidence of this community construction is, for example, the two young artist-activists, who infiltrated one of Beecroft’s projects (see ‘Material’) intending to sabotage it as part of their personal feminist agenda. The main reason why the intruders eventually did not carry out their planned sabotage was their solidarity with the fellow participants they had worked with for three days.74 Another instance of a spontaneous emerging community was the decision of the participants in the Helsinki Complaints Choir to produce a T-shirt as a souvenir of the experience. This was arranged independently without the artists’ involvement in any way. Tunick’s followers, as we have seen, have organised themselves to form a virtual club of people with an online platform. A participant in Sehgal’s These Associations equally evidences how bonding and group spirit developed during the process: ‘Quite how and when we came together and merged into a collective body [. . .] is unclear to me.’ And: ‘We were always encouraged to think of ourselves in connection to the group, rather than as separate entities.’75

Fears and Hopes of Participation Participatory culture currently receives a lot of attention. As part of its exposure and popularity, views tend to become polarised; participation is seen either as a revolution or as a nightmare.76 Leaving aside the hype at both extremes, it is useful to try and summarise what is ‘new’ about the new approach and how participation in art is compatible with developments in other areas of social life. For Bruns, the new model of production – produsage as opposed to an industrial production model – indicates that there is a fundamental change in operation on a more general level in society. He even defines it as a new paradigm.77 For him, the same principles apply to other fields of life, such as journalism, education or democracy. All the above changes – user161

The Participator in Contemporary Art centeredness, anti-authoritarianism and community or crowd production – indicate a move from hierarchical structures to lateral relationships and from unilinear, one-directional flow to networks without a controlling centre. They are also typical of Web 2.0, which has become a general symbol of user-led practices and of the participatory culture. Many areas of activity that share the same characteristics have been given the epithet 2.0, such as Library 2.0 or Museum 2.0.78 The Web 2.0 environments are not tied together by one control centre but by a set of protocols and agreements – as indeed are participatory art projects. As we have seen earlier in this chapter, participatory art challenges the prevailing political culture in promoting direct participation instead of a representative model. In terms of economic logic, the type of production in which use is productive, and in fact increases the product’s value rather than consuming it, works against the market logic that is based on making profit on the rapid circulation of consumer goods produced with minimum labour. Similarly, Web 2.0 solutions are built on an ‘architecture of participation’, meaning that users are considered as a resource rather than as cost or target; they add value to a service, which gets better when more people use it as opposed to consuming it, which by definition uses up or exhausts the product.79 Artworks that resist buying and selling, such as environment art or ‘unsalable’ installations, have led the way in this direction, but participatory art adds a layer to the process by raising produsage over consumerism. Participatory art processes come close to the production of commons – exemplified by the Creative Commons – as opposed to for-profit production. ‘Commoning’ is characterised by features such as decentralised, collective production, inclusiveness, free and open-source methods and technologies, peer-to-peer processes, and the principle of sharing.80 Some art projects, such as Complaints Choir, fulfil these criteria perfectly, some others only to a limited extent. Thinking and acting against ownership conflicts with the values and operational logic of the art world, in which the understanding of the artist and the artwork is largely based on ownership and property (as discussed in connection to produsage and contracts), and art institutions, whether privately or publicly funded, function within the market logic (as discussed in connection to structures of production). Proposing something else even on the level of thought seems out of place. Michel Bauwens explains:

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The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation We are coming out of 300 years of a system where people were led to believe that only self-interested exchange would bring progress to themselves and society, and that such exchanges had to be mediated by institutions such as the state and large corporations.81

The comments dismissing participation in, for instance, One & Other as unpaid content provision become understandable against this background. It is beyond the commentator that people would participate in an art project for other than economic reasons, and hence come across as being duped by the artist.82 The unwitting participants in Free Shop are equally astonished about the suspension of economic exchange and consider it either as a miracle or an assault. Encountering non-economic interaction in a world dominated by capitalism is an anomaly. The suggested economic revision does not reside on the level of the production of art projects, which, as discussed, is firmly positioned within institutional funding structures and the art market, but rather in the ways in which the projects are constructed and in the exchange relations they elicit, that is within the projects themselves. As to forms of democracy, the main change similarly happens in how the projects are constructed internally and what possibilities they offer for participation. There are fewer possibilities for participation offered on the level of institutions and the production framework: audiences are not usually invited to make decisions about, for example, what kind of art is produced.83 Tension, sometimes even conflict, seem to arise when art projects challenge the production and exhibition logic within which the institutions operate. Another aspect of the user-centeredness is the relationship to expertise and professionalism. According to Bruns, rigid expert models are counterproductive in the produsage environment. Expert –amateur and teacher –learner relations have to be rethought.84 On an institutional level, a user-led social web bypasses authorised channels, making authorities and institutions lose control of production and communication; this also happens with art institutions.85 Regarding individual projects, the artist as an authorised person is sharing his or her artistic authority with participators and giving space for different kinds of expertise. As discussed earlier, this can happen on several levels and loosening authority does not mean giving up the final authorship of the artwork. It is, however, a new feature in art, at least as a standard practice, to leave the responsibility of

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The Participator in Contemporary Art the content to non-art professionals. The ‘Material’ group, however, stands apart from the rest in this respect. Shared responsibility suggests a situation in which new democratic relationships are established. Participators engage directly in the process, not via representatives or proxies. Participatory art projects are based on trust in the participators. As no advance control exists, projects rely on participators’ willingness to act constructively and on their ability to produce meaningful content. Some art projects place immense trust in participators as cocreators; in the beginning, only a structure may be prepared and there is no certainty or even indication of what the content will be.86 The sharing of expertise usually provokes a fair amount of resistance. Endorsement of participation is blamed for expanding and exacerbating amateurism. Participatory projects allow non-art professionals to (co-)produce artworks, which brings closer the threat of the commonplace and of mediocrity.87 Similar charges are pressed against any kind of open participation, and the claim is that it means a decline of quality, the reign of amateurism and, at worst, total anarchy when anyone anywhere is able to publish texts, blogs, music, photographs or any other kind of creations for a wide public.88 In terms of democracy, this represents mistrust of citizens and of democratic participation. To an important extent, media technology would drive change related to the produsage model and Web 2.0, but beyond the technical innovations, both entail a model of human relations and interaction, characterised by the idea of open participation. In the field of art, new media signifies changes that some writers see as a categorical break away from the concept of art in general.89 According to Bruns, even if many of these models are built on the availability of technologies for networking and collaboration, it is not a question of technological determinism: the change is not inherent in technology itself, but generated by ways of using it.90 Participatory art is in concert with digital and open-source processes and could be seen as a part of a wider change in the modus operandi of societal interactions. However, the possibilities for art of bringing about a real change are limited. Alana Jelinek expresses her suspicion towards art forms that mimic radical action, education or activism. Compared to real activism, art projects easily sound false and fall short of real impact.91 The artist collective BAVO warns about what they call ‘NGO art’ as false activism

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The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation that claims to work for a social cause but avoids talking about any wider political issues.92 The sense of futility of socially engaged art may even be one reason for the above-described trend to exaggerate the existing inequality and exploitation as opposed to tending towards a socially ameliorative approach. The main challenge to critique, however, is co-option. All the case studies in this investigation are part of the mainstream art world, of ‘biennial art’. They can be part of political discussion and provide alternative models and experiences of togetherness outside the everyday but, as part of the established art world, their subversive power is limited. Art projects may undermine the logic of the art world and capitalism, but radicalness easily gets co-opted to adorn the organising institution as a marker of progressiveness and innovation.93 The risk is even greater as the language of horizontality looks the same when used in mainstream neoliberal post-Fordism as that used for widening democracy: participation is seen positively and audience engagement is encouraged although the motives may be totally different.94 This happens, for example, when activities with educational purposes are diverted into marketing, as visitors and users of educational activities and services are seen as potential customers for the museum and its sponsors.95 Art activity is part of a wider network of relations that may distort or even contradict the explicit aims of the project, and a benevolent inclusive project may contribute to the very structures it seeks to criticise because it takes place in a context that contradicts its aims. Andrea Fraser, among others, asks how and if it is possible to make art that is critical of, for example, globalisation and capitalism and yet distribute it through channels that are permeated by these forces. She reminds the art world of these bonds: ‘We are the 1%.’ Notwithstanding the intended critical message, operating in the art world unwittingly supports the system; there is no outside from where to act, and acting within the frame reproduces and perpetrates an unjust system.96 Truly radical activism takes place under the radar, and pockets of resistance exist outside mainstream art. Street art, squatters, environmentalist groups, promoters of alternative economies and forms of work, and artist collectives would be more promising places to look for such art. The dynamics of engineering effective projects and challenging prevailing hierarchies, as many participatory projects do, while at the

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The Participator in Contemporary Art same time working within those structures, is a familiar situation for any individual or group acting in a subordinate position. The dilemma for feminist practice, for example, articulated as a ‘double bind’, is whether accepting a place inside the hegemonic (or patriarchal) system will compromise the struggle that aims at changing the system: Will including more women artists in exhibitions change anything in the art world or just replace old names with some new ones and maintain a system that structurally discriminates against women? Is demanding visibility for women artists in mainstream institutions equal to ‘gaining fishing rights in a private brook’ as Lucy Lippard has it?97 In a similar way it is possible to ask if criticising neo-liberalism or globalism in a globalised neo-liberal framework changes or instead consolidates it. Or would the right move be to attack the unjust system from the outside? According to Nancy Proctor, both moves are necessary. Two seemingly contradictory strategies need to be applied at once: marginalised voices should be included and empowered but in order for them to be heard it is necessary to dismantle the structures that produced the marginalisation.98 In terms of participatory art, this could mean cultivating alternative, convivial, relation-building projects, while at the same time encouraging antagonistic, conflictual and subversive practices. Would it be possible to do the two opposing things at the same time? Simon Critchley seems to think it is. His example is Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe’s project No Ghost Just a Shell, built around a manga character Annlee they bought for 46,000 yen. It hence operated in the commercial field but also, according to Critchley, managed to subvert it and to free the character from its role as a commercial product. He sees a similar thing happening in instances where events in other fields of activity take the form of art or are seen through the art framework and reframed as art: Critchley mentions Zuccotti Park as a relational work and compares it to Hirschhorn’s transient installations.99 Such complying and subverting acts could also include the use of art world structures for other purposes, such as the Platform collective using their Arts Council grant to take part in climate protests in Copenhagen in 2009 or Ai Weiwei bringing 1,001 Chinese people to Kassel as part of an artwork. Such instances confirm that, in some way, art has become a central category in society.

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Postscript

In her analysis of social life, vita activa, Hannah Arendt placed art in the category of ‘work’, which in her theory is about creating the tangible world: work creates objects that have a purpose and can be used. As opposed to ‘action’, the category of dealing with people, work manipulates matter. Arendt’s third category ‘labour’ refers to maintaining the conditions of life and relates to the biological side of human life, from which work and action arise.1 ‘Action’, living with other people – the basic ‘human condition’ – takes place in public, the in-between space, which is created whenever people get together; action is hence the sphere of politics, of political action. When art takes its form and themes from interaction and human relationships, it seems to have grown out of the category of ‘work’ and started to resemble ‘action’.2 It takes part in the creation of the world between people and provides space for politics. This book has investigated artworks that specialise in creating spaces for action and relationships between people. Apart from a brief excursion into action-network analysis and human –object relations in connection to one project, the focus has been on human relationships. Objects play a role, or many different roles, in these encounters, but restricting attention to the interpersonal aspect has allowed us to acquire a better and more detailed understanding of participatory art as social event and of the interaction that takes place. The art explored in this book has created new ways in which people come together and, to use Simmel’s expression, ‘exist beside, for, and with each other’.3 These ‘ways of being’ are at least as important as the issues the works deal with. Focusing on the participator, not as an ‘activated spectator’ but as a role in its own right, has brought to light the different

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The Participator in Contemporary Art ways in which these relationships and situations are constructed. Participatory projects are figurations, to use Elias’ term, comprising artists, participators, spectators, as well as curators, producers and other professional staff. The arrival of the participator has shaken up habitual patterns, and relationships are being negotiated anew. Sometimes, as we have seen, conventional agreements have to be enforced by explicit contracts. The study has aimed at developing tools and more specific vocabulary to describe and analyse some of the new art forms. It has analysed the parameters that regulate participation and identified the different participator functions as target, user, material and co-creator. An important dimension in any participation is the autonomy of the participator and the agency it allows. As Elias has stated, the players in the figuration have unequal possibilities of affecting how the game evolves. Those in a position to decide about the rules have the most power. Artists use their authority to allocate participators varying amount of agency. Sometimes, although rarely, as we have seen, the participators refuse to obey the rules and seize power in unexpected ways. Even the artists are players in a figuration that limits their freedom to move. The important aspect here is that the chosen viewpoint guides us to see participatory projects as processes and webs of relations instead of objects or projects with clear outlines. In these complex and multidimensional networks the actors depend on each other, and their behaviour and actions only become understandable in relation to others and as part of a figuration. Elias’ warning against substantialisation, conceiving processes as ‘things’, is apt regarding participatory art. The way we use language easily misleads us. To avoid falling into this trap, I have conceived the participator as a function or a role that can be assumed, and preferred the concepts of participation and participating to participatory art. Each language has ways of defining relations. One of these is prepositions. To Simmel’s suggestion above that attention be paid to people existing ‘beside, for, and with’ each other, we can add others. Charles Leadbeater has conceptualised social organisation with the prepositions for, with, by and to. (See chapter Artwork as a Network, ft. 18.) According to him, ‘“For” solutions are delivered to us. “With” solutions are devised cooperatively with others. “By” solutions depend on self-motivation and DIY. “To” solutions depend on instruction, command and coercion to get

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Postscript things done.’4 The models roughly correspond to the categories in the typology which also describe relationships between the participator and the artist and other participators: ‘For’ relates to ‘Target’, ‘With’ to ‘User’, ‘By’ to ‘Co-creator’ and ‘To’ to ‘Material’. Essentially, all these models describe ways of relating to other people. As another linguistic parallel we could say that art is a verb, not a noun. People engage in activities such as to play, to sing, to exchange, to consume, to discuss, to instruct, to care and so forth. All this can be done in active or passive voice: to do or be done to, to look or be looked at, to use or be (ab)used. In the typology, the divider is the vertical line: in ‘Target’ and ‘Material’ categories the participators undergo the action whereas in ‘User’ and ‘Co-creator’ they perform the action. Whatever the choice of prepositions, or active or passive voice, all participation takes place in a power network, and the relationships created in art projects can strive towards equality or accentuate the hierarchical positions. Dias & Riedweg experiment with creating an equal platform with a subaltern group; Free Shop subverts economic exchange relations; in Tunick’s projects, a group of people shares nakedness in public space and creates a temporary utopia – or maybe, for others, a dystopia. People alternate between a position as sculpture and spectator; they are put on the plinth or in the ditch; they are given instructions or asked to make decisions. As Simmel has it, society is formed in the small-scale encounters and the spaces in-between. What kind of societies are formed depends on the relationships. In this perspective, art projects become places for society in the making. They operate in the sphere of ‘action’. In these processes people do not have fixed roles or identities but varying positions as a function of a relational situation. With the choice of perspectives, nonparticipation is also cast as an active position. The responsibility of a spectator and an observer is to be a witness of participation and of the participators being seen and heard. It is an exercise in empathy. Although participation and relationality in art have been actively practised for a couple of decades now, the discussion and the theory are still in flux. Each seminar, symposium, article and book about the topic adds to the discussion and shapes the general understanding. This book has aimed to clear up some of the confusion in the debates by analysing and differentiating between various forms of participation, their theoretical

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The Participator in Contemporary Art background and practical implications. The relative newness of this practice has implications for the producers of art projects as well: it is important for the producing institutions to know what kind of participatory project they are dealing with and what it entails. This study hopes to prove useful also for the organisers of participatory art projects.5 What has not been addressed in this publication are the experiences of individual participants, apart from a few anecdotal accounts. Fortunately, more systematic research is being conducted and published by other experts and, in addition, we can all start accumulating our own experiences as participants and observers of participation.

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Appendix: List of Works

Case Studies Pilvi Takala (1981 – ) The Trainee (2008) An installation consisting of letters and emails, objects, a PowerPoint presentation, and two videos. Takala worked incognito for a month as a ‘trainee’ in the marketing department of Deloitte Helsinki. After an initial period, she introduced various social experiments into the daily routines and documented the reactions. The project was organised by Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma. Superflex (founded 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen) Free Shop (2003 –) When Free Shop takes place in a shop, any goods or services purchased there by any given customer are free of charge. The project has been realised in six cities in the world since 2003 in Germany, Japan, Poland, Denmark, Norway and Finland. Some of people’s reactions are documented in the Free Shop publication downloadable at http://www. superflex.net/freeshop/. Erwin Wurm (1954 – ) One Minute Sculptures An ongoing series since the end of the 1980s of written or drawn instructions for visitors to perform a ‘statue’, and possibly of objects and props to use in these embodiments.

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The Participator in Contemporary Art Michael Lin (1964 – ) Palais de Tokyo, 21-01-2002/21-12-2002 (2002) Installation in Palais de Tokyo, Paris, of a floor painted in big brightcoloured flower patterns, and large cushions and textiles on the lounge chairs and benches. Spencer Tunick (1967 –) Nude Adrift (2002), Helsinki A photograph of nearly 2,000 naked people on a public square; a part of a series of similar installations in different cities. Santiago Sierra (1966 – ) Person in the Ditch measuring 300 £ 500 £ 300 cm. Space between Kiasma Museum and parliament building. Helsinki. Finland. September 2001 A live installation and photographic work made from a still of a documentary video. A homeless person is paid 50 Finnish marks per hour for sitting in a hole in the ground outside the museum. The work was created as a part of a group exhibition ‘ARS 01, Unfolding Perspectives’ at the Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma. Tellervo Kalleinen (1975 –) and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen (1971 –) Helsinki Complaints Choir (2006) A live performance and 8 min. 29s video. People were invited to sing about their complaints in a choir together with fellow complainers. The project was produced as part of a group exhibition ‘ARS 06’ at Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma. Mauricio Dias (1964 – ) and Walter Riedweg (1955 – ) Voracidad Máxima (Maximum Voracity) (2003) Media installation: two-channel video, colour, sound, 71 min 14 s, mirrors, seats and remote control. Eleven videos showing interviews of male sexual workers in Barcelona. The project was commissioned by MACBA, conceived and realised for the exhibition Dias & Riedweg. Possibly Talking about the Same in 2003.

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Appendix

Comparative Works (in Alphabetical Order by Artist) Marina Abramovic (1946 –) Rhythm 0 (1974) A six-hour performance at Galleria Studio Morra in Naples during which Abramovic allowed herself to be manipulated by the public in any way they chose, using a range of objects laid on a table, such as food, tools and weapons. Transitory Objects for Human and Non-Human Use (1988) Shoes, pillows, helmets and other objects made of crystal and other materials, inviting the audience to interact with them. Artist is Present (2010) A performance as part of the exhibition at the MoMA, New York. During the opening hours, the artist sat immobile in the museum’s atrium while spectators were invited to take turns sitting opposite her. A documentary film with the same name was released in 2012. Ai Weiwei (1957 – ) Fairytale and 1001 Chairs (2007). A project in Kassel Documenta Fairytale The project brought 1,001 Chinese citizens to Kassel as tourists in five successive groups, most travelling for the first time. Ai set up a temporary travel agency, designed T-shirts, luggage and their accommodation at the Documenta. 1001 Chairs Chairs from the Ming and Qing dynasties, arranged in circles among the other artworks in the exhibition. Straight and Forge (2008 –12) Two installations made of steel bars from houses destroyed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Ai also conducted a citizens’ investigation to list the names of the dead pupils. Sunflower Seeds (2011) An installation shown at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall from October 2010 to May 2011, made of a hundred million handcrafted porcelain

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The Participator in Contemporary Art seeds produced by an artisan community of Jingdezhen, China. The installation included a documentary film about the project and the possibility for the visitors to record a video either asking him a question or answering one from him. Francis Al€ys (1959 –) Re-enactments (2000) A video of the artist who bought a gun and carried it visibly in the street of Mexico City until he got arrested by two police officers; and a second part in which the police officers re-enact the events with the artist. When Faith Moves Mountains (2002) In this action, 500 students were asked to shovel sand outside Lima to move a sand dune by a few inches. A 15-minute film documenting the ‘making of’ the project was made. In collaboration with Cuauhtémoc Medina and Rafael Ortega. Vanessa Beecroft (1969 –) VB series Beecroft’s hours-long performances, made for specific locations, involve live female models, mostly nude. Video recordings and photographs can be exhibited as documentation of the performances, but also as separate works of art. She entitles her projects from VB01 in 1993 to VB73 in 2014. Wafaa Bilal (1966 –) Shoot an Iraqi (2007) A 30-day performance, originally known as Domestic Tension, in which Bilal confined himself to a small room where he could be seen 24 hours a day via the internet and shot with a paintball gun by the viewers at any time. A book, Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun, came out in 2008. Tania Bruguera (1968 – ) Immigrant Movement International (2010 – 15) A five-year project in Corona, Queens, New York, an artist-initiated sociopolitical movement engaging the local community in diverse partnership projects and exploring the political representation and conditions of immigrants. In collaboration with Creative Time and the Queens Museum of Art. Part of Useful Art, Arte Util, in which ‘art’s function

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Appendix is no longer to be a space for “signaling” problems, but the place from which to create the proposal and implementation of possible solutions’. Angela Bulloch (1966 –) Rule Series (1992 –) ‘Wall paintings’ of texts stencilled onto the gallery’s walls and combined with graphic elements. The sources of the texts are diverse, from art context to WikiLeaks. Martin Creed (1968 – ) Work No. 850 (2008) A runner hired by the artist to run as fast as she or he can across the Duveens Gallery at the Tate Britain every 30 seconds. Mauricio Dias (1964 – ) and Walter Riedweg (1955 – ) Devotionalia (1994 –2003) The artists worked with children in a poor neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro producing ex-voto wax casts of their hands and feet, accompanied by a personal wish. The process was documented on video. Question Marks (1996) A project in two prisons, produced by Conversations at the Castle exhibition (curated by Mary Jane Jacob) in Atlanta. Artists organised workshops with the inmates, resulting in an exhibition and questions painted on car licence plates and circulated around the city. Innendienst (1995) A project with migrant children in Zurich, Switzerland. Workshops were run in 25 classes, resulting in an exhibition at Shedhalle. Inside & Outside the Tube (1998) A project in a refugee centre for political refugees. The result was a sound installation in the city that allowed the participants’ stories to be heard. Mera Vista Point (1999 – 2002) One-minute videos of vendors in a square in Sao Paulo presenting their own stall. Beautiful is also that which is unseen (2002) A video of a performance in which a blind woman reads Homer and Borges on the steps of the National Library in Rio de Janeiro, and three 175

The Participator in Contemporary Art chests of drawers containing a high-relief map of a Brazilian region and video material of the workshops with blind adults. First presented at Sao Paulo Biennial 2002. Rineke Dijkstra (1959–) Beach Portraits (1992–98) A series of photographs of young people on the beach in their swimwear, shot in a uniform way against the empty sea and the sky, slightly from below. The photos were shot in Belgium, Croatia, England, Poland, Ukraine and the United States. New Mothers (1994) A series of full-length portraits of women, who have recently given birth, nude, with their babies, shot against a simple wall. Buzzclub (1996) and Crazyhouse (2010) Two series of videos shot in a back room in two Liverpool music clubs. Young people dance to the camera, one at a time, to their favourite music. I See a Woman Crying (Weeping Woman) (2009) A three-screen video showing only the faces of school children looking at a painting (Picasso’s Weeping Woman 1937) and giving their observations and thoughts about it. Produced with Tate Liverpool. Olafur Eliasson (1967 – ) Weather Project (2003) An installation shown from October 2003 to March 2004 in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, consisting of a big semi-circular form made up of hundreds of lamps and repeated in the mirror overhead, producing a sphere. Andrea Fraser (1965 – ) Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989) The artist acts as a docent giving a tour in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, paying equal attention to the artworks as well as to furniture or other objects such as a drinking fountain.

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Appendix Untitled (2003) A video of a hotel-room sexual encounter between the artist and a private collector. The 60-minute DVD video was sold in five copies, one to the collector himself. Coco Fusco (1960 –) and Guillermo Gomez-Peña (1955 – ) Undiscovered Amerindians Visit the West (1992 – 94) A collaborative performance in which the artists put themselves on display in a cage, advertising that they were native to an undiscovered island off the coast of Mexico, Guatinaui. They wore ‘primitive’ outfits, performed ‘native’ tasks and posed for photographs with the spectators. The work was produced for the ‘quincentenary of the discovery of the Americas’. Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957 –96) ‘Candy Pieces’ Nearly 20 installations of sweets, usually entitled ‘Untitled’, in the corners of the room or spread on the floor, to be consumed by the visitors; stacks of posters to be taken home. Antony Gormley (1950 – ) One & Other (2009) Twenty-four hundred members of the public occupied the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square for an hour each for 100 days. The event was streamed live online. Waste Man (2006) A statue made of waste material collected by the inhabitants of Margate and set on fire at the end of the project. Caroline Deeds directed a 24-minute documentary for Channel 4 of the making and burning of the Waste Man. The Waste Man also has a role in Penny Woolcock’s film Margate Exodus. Gran Fury (founded in 1988) Kissing Doesn’t Kill, Greed and Indifference Do (1989) A public poster project on New York City busses by the activist and artist collective to inform a broad public and to provoke action about AIDS.

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The Participator in Contemporary Art Hans Haacke (1936 –) Manet-project (1974) A proposition for an installation including Manet’s Bunch of Asparagus in Wallraf-Richartz Museum’s collection and documents presenting ‘the social and economic position of the persons who have owned the painting over the years and the prices paid for it’; most of the previous owners had been Jewish. The last panel showed the Nazi connections of the chairman of the Friends of the Museum that had bought and donated the work to the museum. Haacke’s proposal for ‘Project 74’ exhibition was rejected. Jeanne van Heeswijk (1965 – ) 2Up 2Down (2012) A project commissioned by Liverpool Biennial, using two vacant houses and an empty bakery. People from Anfield and Breckfield worked for two years with the artist to remodel a block of empty property and to set up a cooperative business to reopen the bakery as a social enterprise. Thomas Hirschhorn (1957 –) Altars Installations in public places made of non-precious materials that resemble popular, spontaneous altars that people assemble in the streets to memorialise a person who has died or been killed on a certain spot. Bataille Monument (2002) A temporary library, snack bar, TV studio and public sculpture installed in a working-class Turkish-German neighbourhood in Kassel, constructed and maintained by the community members. Carsten Höller (1961 – ) Test Site (2006) A series of five metal slides, one on each floor, that the visitors could slide down in the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern between October 2006 and April 2007; more slides were constructed at the Experience exhibition in October 2011 –January 2012 at New Museum, New York. Kimsooja (1957 –) Needle Woman (1999 –2005) A series of videos showing the artist from the back, standing still in the middle of a busy and crowded street in different cities. 178

Appendix Yves Klein (1928 –62) Anthropometries (1960) A happening in Paris in which the artist painted blue paint on naked women and his assistants used them as human paintbrushes on paper while an orchestra was playing. Suzanne Lacy (1945 – ) The Roof is on Fire (1994) A project in Oakland consisted of 220 public high school students sat in 100 cars parked on a rooftop garage and talking about family, sexuality, drugs, culture, education and the future with over 1,000 Oakland residents listening in. The event was the pubic outcome of a two-year programme with students and teachers from several schools. Michael Lin (1964 – ) Untitled Cigarette Break (1999) A smoking room with two floral-pattern Corbusier arm chairs, an ashtray and floral-pattern wall panels. In Sickness and In Health (2004) A site-specific installation commissioned by the Contemporary Art Museum, St Louis, Missouri. One couple won the opportunity to have their private wedding ceremony in the installation. Day Bed (2001) Site-specific installation as part of ‘ARS01’ exhibition at Kiasma, Helsinki, installed on a bridge connecting two exhibition wings. Goshka Macuga (1967 – ) The Nature of the Beast (2009) Commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery, a round meeting table and a replica of a tapestry of Picasso’s Guernica (located at the United Nations Headquarters in New York) as a backdrop. The artist invites the public to make use of the installation as a meeting room with the sole condition that the participants have to document the meeting in some form. Steve McQueen (1969 –) Queen and Country (2007) A set of 155 sheets of stamps, each sheet commemorating a soldier who lost their life in the war in Iraq between 2003 and 2008, placed in a cabinet with 179

The Participator in Contemporary Art sliding vertical drawers. The images were provided by the families of the dead soldiers. Renzo Martens (1973–) Episode III, Enjoy Poverty (2008) Shot in the Republic of Congo, the 90 minutes film shows the artist encouraging local photographers to capitalise on poverty as their biggest resource by producing images of poverty and disaster instead of leaving it to the international press to profit from. David Medalla (1942 – ) A Stitch in Time (1968 – 72) A series of ‘participation-production’ works where the audience was encouraged to be involved in the production by sewing small objects of significance onto a large cloth in a public space. Robert Morris (1931 –) Bodyspacemotionthings (1971) Tate Gallery, remake at Tate Modern in 2009 An interactive installation constructed of plywood to form platforms, seesaws, tunnels and ramps that the audience was allowed to use and play with. Bruce Nauman (1941 –) Live-taped Video Corridor (1970) A narrow corridor for the visitor to enter. At the end of the corridor there is a monitor showing the person from behind and, as he moves along the corridor towards the monitor, he gets further away from the camera. Another monitor shows a pre-recorded image of the empty corridor. Yoko Ono (1933 –) Cut Piece (1964 – 65) Kyoto, New York and London; repeated in 2003 Paris The spectators were given a pair of scissors to cut away a piece of cloth from the artist’s dress while she sat motionless on the stage. Grapefruit (1964) A book with instructions to be completed in the mind of the reader. Tim Rollins (1955 –2017) and The Kids of Survival (founded in 1984) The group had its beginning at the ‘Art and Knowledge Workshop’ in the Bronx that Rollins launched for a group of at-risk students who named 180

Appendix themselves Kids of Survival, K.O.S. The group produces paintings, sculptures and drawings, often based on printed matter and classic literature. Tino Sehgal (1976 – ) This is So Contemporary (2005) A project in the German Pavilion in the Venice Biennale, where the exhibition guards started singing and dancing around the visitor, chanting ‘Oh, this is so contemporary, contemporary!’ These Associations (2012) A group of performers whose choreographed actions use movement, sound and conversation circulated among the visitors in the Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, and occasionally engaged in a personal contact with them. Santiago Sierra (1966 – ) 133 Persons Paid to Have Their Hair Dyed Blond (2001) Illegal street vendors were asked to agree to have their hair dyed blond and were paid 120,000 lire, some $60, at Venice Biennale. Superflex (founded 1993) Karlskrona2 (1999) An online replica of the Swedish city of Karlskrona, with avatars of the inhabitants and streets and buildings of the city centre. The inhabitants got access via the internet. Superchannel (1999) A network of local studios for people and communities to produce internet TV, to use as a discussion forum, presentation medium and a physical gathering place. Free Beer (2004 –) A project that applies free software/open-source methods to a real-world product; the recipe and branding elements are published under a Creative Commons licence. Copyshop (2005 –07) A shop selling products that challenge intellectual property by modifying or copying products.

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The Participator in Contemporary Art Supercopy (2007 –) A silk screen-printing facility that prints the text SUPERCOPY on counterfeit objects brought in by the public. In this process a copy product is turned into a Supercopy – a new original. Today We Don’t Use the Word Dollars (2009) A project for One Day Sculpture, Auckland, which involved the employees of a bank who could not say or use the word ‘dollars’. If they broke the pact they had to pay a fine of $1 into a staff social fund. Pilvi Takala (1981 – ) Bag Lady (2006) A video of a woman, the artist, walking with a transparent handbag filled with high-denomination banknotes in a busy shopping mall; a week-long project in Berlin. Real Snow White (2009) A video showing the artist attempting to enter Paris Disneyland dressed as Snow White and being refused entrance by security guards. The Committee (2013) A project commissioned by Frieze Projects in which a committee of children between 8 and 12 years decided about the use of the production budget reserved for the project. Mierle Laderman Ukeles (1939 –) Touch Sanitation (1977 –80) The artist met all the 8,500 sanitation workers in New York City and shook their hand saying, ‘Thank you for keeping NYC alive.’ Documented with photographs. Gillian Wearing (1963 – ) Confess All On Video. Don’t Worry You Will Be in Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian. (1994) Videos of participants who took up Wearing’s offer to make their confessions on camera wearing a mask.

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Notes

Introduction 1. The projects referred to in the text are listed in the Appendix. 2. Georg Simmel, Pieni sosiologia (Helsinki: Tutkijaliitto, 1999), translated into Finnish by Kauko Pietilä from Soziologie/Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung 1908 and Grundfragen der Soziologie 1917, pp. 21– 37, 71– 96; David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, eds, Simmel on Culture. Selected Writings (London: Sage, 1997), pp. 109 –10. 3. Georg Simmel, ‘The Problem of Sociology’, American Journal of Sociology 15:3 (1909), p. 296. 4. The concept or ‘figuration’, sometimes translated as ‘configuration’, was developed throughout Elias’ career and was called as such only at a later stage. Nathalie Heinich, La sociologie de Norbert Elias (Paris: La Découverte, 1997), pp. 91 –2. 5. Norbert Elias, What is Sociology? (London: Hutchinson, 1970), pp. 13– 16; 92– 3; 111– 13. 6. Claire Bishop, ‘The social turn: Collaboration and its discontents’, Artforum February (2006). In a similar way, Helguera introduces ‘socially engaged art’ by explaining that it was previously identified as relational aesthetics, community, collaborative, participatory, dialogic or public art. Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art. A Materials and Techniques Handbook (New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2011), pp. 2– 3. 7. Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics’, October 110, Autumn (2004); Bishop 2006; Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002 /1998); Liam Gillick, ‘Contingent factors: A response to Claire Bishop’s “Antagonism and relational aesthetics”’, October 115 (2006); Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community þ Communication in Modern Art (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004). 8. Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating. Art after New Media (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2010), pp. 112 – 14. Dave Beech, ‘Include me Out’, Art Monthly (April 2008), p. 3. For yet a different

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Notes to Pages 5 –9

9. 10.

11.

12.

1

classification, including among other categories ‘collective action’, see Christian Kravagna, Working on the Community: Models of Participatory Practice (Amsterdam and Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1998). Claire Bishop, Installation Art. A Critical History (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), pp. 10– 11. The opposing stands can be personified by Peggy Phelan’s strict claim that performance cannot be recorded or represented and Christopher Bedford’s suggestion that performance is only made in discourse which is a combination of images and critical texts. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked. The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 146; Christopher Bedford, ‘The viral ontology of performance’, in Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield, eds, Perform Repeat Record. Live Art in History (Bristol: Intellect, 2012), pp. 77– 87. Bishop notes this again in Artificial Hells, which takes participatory art as its object; she writes about her research: ‘It is an art dependent on first hand experience [. . .] a luxury not always available to the underpaid critic and tightly scheduled academic.’ Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 5– 6. My attempt to find out how Santiago Sierra’s project 133 Persons Paid to Have Their Hair Dyed Blond in 2001 in Venice Biennale was realised yielded no results: the process involving 200 street vendors having their hair dyed and presumably a large number of hairdressers with a crew of assistants had left no trace in the Biennale’s archival material. In the alphabetically ordered files, the folder for the transport and installation of Richard Serra’s 110 ton sculpture, which that year won the Golden Lion together with Cy Twombly, was amply documented, but the place for the next artist in order, Sierra, was empty. Graham and Cook, Rethinking Curating, pp. 161– 87. Regarding interactive new media installations, there is an additional obstacle when no documentation explains whether the screen in a picture is a work of art or an educational device intended to be used as a source for additional information. Beryl Graham, ed., New Collecting: Exhibiting and Audiences after New Media Art (London: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 66 –7.

The Participator: A New Role in Art 1. Both write about literary context and refer to the writer, the text and the reader. Roland Barthes, ‘The death of the author’, in Image – Music – Text (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977/1967), pp. 142 – 8; Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’ in D.F. Bouchard, ed., Language, CounterMemory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979/1969), pp. 124 –7. 2. Barthes declares the death of the Author, with capital A, and proposes the nomination of scriptor as a replacement for the new role of the author. Foucault talks about the disappearance or absence of the writing subject.

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Notes to Pages 10 –15 3. Foucault does not define ‘discourse’ in this text, he only talks about it as a speech ‘in a certain mode’, which ‘in a given culture, must receive a certain status’ (Foucault, ‘What is an author?’). His notion of discourse, developed mainly in Archaeology of Knowledge, holds that discourse constructs knowledge, sets the limits of what it is possible to think and to talk about, and hence through the production of categories of knowledge defines subjects and re/produces power. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1972/1969). 4. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer. On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). 5. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, pp. 5 –6. Crary refers to Foucault’s ‘genealogy’ as his method. 6. See for example Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0, 2010). 7. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), p. 237. 8. For a viewer experience, see e.g. Alan, ‘The Spencer Tunick Experience Barcelona’ website, 2003, http://homepage.eircom.net/, ator/Spencer %20Tunick%20Experience%20Barcelona/The%20Spencer%20Tunick%20 Experience.htm (accessed 22 December 2011). 9. Being in the presence of live people and being asked to participate can also lead to rejection of this type of art for the same reason of enhanced engagement that the work imposes and which some people find unpleasant and off-putting. 10. This separation and the change of perspective is at the heart of Augusto Boal’s forum theatre in which spectators, or ‘spect-actors’, can interrupt the scene and suggest alternative developments. Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (London: Pluto Press, 2008/1974). 11. Jacques Rancière, ‘The emancipated spectator’, Artforum, March 45:7 (2007), pp. 271– 80. 12. Spectacle in the meaning described by Debord: perception and experience commodified and lived through representations. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red Press, 1977/1967).

2

Typology of Participatory Art 1. See Claire Bishop, ‘The social turn: Collaboration and its discontents’, Artforum, February (2006); Anthony Downey, ‘An ethics of engagement: Collaborative art practices and the return of the ethnographer’, Third Text 23:5 (2009), pp. 593 – 603; Beryl Graham, ‘What kind of participative system? Critical vocabularies from new media art’, in Anna Dezeuze, ed., The ‘Do-itYourself’ Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media (Manchester:

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Notes to Pages 15 –24

2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 114 –15; Kirsten Lloyd, ‘The ethics of encounter’, Artpulse 2:3 (2011), pp. 26– 8. For example, Nina Möntmann discusses a project by Oda Projesi under ‘community-based’ art; for Claire Bishop, it represents ‘relational art’. Möntmann further brings in projects by Phil Collins, Artur Zmijewski and Santiago Sierra, which Bishop sees as exemplar of the ‘antagonistic’ approach (Nina Möntmann, ‘Community service’, Frieze, October (2006); Bishop ‘The social turn’, and Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics’). The sociological concept of ideal type, coined by Max Weber, was developed to mediate between subjectivism and positivism. It is used to organise and analyse large numbers of examples. For example, Boltanski and Chiapello use it in order to analyse a large amount of management literature to discern the changes in ‘the spirit of capitalism’. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2005/1999), pp. 7– 12, 57 –62. ‘In other words, all art is relational’, says Pascal Gielen, ‘Mapping community art’, in Paul De Bryene and Pascal Gielen, eds, Community Art. The Politics of Trespassing (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2011), p. 16. ‘There are as many kinds of participation as there are participatory projects’, says Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art. A Materials and Techniques Handbook (New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2011), p. 13. Not everyone is ready to call this participation. For example Anna Dezeuze maintains that participation needs to be active, conscious and voluntary. Anna Dezeuze, ‘The art of participation: 1950 to now, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’, Art Monthly 3:324 (2009), pp. 24– 5. The project was organised by the Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma in Helsinki with Deloitte, at the time one of Kiasma’s sponsors. The resulting work, which consists of letters and emails, objects, a PowerPoint presentation and two videos, is now in the museum’s collection. Description of the project and diverse reactions from five countries are collected in the Free Shop publication (Copenhagen: Pork Salad Press, 2009). I use ‘intervention’ in a specifically defined, limited sense. For a wider understanding of the term, see for example Nato Thompson and Gregory Sholette, eds, The Interventionists. User’s Manual to the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004). Most of the projects in it would fall into my categories ‘User’ and ‘Co-creator’. Needle Woman took place in Tokyo, New York, London, Mexico City, Cairo, Delhi, Shanghai and Lagos in 1999 – 2001. Coco Fusco, ‘The other history of intercultural performance’, in English is Broken Here (New York: The New Press, 1995); Diana Taylor, ‘A savage performance: Guillermo Gomez-Peña and Coco Fusco’s “Couple in the Cage”’, The Drama Review 42:2 (1998), pp. 160– 75. Fusco estimates that half of the audience took the performance seriously. Fusco, ‘The other history’, p. 50. Fusco ‘The other history’, p. 40.

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Notes to Pages 24 –27 14. Ibid., p. 38. 15. Ibid., p. 47. 16. Foster’s notion of the ethnographic turn describes work in which artists align themselves with the cultural ‘other’, a weaker position based on cultural or ethnic origin, similar to Walter Benjamin’s discussion of artist as producer on the side of the worker. Hal Foster, ‘The artist as ethnographer’, in the Return of the Real. The Avant-garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 171–2. In addition, Fusco recognises that being objectified as a woman adds a sexualised aspect to the notion of objectification. Anna Johnson, ‘Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’, interview, Bomb 42/ Winter (1993). Available at http://bombsite.com/issues/42/articles/1599 (accessed 6 August 2012). 17. Taylor, ‘A savage performance’, pp. 166–70. 18. Anna Dezeuze does not consider either of these acts as participation because the first time the policemen were not aware of being a participant and even in the re-enacted version were only doing their job. Dezeuze, ‘The art of participation’, pp. 24– 5. 19. Greil Marcus traces this ‘secret history’ of avant-garde as a subterranean force that erupts at different times in different places in history and relies on shock and provocation. Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 20. Claire Bishop identifies as key moments of early participatory art Italian Futurism, post-revolution Russian avant-garde art and Paris Dada, and emphasises its roots in the domain of theatre and performance rather than visual arts. She also discusses Situationism but does not mention Fluxus (Bishop, Artificial Hells, pp. 41– 75, 80– 7). See also Rudolf Frieling, Boris Groys, Robert Atkins and Lev Manovich, The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now (New York and London: Thames & Hudson, 2008). 21. The label anti-art has been attached particularly to Dada, following from Hans Richter’s book Dada: Art and Anti-Art in 1965. 22. Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (London: Routledge, 1992); Martin Puchner, ‘Society of the counter-spectacle: Debord and the Theatre of the Situationists’, Theatre Research International 29:1 (2004), pp. 4 –15. 23. This work was most often done by artist groups such as Guerrilla Girls, Act Up or Gran Fury. Nato Thompson sees this type of activist intervention is also indebted to Situationist tactics (Thompson and Sholette, The Interventionists). 24. For the former, see e.g. Art Not Oil and Liberate Tate; for the latter, groups like RTMark, etoy, AdBusters, the Yes Men and Critical Art Ensemble. 25. Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places (New York: The Free Press, 1963), pp. 18– 19 and 243. 26. Tino Sehgal calls his works ‘constructed situations’ or ‘staged situations’.

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Notes to Pages 27 –31 27. Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), pp. 30, 36–8. 28. People are willing to go to surprising lengths to ‘make sense’ and to explain away anomalies, as was shown by Garfinkel’s experiment in which students could ask a ‘counsellor’ for advice on their personal problems, but the mentor’s answers were coded to ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in advance. Students were nevertheless able to understand – create a meaning to – the ‘logic’ of the advice they got. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, pp. 76– 103. 29. Garfinkel was himself surprised at the strength of the reactions. John Heritage, Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1984), p. 81. 30. Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology, pp. 49–51. 31. Interview with Takala, 19 June 2012. 32. Harold Garfinkel, Ethnomethodology’s Program. Working Out Durkheim’s Aphorism, edited and introduced by Anne Warfield Rawls (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002), p. 246. 33. Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, pp. 227– 8. 34. Ibid.; see Norbert Elias, What is Sociology? (London: Hutchinson, 1970), pp. 71– 103, 128– 33, for his example of football. 35. Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984/1980), p. 25. De Certeau’s metaphor for stealing time at work is ‘la perruque’, the wig, a private act disguised as work. 36. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, pp. 35– 7. 37. ‘In our society the absence of work is non-sense’. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 191. There are different readings of the concept of tactics. See e.g. Thompson and Sholette, The Interventionists, pp. 13 –24 about politically activist art. Weintraub, as opposed to my reading, also interprets Takala’s non-work as a form of tactics. Max Weintraub, ‘On view now, the ungovernables: The New Museum’s Triennial Exhibition’, Art21 magazine (2012). Available at http://blog.art21.org/2012/03/01/on-view-now-theungovernables-the-new-museums-triennial-exhibition/ (accessed 14 July 2012). The confusion about the meaning of ‘tactic’ is due to de Certeau’s idiosyncratic way of defining tactic and strategy as opposed to each other, whereas in the military realm, where the terms originate from, tactics is part of strategy, its implementation. Art interventions under discussion could therefore be called tactics in the military sense (as part of a coup) but not in the way de Certeau defines it as a way of coping with the system, of getting by or playing one’s own game within the official game. In my study, ‘tactic’ in the sense of de Certeau becomes relevant for the ‘User’ group in the next section. 38. Free Shop. 39. Ibid., pp. 80– 97. The shopkeepers’ experience falls in the category of ‘Material’: they are asked to perform a task set by the artists and they together produce the ‘intervention’. 40. Diana Taylor notes that the film produced about Fusco’s and Gomez-Peña’s project runs counter its ethos of challenging the habit of objectification and

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Notes to Pages 31 –37

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50.

51.

instead succumbs to objectifying its audience. Taylor, ‘A savage performance’, pp. 166– 72. Fusco is aware of this experimental dimension, as she writes, ‘In such encounters with the unexpected, people’s defence mechanisms are less likely to operate with their normal efficiency; caught off guard, their beliefs are more likely to rise to the surface’ (Fusco, ‘The other history’, p. 40). She also reports the various reactions of different audiences (ibid., pp. 52– 6). A few months after our interview, however, Takala titled her next exhibition Breaching Experiments, Site Gallery, Sheffield September –November 2012. Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed (London: Pluto Press, 2008/1974), pp. 122– 6. Culture Jammer’s Encyclopedia. Available at http://sniggle.net/index.php (accessed 7 August 2012). Breaching experiments are under the section ‘performance art’, listed as one of cultural jammers’ tactics. Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, p. 248. This was offered when the works were on show in Kiasma, Helsinki, in 2002, in an exhibition titled Sculptures with Embarrassment. In addition, the guards took pictures of visitors’ sculptures with a mobile phone and the images were projected on the wall in the entrance hall. In 2002 camera phones were a novelty. See Perttu Rastas, Erwin Wurm at Kiasma, 2002 project Nolo veistos / Sculptures with Embarrassment (2008). Available at http://www.youtube. com/watch?v¼7RgLe9jWQBc (accessed 30 October 2014). For Red Hot Chili Peppers’ 2006 video. Available at http://www.youtube. com/watch?v¼ 8DyziWtkfBw&feature ¼ artistob&playnext ¼ 1&list ¼ TLlTclA2pWnLU (accessed 30 April 2013). The case of Self Service fashion magazine is reported in Michelle Nicol, ‘The concept of the original is obsolete – Wurm v. Forester’, Parkett 55 (1999), pp. 184 – 5. The venue was headed by Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans. The café interior remained in place much longer than the title indicates, but it was eventually removed in 2008. Bourriaud mentions Gonzalez-Torres’ work but does not give a date to it. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002/1998), p. 60. Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings were translated into English in the beginning of the 1960s and had a strong influence on artists and critics as a way to theorise Minimalism and the experience it produced. A leading critic was Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sense and sensibility: Reflection on post ’60s sculpture’, Artforum 12:3 (1973), pp. 43– 53; for a re-examination of Krauss’ arguments, see Hal Foster, ‘The artist as ethnographer’, in The Return of the Real. The Avant-garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 43– 4. Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998/1967), pp. 148 – 71. Robert Morris, ‘Notes on sculpture 1 – 3’, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds,

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Notes to Pages 37 –40

52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61.

62. 63.

64.

Art in Theory 1900 – 2000 (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2005/1966 – 67), pp. 831 – 2. Dan Graham, Two-Way Mirror Power: Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 77. Described, among others, by Rudolf Frieling in Rudolf Frieling, Boris Groys, Robert Atkins and Lev Manovich, The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now (New York and London: Thames & Hudson, 2008). Morris’ wife was choreographer Simone Forti and they both were active in Judson Dance Theatre. Morris designed props for dance performances. According to The Times in 1971, ‘an orderly pandemonium was expected, but pandemonium broke out’. Cited in ‘Robert Morris’s Bodyspacemotionthings at Tate Modern’, Guardian 6 April 2009. Available at http://www.guardian. co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2009/apr/06/tate-robert-morris-body spacemotionthings#/?picture¼345544623&index¼2 (accessed 9 March 2011). The surprises undoubtedly also bear witness to the newness of this type of project in museum space. When Bodyspacemotionthings was recreated in May 2009, it was updated to the prevailing health and safety standards. The first performances were in 1964 in Japan and in 1965 at Carnegie Hall, New York. Performed in Naples. Marina Abramovic and Klaus Peter Biesenbach, eds, Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), p. 24; Frieling et al., The Art of Participation, pp. 39– 40. In group 3, ‘Material’, the participants’ actions are defined by the artist; in group 4, ‘Co-creator’, the events are negotiated and decided within certain parameters in collaboration and based on agreement. In group 2, ‘User’, it is to a large extent up to the participants to interpret and to apply the instructions as they wish. (Group 1, ‘Target’, is constructed differently as no conscious participation is expected.) In Claire Doherty, ed., Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation (London: Black Dog Publishing 2004), pp. 144– 6. This has led Benjamin Buchloh to talk about ‘planned vandalism’ and ‘positive vandalism’ (the latter referring to members of an unsolicited audience adding something to the installations). Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, ‘Cargo and cult: The displays of Thomas Hirschhorn’, Artforum November 3 (2001), pp. 110 – 14. A collection of these ‘event scores’ is included in the artist’s book Grapefruit, first published in 1964 (Tokyo: Wunternaum Press). Bruce Altshuler, Art by Instruction and the Pre-History of do it (ICI catalogue, 1998). Altshuler sees Sol LeWitt forming a connection between Minimalism and Conceptual art: in his 1967 article in Artforum, he elevated ideas above physical constructions and accepted unrealised concepts as artwork in their own right. Abramovic and Biesenbach, Marina Abramovic, p. 17. Abramovic talks about these works as performing in her stead: ‘In this work, since the artist is

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Notes to Pages 40 –41

65. 66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

72. 73.

removed, the transitory objects, as I call them, have to function in my place in order to trigger the experience of others. I set up everything in such a way that my presence is not needed.’ Zoe Kosmidou, ‘Transitory objects: A conversation with Marina Abramovic’, Sculpture Magazine 20:9 (2001). Wikipedia, ‘Interactive art’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_art (accessed 20 August 2012). Often, however, what is called ‘interactive’ is merely ‘reactive’: Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, discussing the concepts in relation to New Media Art, define interactivity as a process in which the work and the user act upon each other, as opposed to reactive, which denotes changes effected by the user in the system featuring sensors that respond to movement, sound etc. Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating. Art after New Media (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2010), pp. 111–14. Ibid., pp. 137– 8, 182 –3. Individual works can also be explicitly titled platforms; Michael Lin showed a work entitled Platform in the Istanbul Biennial in 2001. Pernille Albrethsen, ‘Platform formalism’, NU-E magazine 24:9 (2003). Harald Szeemann, Cecilia Liveriero Lavelli and Lara Facco, eds, La Biennale di Venezia. 49a Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte: Platea dell ‘Umanita’ ¼ Plateau of Humankind (Milano Venezia: Electa, La Biennale di Venezia, 2001); Okwui Enwezor, Heike Ander and Nadja Rottner, eds, Documenta 11_Platform 5: Exhibition Catalogue (Ostfildern-Ruit and London: Hatje Cantz; Art Books International, 2002); Matthew Arnatt, Peter Fillingham and David Mollin, eds, Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer. 50th Venice Biennale (S.l.: Alberta Press, 2003). A predecessor could be Hybrid Workspace media lounge in Kassel 1997. Artist groups and independent events are also called platforms: a Google search with keywords ‘platform’ and ‘arts’ gives a long list of venues, spaces, festivals and artist groups. One of the oldest of its kind is Platform, the group of artists and activists formed in 1983 making work around social and environmental issues; see Platform at http:// platformlondon.org/ (accessed 20 August 2012). The connections are many; see e.g. Claire Bishop, Installation Art. A Critical History (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), pp. 54–6; Boris Groys, ‘Multiple authorship’, in Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic, eds, The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Exhibitions and Biennials (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 93–100; Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated – The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 16–17. The other part of the work, Fairytale, which brought 1,001 Chinese people to Kassel, would belong to the next category ‘Material’. John Falk and Lynn Dierking analyse what they call ‘the total museum experience’, which is affected by three contexts: physical, social and personal. The physical context embraces the building, spaces, lighting, decoration, signs etc.; the social denotes the companions the visitor brings and other human contacts with the staff and other visitors; and the personal refers to the

191

Notes to Pages 41 –46

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84.

85. 86. 87.

88. 89.

previous experiences, knowledge, interests and expectations of the visitor. John Falk and Lynn Dierking, The Museum Experience (Howells House, Washington, DC: Whalesback Books, 1992), pp. 2 –4, 121; John Falk and Lynn Dierking, Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2000), pp. 53 –4. For ‘Design Art’ see also William Roberts, Human Resources: Artistic Labour and the Limits of Critique in North American and Western European Art of the 1990s, unpublished doctoral dissertation (Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London, 2010). Altshuler, Art by Instruction. Do it. Available online http://www.e-flux.com/projects/do_it/homepage/do_ it_home.html (accessed 4 April 2014). Alex Farquharson, ‘Bureaux de change’, Frieze, no.101, September (2006), pp. 157– 9. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, pp. 19 –24. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 9; Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red Press, 1977/1967). Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, pp. 56 –9. Ibid., pp. 14– 16, 58 –62. Nicolas Bourriaud, ‘Michael Lin and the concept of ambiance’, in Michael Lin, exhibition catalogue for A Modest Veil (Vancouver Art Gallery: Hatje Cantz, 2010), p. 15. He explains that this is what he tried to convey in the Relational Aesthetics publication. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, pp. 52, 54, 65. W. Alan Moore, ‘Artists’ collectives’, in Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette, eds, Collectivism after Modernism. The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), p. 212. Long before this approach became popular in the 1990s, the Artists Placement Group had presented their work in a form of symposia and panel discussions through the 1970s. Another single example is Joseph Beuys’ Büro der Organisation für direkte Demokratie durch Volksabstimmung in 1972 Documenta 5 in Kassel. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p. 15. Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places (New York: The Free Press, 1963), pp. 18– 19 and 243; see previous chapter. Hou Hanru, ‘What about sleeping in a show? Michael Lin’s Artistic Interventions’, in Maria Hirvi, ed., ARS 01: Unfolding Perspectives (Helsinki: Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma, 2001), pp. 142 – 3. Hou refers to Lin’s Day Bed. Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, p. 45. A visitor to Höller’s New York exhibition: ‘Due to the participatory nature of the show, waiting in line becomes a part of the experience – the museum is transformed into a space of socialization. While waiting for my chance to

192

Notes to Pages 46 –50

90. 91. 92. 93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

slide, I bonded with the women in front of me over our mutual fear of heights. [. . .] Experience asks you to participate fully with your environment, including the people standing next to you.’ Emma S. Hazen, ‘Lab report: Carsten Höller: Experience’, A Gathering of the Tribes, 2 December (2011). Available at http://www.tribes.org/web/2011/12/02/carsten-holler-experience/ (accessed 22 August 2012). Barry Paddock, ‘NYC museum exhibit “Experience” features sensory deprivation tank, two-story slide’, Daily News, 25 October (2011). Falk and Dierking, Learning from Museums. This applies also, and even more pertinently, to artists creating works in the first (‘Target’) and third (‘Material’) categories. A more explicit case organised by Höller was The Baudouin/Boudewijn Experiment. A Deliberate, Non-fatalistic, Large-scale Group Experiment in Deviation, in which a hundred volunteers spent a day, from 10 a.m. on 27 September until 10 a.m. on 28 September 2001 shut in a building in Brussels. They were not asked to do anything in particular but just to leave their normal lives behind. There is no documentation of the experiment. Will Bradley, Mika Hannula, Cristina Ricupero and Superflex, eds, Selforganisation / Counter Economic Strategies (Rotterdam: Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, 2006), p. 7. See Superflex website, ‘Tools’. Available at www.superflex.net.tools. For Counter-strike also Bradley et al., Self-organisation, pp. 76– 7 and for Karlskrona2, pp. 156– 7. Bradley et al., Self-organisation, pp. 182–3. Liam Gillick quoted in Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics’, October 110, Autumn (2004), p. 61. ‘Util’ translates as tool, as well as useful, hence joining Superflex’s definition of their art. ‘IM International functions as a think-tank for immigrant issues, working to be part of the fight for the advancement of immigrant rights and advocate for progressive immigration policies.’ Immigrant Movement International, available at http://immigrant-movement.us/ (accessed 15 November 2014). Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984/1980), pp. xxi – xxii. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., pp. xi –xiii, xxi – xxii. Jessica Morgan, Carsten Höller. Test Site (London: Tate, 2006). Michael Lin, p. 29. The connection between tactics and interstice is noted also by Anne Dezeuze, ‘Transfiguration of the commonplace’, Variant 22 (2005). Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, p. 16. ANT is developed by Latour together with Michel Callon and John Law. ANT is not a strict doctrine, and particularly since the 1990s, it has been used in multifarious ways. At some point, Latour himself was ready to question the

193

Notes to Pages 50 –55

108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

115.

116. 117. 118.

119. 120.

whole concept. Bruno Latour, ‘On recalling ANT’, in John Law and John Hassard, eds, Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 15 –25; later, he revised his position and was again convinced about its value. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to ActorNetwork-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 98–117; Latour, Reassembling the Social, pp. 80–2. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 179; Tim Dant, ‘The driver-car’, Theory, Culture and Society 21:4 (2004), pp. 145– 67. Latour, ‘On recalling ANT’, pp. 15 –25. Latour, Reassembling the Social, pp. 80– 2. The Juvenalia blog by ‘Allison’, 10 January 2012. http://thejuvenilia.com/ ?p¼1828. A term used by Boris Groys, ‘Multiple authorship’, in Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic, eds, The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Exhibitions and Biennials (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 93–100. Elizabetta Fabrizi and Sara Ley eds, Spencer Tunick in Newcastle Gateshead; 17 July 2005 (Gateshead: BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, 2006). There is ample online material about the process as people report their experiences in blogs and on the ‘Spencer Tunick Experience’ website, http://www. spencertunickforum.org (assessed 22 December 2011). Spencer Tunick’s website http://www.spencertunick.com/index.html (assessed 22 December 2011). He also compares his art to portraiture and colourfield painting (Gerald Matt, ‘Spencer Tunick’, in Interviews 2 (Kunsthalle Wien, Köln: Walther König, 2008), pp. 84– 289). Leif Jakobsson, Maria Laurent and Klara Paul, eds, ‘Som en tjuv om natten’: Verk ur Carl Gustaf Ehrnrooths samling av finsk samtidskonst (Ekenäs: Stiftelsen Pro Artibus, 2008). The record has been 18,000 people in Mexico City in 2007 but it remains a single instance. The process was reported in the magazine Image (Marjaana Toiminen, ‘Hyvien ihmisten juhla’, Image 06 (2002), pp. 56–61). Deciding about the location was not straightforward, and persuading the various officials who decide about the use of public place was a hard job. The practical arrangements were not made easier by the capricious artist, described by the producer as behaving like a rock star. At some point, Tunick cancelled the whole project due to the many complications but the situation was finally restored. Particularly in his early career, Sierra produced explicit street actions and other interventions. Santiago Sierra’s website, available at http://www.santiago-sierra.com/ 200111_1024.php (accessed 15 April 2012). Sierra’s figure is not accurate. He probably confused it with the figure for the whole of Finland. In 2001 there were 4,700 homeless people in Helsinki (9,960 in Finland). Ministry of

194

Notes to Pages 55 –59

121.

122.

123. 124. 125. 126. 127.

128.

129.

130. 131. 132.

the Environment press release 13 June 2006, http://www.ymparisto.fi/default. asp?contentid¼188260&lan¼fi (accessed 15 April 2012). The incorrect information gets repeated in shows and catalogues of his work. The production process is described in Leevi Haapala, ‘Dokumentaarinen käänne. Neuvotteluja dokumentin ja taideteoksen välillä’ [The Documentary turn. Negotiations between a document and an artwork], in Päivi Rajakari, ed., Mitä meillä oli ennen Kiasmaa. Kokoelmatoiminnan vaikuttavuus (Helsinki: Finnish National Gallery, 2008), pp. 107–26. During the exhibition, the work was called Person in a Hole. The photo documentation, as it became an independent artwork, was named Person in a ditch measuring 300 £ 500 £ 300 cm. Space between Kiasma Museum and parliament building. Helsinki, Finland. September 2001. Kaleva, ‘Helsinki riisuutuu Spencer Tunickille’, 1 August (2002). Available at http://www.kaleva.fi/uutiset/juttu/245067 (accessed 21 December 2011). Helena Kontova and Massimiliano Gioni, ‘Vanessa Beecroft: Skin Trade’, Flash Art 36, January – February (2003), pp. 94 –7. Andrea Fraser, Museum Highlights. The Writings of Andrea Fraser, ed. Alexander Alberro (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), p. 107. This could also be seen as the extreme point of Fraser’s concept of art as service. Fraser, Museum Highlights, pp. 153–61. Marina Abramovic and Klaus Peter Biesenbach, eds, Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010), pp. 17, 24; Rudolf Frieling, Boris Groys, Robert Atkins and Lev Manovich, The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now (New York and London: Thames & Hudson, 2008), pp. 39– 40; Zoe Kosmidou, ‘Transitory objects: A conversation with Marina Abramovic’, Sculpture Magazine 20:9 (2001). In Korea Ku-lim Kim in Body Painting Performance in 1969 applied paint decoratively on women’s bodies as living artworks. Catherine Wood, ‘Painting in the shape of a house’, in Catherine Wood, ed., A Bigger Splash. Painting after Performance (London: Tate, 2012), pp. 18, 62. The work is described by Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 113– 18. She also lists two other projects that use people as the medium and sees these as ‘isolated precedents for a tendency that has become familiar in contemporary art since the early 1990s’. Susanne Lacy, ed., Mapping the Terrain. New Genre Public Art (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1995), p. 281. Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 75 –103. In both cases, the photos that stirred up controversy were about children and nudity. Particularly around Sally Mann’s album Immediate Family allegations of her abusing her children were presented. For a discussion of the power relations between an artist and his or her model see Julian Stallabrass, ‘What’s in a face? Blankness and significance in contemporary art photography’, October 122, Fall (2007), pp. 71–90.

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Notes to Pages 60 –63 133. The ethnographic shows and their exoticising objectification banned, the discussion has continued around ethnographical museums. See e.g. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). 134. Bishop, Artificial Hells, pp. 220–39. 135. Bishop, ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics’, pp. 65– 8. She follows here Rosalyn Deutsche who bases her argument on the same publication: Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy from 1985. It is not clear to me why Bishop sticks to this publication and does not move on to Mouffe’s later concept ‘agonism’, which she develops in The Democratic Paradox, 2000. Pluralistic agonism, which transforms open hostility into adversary relationship, would seem to explain the controversial nature of some participatory work even better than direct antagonism. 136. Claire Bishop, ‘The social turn: Collaboration and its discontents’, Artforum February (2006), pp. 179 –85. 137. Bishop, ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics’, p. 70. 138. Claire Doherty, ed., Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004), p. 135. 139. Participation is often described as a ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’: Paal Aarsaether, ‘Getting naked at Helsinki photo shoot’, The Baltic Times, 22 August (2002). See also: ‘The Spencer Tunick Experience Barcelona’, 2003, available at http://homepage.eircom.net/, ator/Spencer%20Tunick%20 Experience%20Barcelona/The%20Spencer%20Tunick%20Experience.htm (accessed 22 December 2011). 140. Tino Sehgal’s public workshops, for example, organised by the Tate Modern in preparation for Sehgal’s Turbine Hall project in the summer of 2012, were marketed as an opportunity to work with a world-famous artist and ‘[o]ffering a unique opportunity to work in the Turbine Hall out of the normal opening hours’. Available at Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/south warkevents/posts/10150315716327843 (accessed 22 October 2012). This is in line with other marketing by the museum, for example for the life-drawing events within the collection display that ‘produce a unique drawing experience’. Tate, Creative Life Drawing Evening Workshops, London Drawing, http:// www.londondrawing.com/tatemodern/creative-life-drawing-evening-works hops (accessed 22 April 2014). Experience is also the currency of other types of audience participation: the title of Carsten Höller’s large exhibition at MoMA was Experience. 141. ‘Experience economy’ was defined by Joseph P. Pine and James H. Gilmore in their groundbreaking article (and later a book), ‘Welcome to the experience economy’, Harvard Business Review (July– August 1998), pp. 97– 105. They identify a new economy, in which experience and creating or staging memorable events is a valid asset in business. The participants’ descriptions of attending Tunick’s projects fit well with how Pine and Gilmore define an experience as a ‘memorable event’. The tone of exclusivity in Sehgal’s

196

Notes to Pages 63 –68

142. 143.

144.

145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152.

153.

workshop (see previous footnote) is reminiscent of the standard offers for museum members or friends, including private views and out-of-hours access to the gallery: it is the lure of a nearly privileged, out-of-the-ordinary experience, which is presented as the reward for an investment either of time or money. Julie Steinmetz, Heather Cassils and Clover Leary, ‘Behind enemy lines: Toxic Titties infiltrate’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31 March (2006), pp. 130. Similarly, during the cage performance Coco Fusco, who usually works with text in her performances, made a symbolic vow of silence and turned herself into pure spectacle. Coco Fusco, ‘The other history of intercultural performance’, in English is Broken Here (New York: The New Press, 1995), p. 39. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked. The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 6. For photographic exposure, see e.g. Joanna Lowry, ‘Negotiating power’, in Mark Durden and Craig Richardson, eds, Face On (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2000). Spencer Tunick’s website, ‘Sign up to pose’, available at http://spencertunick. com/sign-up-to-pose (assessed 22 December 2011). Some of the public comments, particularly the critical ones, indeed point to this direction and make allusions to Nazism and the Holocaust. P.L. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Books, 1966), pp. 129– 47. Aarsaether, ‘Getting naked at Helsinki photo shoot’; The Spencer Tunick Experience Barcelona blog. Interview with Beecroft, Thomas Kellein, ‘The secret of female intimacy’, in Vanessa Beecroft. Photographs, Films, Drawings, exhibition catalogue (Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 2004), pp. 6 –18, 143. Bleaching of hair and eyebrows, waxing of pubic hair, body painted, swollen and blistered feet from endless waiting and standing. Steinmetz, ‘Behind enemy lines’. The Spencer Tunick discussion forum, available at http://www.spencertunick forum.org/ (assessed 22 December 2011). Norbert Elias has described the centuries-long process of ‘civilization’, during which the control of inner impulses, particularly concerning violence and sexual drives, became placed under strict control, operating first through external rules and restrictions, then gradually internalised. The relative relaxation, the fact that we are able to socialise with other, unknown people half-naked, for example in a bathing suit on a beach is a sign of trust that people are able to control their impulses without the aid and protection of clothes. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, Vol.I. The History of Manners (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982/1939). This observation has been made by many writers, e.g. Dave Hickey, ‘A foreword’, in VB 08 – 36. Vanessa Beecroft Performances (Ostfildern-Ruit:

197

Notes to Pages 68 –75

154. 155.

156.

157. 158.

159. 160. 161.

162. 163.

164.

Hatje Cantz, 2000), pp. 7 –8) notes that Beecroft uses the rhetoric of Renaissance painting in the space of live performance. Also Steinmetz, ‘Behind enemy lines’. Beecroft herself talks about her interest in painting and film, Kellein, ‘The secret of female intimacy’. Luke Harding, ‘Ruthlessly exposed’, The Guardian, 8 April (2005). Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/apr/08/worlddispatch.germany (accessed 18.4.2012). Tunick seems to have trouble in convincing some critics about this. This may be due to the fact that most people only see his photos and by habit read them in comparison to other images, that is, other representations of sexualised bodies. An incident is reported in a participant’s blog describing the Barcelona shoot. During the change between two poses, as people were moving around, a couple of the photographers, men, intruded in the crowd and started chasing some of the women participants for close-ups. This was quickly noticed by other participants and soon also by the guards who returned the too-eager members of the press to their stalls. The photographers’ attitude of regarding women as an image and an object was felt to violate the prevailing understanding of equality (Aarsaether, ‘Getting naked at Helsinki photo shoot’). Norbert Elias, What is Sociology? (London: Hutchinson, 1970), pp. 80– 1. In Birmingham 2005, Helsinki 2005, Hamburg 2006, St Petersburg 2006, Chicago 2007, Singapore 2008, Copenhagen 2008 and Tokyo 2009. Complaints choirs worldwide, available at http://www.complaintschoir.org/history.html and http://www.complaintschoir.org/choirs.html (accessed 20 January 2011). I took part in Helsinki Complaints Choir. Complaints choirs worldwide, available at http://www.complaintschoir.org/ doityourself.html (accessed 20 January 2011). The production process is described in Dias & Riedweg, exhibition catalogue (Barcelona: Macba, 2003), pp. 168 – 75, 223–5. Another method for inspiring and structuring conversation is their ‘sensory workshops’, which consist of working with and talking about different materials that stimulate the senses – smells, sounds, materials to be touched, images. Dias & Riedweg, pp. 44 –9. Kaija Kaitavuori, ‘Dias and Riedweg – Artist duo sets up staged encounters’, Kiasma Magazine 25 (2004), pp. 2 –5. The article is based on an interview with the artists in 2004. Carol Becker, The Artist in Society: Rights, Roles, and Responsibility (Chicago: New Art Examiner Press, 1995); Nina Felshin, ed., But is it Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995); Suzi Gablik, Conversations before the End of Time (London: Thames & Hudson, 1995); Susanne Lacy, ed., Mapping the Terrain. New Genre Public Art (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995); and Mary Jane Jacob, Michael Brenson and Eva M. Olson, Culture in Action: A Public Art Program of Sculpture Chicago (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995). Felshin, But is it Art? p. 29.

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Notes to Pages 75 –78 165. Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, pp. 21 –5. 166. The term is adapted, as Lacy acknowledges, from Arlene Raven: Art in the Public Interest (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993/1989). 167. The expressions were invented by architect James Wines and then repeated regularly. Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another. Site-specific Art and Locational Identity (London and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), pp. 65, 182 fn 16; also Raven, Art in the Public Interest. 168. Felshin But is it Art? pp. 221– 49; Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, pp. 251– 4; Raven, Art in the Public Interest, pp. 155– 74. 169. Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, pp. 25 –6. 170. Raven, Art in the Public Interest, pp. 1 –14. Through the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) artists were commissioned to produce painting and murals in public buildings. Some artists worked in their studios, others at community art centres. Raven also mentions Russian Constructivists, integrating social and aesthetic considerations, as a forerunner for socially engaged art in the 1970s and 1980s. 171. Murals are, for example, presented as part of ‘New Genre Public Art’, in Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, pp. 135–6, 202 – 3; also Kester, Conversation Pieces, 173. 172. David Harding, ‘Glenrothes Town Artist 1968 – 78. Part of an unpublished memoir’ (posted February 2006). Available at http://www.davidharding.net/? page_id¼37 (assessed 22 December 2011). 173. Ibid. 174. Barbara Steveni, ‘Repositioning art in the decision-making processes of society’, a presentation at Interrupt symposium organised by the Arts Council of England (2003). Available at http://interrupt.org.uk/index.php (assessed 22 December 2011). 175. Owen Kelly, Community, Art and the State. Storming the Citadels (London: Comedia, 1984), pp. 9 –38. 176. Malcolm Miles, Art for Public Places (Winchester: Winchester School of Art Press, 1989) and Malcolm Miles, Art, Space and the City. Public Art and Urban Futures (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). Sara Selwood presents public art as art commissioned by a public body, placed in a public place, and giving the audience only a passive role as spectators, i.e. exactly as the conventional notion that the ‘new public art’ sought to distance itself from. Sara Selwood, The Benefits of Public Art. The Polemics of Permanent Art in Public Places (London: Policy Studies Institute, 1995). 177. Littoral, available at http://www.littoral.org.uk/ (accessed 6 July 2011). 178. Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Communityþ Communication in Modern Art (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 91– 7. Stephen Willats, The Artist as an Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour (London: Gallery House Press / Occasional papers, 2011/1973). 179. Kester, Conversation Pieces, pp. 63– 4. 180. David Medalla, A Fruitful Incoherence (London: inIVA, 1998), pp. 68– 72.

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Notes to Pages 78 –83 181. For example Berry 2009. Rollins and his students from Intermediate School 52 in the South Bronx, labelled students ‘at risk’, developed a collaborative workshop method that combines lessons in reading and writing with the production of works of art. 182. Working through the 1980s they have been included in two Whitney Biennials, Kassel Documenta, Venice Biennial, among others, and bought by major museums. 183. Mary Jane Jakob notes that these works tend to appear to the established art world as unsophisticated. In Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, p. 58. 184. Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 117. 185. Sherry R. Arnstein, ‘A ladder of citizen participation’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners 35:4 (1969), pp. 216– 24. 186. Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 10. 187. Ibid., pp. 8– 9. 188. Kester, Conversation Pieces, pp. 17 –21; 82– 5. Suzi Gablik sees a similar split between ‘deconstructive’ and ‘reconstructive’ strategies, essentially condemning the ‘deconstructionists’. Her reconstructive model, influenced by Joseph Beuys, among others, bears a more spiritual-shamanistic ethos than Kester’s sociological approach. Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art (New York and London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), pp. 177 –92. 189. Kester, Conversation Pieces, pp. 87– 8. 190. Ibid., p. 24. 191. Ibid., pp. 3, 111–13. 192. Ibid., pp. 82– 123. 193. Ibid., pp. 113–16. 194. Ibid., pp. 24, 39 –40, 110. 195. Suzi Gablik, ‘Connective aesthetics: Art after individualism’, in Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, pp. 82 –3. 196. Gablik, Conversations before the End of Time, pp. 16 –17. 197. Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 7– 10, 19– 29, 32. 198. Peter Dunn cited in Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 1. 199. Kester, The One and the Many, pp. 32–7, 53 –8, 213. 200. Dias & Riedweg, p. 15. 201. Toby Lowe, ‘Participatory arts: How do we know it’s any good?’ Helix Arts, Arts Council England website (2011), available at https://cypquality conversation.wordpress.com/2011/12/05/participatory-arts-how-do-weknow-its-any-good-toby-lowe-helix-arts-2/ (accessed 16 April 2012). Helix Arts in Newcastle works with groups such as young people, people with dementia or prisoners, creating opportunities to participate in arts activity led by artists across a range of art forms. See Helix Arts homepage, available at http://www.helixarts.com/ (accessed 16 April 2012). 202. Kester, Conversation Pieces, pp. 137– 40.

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Notes to Pages 83 –85 203. For example, Eugenie Dolberg expresses her frustration about dismissive attitudes from the museums against participative photography in Photoworks 2014, 136. 204. Claire Bishop, ‘The social turn: Collaboration and its discontents’, Artforum (February 2006), pp. 179 – 85. Markus Miessen provides a similar account of participation as naïve, fake solidarity, romantic and politically correct; he derides it as ‘Harmonistan’. Instead of consensus he calls for conflictual, uninvited participation. Markus Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation. Crossbench Praxis as a Mode of Criticality (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010). 205. Dias & Riedweg, p. 12. Interestingly, she refers here to art in the 1990s in the USA although without giving any examples. 206. Kwon, One Place after Another, pp. 6, 109–12. Kwon defines four different types of community: mythic, sited and two types of invented communities. Ibid., pp. 118–37. 207. Kwon, One Place after Another, pp. 111, 117. Tom Finkelpearl, among others, notes how the term ‘community’ has class overtones and is never used for well-heeled art lovers. Tom Finkelpearl, Dialogues in Public Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), pp. x – xi. 208. Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 175. ‘Delegation’ is retrieved from Bourdieu and signifies elevation of a ‘representative’ in the place of a group of people. 209. See e.g. Sophie Hope, Participating in the ‘Wrong’ Way? Practice Based Research into Cultural Democracy and the Commissioning of Art to Effect Social Change (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Birkbeck, University of London, 2011). 210. Immigrant Movement International. Available at http://www.taniabruguera. com/cms/486-0-Immigrantþ MovementþInternational.htm.2Up2Down. Available at http://www.2up2down.org.uk/ (accessed 15 November 2014). 211. Innendienst was carried out with a class of pupils with migrant background and built into an exhibition in Shedhalle, Zurich. Inside & Outside the Tube was a project with refugee centre residents in Switzerland, in which the stories produced by the participants were transmitted into public places through tube-formed sound sculpture. Dias & Riedweg, pp. 34–43, 58– 67. 212. In their installation Tutti Veneziani in the Venice Biennale 1999 one of the participants was a Senegalese street vendor of fake brand-name handbags, a potential protagonist-to-be for Sierra’s 2001 piece. 213. Kester, The One and the Many, pp. 31 –3, 171. In a similar vein, Maria Lind criticised Hirschhorn for treating a Turkish community as executors of his Bataille Monument and compares it with the work of Oda Projesi, a Turkish artist group, who construct their projects for participants as co-creators. Maria Lind, ‘Actualisation of space: The case of Oda Projesi’, in Claire Doherty, ed., Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation (London: Black Dog Publishing 2004), pp. 109 – 21. 214. Kester, Conversation Pieces, pp. 104– 5.

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Notes to Pages 85 –94 215. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012). 216. Kester, The One and the Many, p. 10. 217. Kester, Conversation Pieces, pp. 3, 111– 13. 218. Dias & Riedweg. 219. Kester, The One and the Many, p. 205. 220. 2Up 2Down. Available at http://www.2up2down.org.uk/ (accessed 15 November 2014). For The Blue House in a suburb of Amsterdam in 2005–09, see also Paul O’Neill and Claire Doherty, eds, Locating the Producers. Durational Approaches to Public Art (Amsterdam: Antennae 2011). 221. Tom Finkelpearl, What We Made. Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 90–1. 222. Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art. A Materials and Techniques Handbook (New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2011), pp. i –xv. 223. Kester, Conversation Pieces, p. 10. 224. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2002/1970), pp. 71– 86. 225. Ibid., p. 69. 226. Bruno Kaufman, Rolf Büchi and Nadja Braun, Guidebook to Direct Democracy in Switzerland and Beyond (Köniz: Ast & Jakob, Vetsch AG, 2010). 227. The artists themselves, however, do not conceive of their project in terms of direct democracy and do not talk about the process in relation to these concepts. 228. Kester, The One and the Many, p. 33; Mary Jane Jacob, ‘An unfashionable audience’, in Suzanne Lacy, Mapping the Terrain, p. 58. Beryl Graham also notes how participatory works challenge institutional value systems and concepts of quality. Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating. Art after New Media (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2010), pp. 122–8. 229. Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics’, October 110 (Autumn 2004), p. 63. 230. Kester, The One and the Many, p. 32. 231. For example, Bishop says Hirschhorn and Sierra were ‘conspicuously ignored’ by Bourriaud. Bishop, ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics’, p. 69.

3

Artwork as a Network 1. For example, O’Hagan reports how a group of young people spelt out the words ‘Fuck Bush’ and created loud cheers among the visitors. Sean O’Hagan, ‘Splash!’ The Observer, 14 September (2008). Available at http://www.theguardian. com/artanddesign/2008/sep/14/art (accessed 29 July 2013).

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Notes to Pages 95 –97 2. Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008); and Axel Bruns, ‘The future is user-led: The path towards widespread produsage’, Fibreculture Journal 11 (2008). Available at http://eprints.qut.edu.au (accessed 28 July 2013). 3. The term pro-am alludes to producers and consumers improving consumer goods together. Charles Leadbeater and P. Miller, The Pro-Am Revolution: How Enthusiasts Are Changing Our Economy and Society (London: Demos, 2004). Already in the early 1970s Alvin Toffler coined the concept ‘prosumer’ to describe an informed and demanding customer who wants to be involved in the development and customisation of products. Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (London: Bodley Head, 1970). Crowdsourcing is a term coined and defined by Jeff Howe in 2006 as ‘outsourcing to the crowd’ in the form of an open call. His examples range from user-generated TV programmes to distributed problem-solving in corporate research and development (Jeff Howe, ‘The rise of crowdsourcing’, Wired magazine, June (2006)). The citizen-consumer is born as the industrial production model is replaced with a network model, and broadcast media change into broadband mode. John Hartley, ‘From the consciousness industry to creative industries: Consumercreated content, social network markets and the growth of knowledge’, in Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren, eds, Media Industries: History, Theory and Methods (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). Commons-based peer production is a term coined by Yochai Benkler to describe a model of production whereby large numbers of people create something together, usually on the internet and without compensation, as opposed to production by a company or market-based production. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 4. Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond, pp. 23 –30 and ‘The future is user-led’. 5. ‘You never know if you are witness or participant, spectator or performer’, notes Adrian Searle about Tino Sehgal’s work. Adrian Searl, ‘Do It: The art of instructions’, Guardian 9 July (2013). 6. Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond, p. 26. 7. Ibid., p. 28. 8. Or ‘author’s name’, as discussed by Michel Foucault, ‘What is an author?’ in D.F. Bouchard, ed., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979/1969). 9. Bruns, ‘The future is user-led’. 10. ‘Egoboo’ is also the reward mechanism of fandom culture. In addition, Raymond identifies the simple joy as an asset: ‘because we have fun doing what we do’. Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (Newton, MA: O’Reilly Media, 1999), pp. 24– 5, 30.

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Notes to Pages 97 –100 11. The contracts and terms of exchange in participatory art projects are discussed in the next chapter. 12. Pioneered by Linus Torvalds and the Linux community. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. 13. Miwon Kwon, ‘Exchange rate: On obligation and reciprocity in some art of the 1960s and after’, in Anna Dezeuze, ed., The ‘Do-it-Yourself’ Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 235 –7. 14. The facade of the gallery was pulled down and the interior space of the gallery was open to the street. The car was the gallery owner’s private car. Jerry Saltz, ‘How a joyride in Gavin Brown’s Volvo became art’, Vulture Magazine, 19 March (2011). Available at http://www.vulture.com/2011/03/jerry_saltz_ on_gavin_browns_in.html (accessed 1 August 2013). 15. Wafaa Bilal’s presentation in Performing Idea Symposium in October 2010, London. See also David Gargill, ‘Target practice’, The National, 7 August (2008). Available at http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/target-practice (accessed 4 August 2013). The project used the same technology as unmanned US drones directed at Iraq, a fact that has a close connection to Bilal’s own experience. While exhibited in May –June 2007, the project was called Domestic Tension. A book titled Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun was published in 2008. 16. Charles Leadbeater: ‘We are witnessing the birth of a different way of approaching how we organise ourselves.’ Charles Leadbeater, We Think. Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production (London: Profile Books, 2008), p. 24. 17. ‘You are what you share.’ ‘We think, therefore we are.’ Leadbeater, We Think. 18. According to Leadbeater, the twentieth century was shaped by the rise of powerful and sophisticated To and For solutions in virtually every walk of life, at the expense of With and By solutions, cooperation and self help, which, on the contrary, characterise the present times. The first one is the world of industrial mass production and mass consumption, in which learning and other operations flow in one direction: in schools, in hospitals and in art, people are treated as targets or recipients of information, production and services. As opposed to this, the second one invites us to think for ourselves and with others; people are participants in their learning and in politics and not simply treated as targets. 19. ANT is developed by Bruno Latour together with Michel Callon and John Law. Bruno Latour, ‘On recalling ANT’, in John Law and John Hassard, eds, Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 15– 25; and Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social. An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 20. Such a description can be made of any type of contemporary art project, not only participatory ones. For a systematic description of the material production of an earthwork, see Fernando Dominguez Rubio, ‘The material production of the spiral jetty: A study of culture in the making’, Cultural

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Notes to Pages 100 –107

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

33.

Sociology 6:2 (2012), pp. 143– 61; of an installation, see Albeana Yaneva, ‘Chalk steps on the museum floor: The pulses of objects in a museum installation’, Journal of Material Culture 8:2 (2003), pp. 169 –88; or Olli Pyyhtinen, ‘Kollektiivinen luovuus ja taiteen tuotanto näyttelyinstituutiossa’ [Collective creativity and art production in an art institution], Tiede & edistys 37:2 (2012), pp. 96– 116. Yaneva and Pyyhtinen have conducted an ethnographic research, while Dominguez Rubio’s study is based on secondhand archive material and is done retrospectively. Vailla Vakinaista Asuntoa ry [No fixed abode NGO], http://www.vvary.fi/. Kotikuntalaki [Municipality of Residence Act] 9 § (10.12.2010/1095). As a contrast, in the United Kingdom, where such a register does not exist, people have to apply for the status of ‘homeless’ in order to be recognised as such and to receive municipal assistance. According to one of the sitters who now works for the homeless’ association, only approximately 2 per cent of the homeless decline the offered help. Personal communication on 5 February 2014. Personal communication by Petri Ryöppy on 24 January 2014, then facilities manager at the museum. Also Leevi Haapala, ‘Dokumentaarinen käänne. Neuvotteluja dokumentin ja taideteoksen välillä’ [The Documentary turn. Negotiations between a document and an artwork], in Päivi Rajakari, ed., Mitä meillä oli ennen Kiasmaa. Kokoelmatoiminnan vaikuttavuus (Helsinki: Finnish National Gallery, 2008), pp. 107 – 26. The bedrock is exposed in Finland (and Fennoscandia) because it is not covered by sediments. The production is explained in a video: Ai Weiwei, Wencuan Rebar (2012). See Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 98 – 117; Latour, Reassembling the Social, pp. 80 – 2. The favourite examples of ANT are citizen-gun or gun-citizen: Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 179; or driver-car: Tim Dant, ‘The drivercar’, Theory, Culture and Society, special issue on automobilities, 21:4 (2004), pp. 145–67. The said assemblages have a more established and permanent role in modern society whereas hybrids created in art, such as homeless-ditch, tend to be temporal and exceptional. Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture (London: Pluto Press, 2011). Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics’, October 110 (Autumn 2004), pp. 70– 1; Bishop, Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 235–7; Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Maria Hirvi, ed., ARS 01: Unfolding Perspectives, exhibition catalogue (Helsinki: Contemporary Art Museum Kiasma, 2001).

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Notes to Pages 107 –109 34. Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another. Site-specific Art and Locational Identity (London and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), p. 51; Frieling, Boris Groys, Robert Atkins and Lev Manovich, The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now (New York and London: Thames & Hudson, 2008), p. 35. Both paraphrase Richard Serra’s list of artistic activity as physical actions ‘to roll, to crease, to fold, to drop, to split’: Richard Serra, ‘Verb List, 1967–68’, in Writings Interviews (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 3–4. 35. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, p. 21. 36. ‘Who creates the “creator”?’ asks Pierre Bourdieu in The Field of Cultural Production (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), pp. 76– 7. 37. Ibid., pp. 42, 76–7. 38. For a history of the ‘curator as artist’ discourse, see Paul O’Neill, ‘The curatorial turn: From practice to discourse’, in Judith Rugg and Michèle Sedgwick, eds, Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance (Bristol: Intellect, 2007), pp. 13– 28; and Paul O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), pp. 91 –110. Further to convergence of artistic and curatorial practice, see also Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012), pp. 64 –5. 39. Nathalie Heinich and Michael Pollack, ‘Museum curator to exhibition auteur’, in Reesa Greenberg, Bruce Ferguson and Sandy Nairne, eds, Thinking about Exhibitions (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 231 –50; Claire Bishop, ‘What is a curator?’ Idea 26 (2007); Boris Groys, ‘Multiple authorship’, in Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic, eds, The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Exhibitions and Biennials (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), pp. 93 –100. 40. The 1990s has been called the ‘curators moment’ or ‘curatorial turn’ and ‘supervisibility’ of the curator. Mick Wilson, ‘Curatorial moments and discursive turns’, in Paul O’Neill, ed., Curating Subjects (London: de Appel, 2007). O’Neill provides a concise outline of the development of curating as a profession. The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), pp. 32– 8, 9 –49. 41. O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), pp. 91 –100. 42. Ibid., pp. 102– 10. 43. Groys, ‘Multiple authorship’. For a critique of this view, see Bishop, ‘What is a curator?’ 44. Mieke Bal, Double Exposure: The Subject of Cultural Analysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 1 – 3. 45. A field is a space with positions that people, e.g. curators, collectors, critics and gallerists, occupy. It has its own laws, its own specific ‘capital’ and rewards, and its own illusio, the shared belief in the value of the field and the capital it recognises. Power is a function of positions in the field and depends on the common interest shared by the actors occupying the positions in the field. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, pp. 77 –8, 176.

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Notes to Pages 109 –111 46. Boris Groys notes that the value of the artist is not measured by his products but by his participation in important exhibitions. Groys, ‘Multiple authorship’. 47. 1996 is the year of Traffic exhibition in the CAPC Museum in Bordeaux, including artists Philippe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe, Carsten Höller, Liam Gillick, Maurizio Cattelan and Rirkrit Tiravanija, among others. 48. O’Neill and Doherty, Locating the Producers, pp. 4 –5. They further characterise this person as ‘charismatic agency’ (ibid., pp. 7– 8). 49. Liam Gillick in 2004, quoted in Wilson, ‘Curatorial moments and discursive turns’, pp. 207–11. 50. O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), pp. 43– 4; Wilson, ‘Curatorial moments and discursive turns’, p. 211. 51. Maaretta Jaukkuri, ‘Unfolding perspectives’, in Hirvi, ARS 01, p. 21. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1998). 52. Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy in ‘Look & learn’, Frieze 141 (September 2011), pp. 182 – 9. She mentions among others Tino Sehgal and Jens Hoffmann, and Francis Al€ys and Cuauhtémoc Medina. 53. Wilson, ‘Curatorial moments and discursive turns’, pp. 213– 14. 54. Mediation is here used to denote communication with audiences and participators, mostly in the gallery or museum setting. See e.g. Maria Lind, ‘Why Mediate Art?’ Mousse Magazine 28 (2011). 55. Tom Finkelpearl, What We Made. Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2013), pp. 90– 1. Ernesto Pujol describes in his article ‘The artist as educator’ how artists of colour and questions of multiculturalism have similarly found their way to galleries first through educational departments. Ernesto Pujol, ‘The artist as educator’, Art Journal 60:3 (2001), pp. 4– 6. 56. Even the phenomenon that has become known as ‘educational turn’ in curating is in fact relatively antagonistic to the educational work that takes place in museums and galleries. See Carmen Mörsch, ‘Alliances for unlearning: On gallery education and institutions of critique’, Afterall, Spring (2011), pp. 4 –13; and Nora Sternfeld, ‘Unglamorous tasks: What can education learn from its political traditions?’, e-flux 3 (2010). Available at http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/125 (accessed 3 March 2013). 57. Instead of ‘capital’ of the Bourdieusian ‘field’, Mick Wilson uses the concept ‘reputational economy’ to describe the battle over prestige between curators and educators. He defines gallery education as work in the logic of ‘service economy’, as opposed to ‘reputational’ economy’ followed by artists and curators, and therefore not achieving the same status. This is to say that considering visitors’ needs is not part of the valid ‘currency’ of the field. See Kaija Kaitavuori, Nora Sternfeld and Laura Kokkonen, eds, It’s All Mediating. Outlining and Incorporating the Roles of Curating and Education in the Exhibition Context (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), pp. xiii –xiv.

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Notes to Pages 111 –115 58. Kester recognises this lack of symmetry when he describes Claire Bishop’s dismissive attitude towards activist and socially engaged art as a rejection of ‘unsophisticated others’. He goes on to define the invention of the ‘class Other’ in artist-led projects as an effort to define the artist as a reformer and protagonist. Kester, The One and the Many, pp. 33, 171. 59. The Committee (2013) Frieze Projects. Available at http://friezefoundation. org/emdash-award (accessed 3 March 2013). 60. Vanderlinden and Filipovic, The Manifesta Decade, pp. 11 –12; see also Karen van der Berg, Ursula Passero and Olav Velthuis on the effects of economic upturn, globalisation and new production models in Maria Lind and Olav Velthuis, eds, Contemporary Art and its Commercial Markets. A Report on Current Conditions and Future Scenarios (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), pp. 44, 158 –63. 61. Ibid., pp. 153– 81. 62. Joseph P. Pine and James H. Gilmore, ‘Welcome to the Experience Economy’, Harvard Business Review (July– August 1998), pp. 97– 105. 63. Kester, The One and the Many, p. 8; Bishop, Artificial Hells, p. 195. 64. In a similar way, education may be co-opted by (experience) marketing. Kaija Kaitavuori, ‘Museum education: Between the devil of business model and the deep blue sea of public service’, Engage journal 28 (2011), pp. 29 –37. Falk and Dierking structure their books around the museum experience and give instructions to museum staff on how to design memorable experiences more efficiently. John Falk and Lynn Dierking, The Museum Experience (Howells House / Washington, DC: Whalesback Books, 1992); John Falk and Lynn Dierking, Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2000). 65. For a discussion about biennials and the (missing) connections with their locations, see O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), p. 74 or Simon Sheikh, ‘Marks of distinction, vectors of possibility’, Open 16 (2009), p. 73; for a critique of participatory projects and local conditions, see Kwon, One Place after Another, p. 52. 66. O’Neill describes biennials as cultural events ‘in tune with capitalism’s colonial expansion in pursuit of new labor markets’. O’Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), pp. 62–3. See also Julian Stallabrass, Art Incorporated – The Story of Contemporary Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) on globalisation of contemporary art and mega-exhibitions. 67. Kortun in Robert Storr, ed., Where Art Worlds Meet: Multiple Modernities and the Global Salon. International Symposium (La Biennale di Venezia, Marsilio, 2005), pp. 176– 7. 68. For an analysis of the intricate liaisons between the private and the public in the arts in the UK and the USA, see Wu Chin-tao, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s (London: Verso, 2001). 69. In Britain under New Labour, art institutions were redefined as ‘centres for social change’ and there was a clear obligation to provide measurable

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70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

4

outcomes. Department for Culture, Media and Sport, Policy Action Team 10: Report on Social Exclusion (London: DCMS, 1999); see also Sara Selwood, Measuring Culture (2002). Available at http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/ article/6851#.VMLFkIusXmo (accessed 23 January 2015.). In Britain, Lynch describes as ‘national initiative overload’ the pressure to chase project funding and to produce evidence of audience engagement in order to secure it. Bernadette Lynch, Whose Cake is it Anyway? (London: Paul Hamlyn Foundation, 2011), p. 6. Haapala, ‘The documentary turn’. ‘Follow the actors!’ says Latour in Reassembling the Social. But which actors? Following an actor leads to another and another and so forth. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). The concept of cutting the network is from Marilyn Strathern. Her examples are from science. Marilyn Strathern, ‘Cutting the network’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2:3 (1996), pp. 517–35. Helena Reckitt, ‘Forgotten relations: Feminist artists and relational aesthetics’, in Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry, eds, Politics in a Glass Case (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), pp. 139–40. In 1969, Ukeles published a Maintenance Art Manifesto and performed, among other things, in 1973 Washing/Tracks/Maintenance cleaning the floor of the gallery. Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 85– 6. For a discussion of the project, see e.g. Jeannine Tang, ‘Future circulations. On the work of Hans Haacke and Maria Eichhorn’, in Provenance: An Alternate History of Art (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013), pp. 173– 96.

Contracts of Participation 1. A formulation by Marcel Mauss in The Gift. Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Cohen & West, 1954), pp. 1 –4. 2. The founding publication is Charles Fried’s Contract as Promise: A Theory of Contractual Obligation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). 3. See e.g. T.M. Scanlon, ‘Promises and contracts’, in Peter Benson, ed., The Theory of Contract Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 86–8. 4. According to Benson, there may be a shared understanding of the main elements of the law of contract but there exists no such general theory of contract. Benson, The Theory of Contract Law, p. 118. 5. Francis H. Buckley, Just Exchange: A Theory of Contract (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. xi–xii. 6. According to Foucault, the birth of the modern concept of author was related to the development of an institutionalised system of discipline and ownership:

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

the author was someone who can be held responsible for a product (a text) and who can claim ownership of it. Michel Foucault, ‘What is an Author?’ in D.F. Bouchard, ed., Language, Counter-Memory, Practice (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979/1969). This is demonstrated by Harold Garfinkel’s breaching exercises; see the section on ‘Target’. Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places (New York: The Free Press, 1963), p. 248. Barry Paddock, ‘NYC museum exhibit “Experience” features sensory deprivation tank, two-story slide’, Daily News 25 October (2011). In England, it is the Occupier’s Liability Act 1957 that imposes a ‘duty of care’ upon the occupier. Ben Quinn, ‘Tate Modern perfects the art of living dangerously’, The Guardian, 12 July (2009). Reported in Charlotte Higgins, ‘Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall recreates a 1971 art sensation’, The Guardian, 6 April (2009). Quinn, ‘Tate Modern perfects the art of living dangerously’. E.g. contracts of the Complaints Choir project. Howard Becker ‘Art as Collective Action’, American Sociological Review, 39:6, 1974, pp. 767– 8. Henry Lydiate, writing about collaborations, warns, ‘People hired as employees [. . .] developing ideas and/or executing them) may be legally regarded as joint authors [. . .] unless there is a written contract of employment clearly specifying otherwise.’ The risk that someone would present such claims grows when works gain economic value. Henry Lydiate, ‘Contracts. creative collaborators: Authors or assistants?’ Art Monthly 364 (March 2013), p. 37. Waste Man directed by Caroline Deeds 2006, 24 mins, Artangel Media (accessed on Vimeo 3 February 2012). Tiravanija’s meals are examples among other projects. Miwon Kwon, ‘Exchange rate: On obligation and reciprocity in some art of the 1960s and after’, in Anna Dezeuze, ed., The ‘Do-it-Yourself’ Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 227– 39. The theme of hospitality has been explored recently, for example, in The Unexpected Guest, Liverpool Biennial 2012. The exhibition Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art in SMART Museum of Art in Chicago, 2012, explored the meal in contemporary art. This relinquishing of intentionality may of course be the artist’s intention. Sehgal sees his work as a success when viewers take it and make use of it. Robert Putnam, ‘Bowling alone: America’s declining social capital’, Journal of Democracy (January 1995), pp. 65– 78, and The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). Buckley, Just Exchange, pp. 3– 4, 13–14.

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Notes to Pages 127 –132 23. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2005/1999), pp. xl –xliii, 18–19, 419– 24. 24. NielsAkerstrøm Andersen and Justine Grønbæk Pors, Public Management in Transition: The Orchestration of Potentiality (Bristol: Policy Press, 2016), pp. 132– 3. 25. An invitation to the public to use objects displayed on the table, including a loaded gun, on the artist’s body. See the section on ‘Material’. 26. NielsAkerstrøm Andersen, ‘Creating the client who can create himself and his own fate – the tragedy of the citizens’ contract’, Qualitative Sociology Review 3:2 (2007), pp. 120, 134–6. 27. The work was part of the One Day Sculpture project in 2008. Available at www.onedaysculpture.org.nz (accessed 3 March 2013). 28. Superflex tools, Supercopy Factory. Available at http://superflex.net/tools/ supercopy_factory (accessed 27 February 2013). 29. Raphael Gygax and Heike Munder, eds, Carey Young: Subject to Contract (Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2013). 30. John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 31. See e.g. Stefan Kalmár, ed., Rule Book. Angela Bulloch (London: Book Works, 1998). 32. There is a form of self-organised tourism built around Tunick’s projects, with people travelling to take part in his projects around the world. Spencer Tunick Forum. Available at http://www.spencertunickforum.org/group/index.php (accessed 7 October 2012). 33. This ambivalence of ‘free’ is pertinent also to the digital open-source software production, famously exemplified by Richard Stallman’s definition of free as in free thought, not free beer. E.g. Superflex: http://superflex.net/texts/richard_ stallman_on_free_beer (accessed 27 February 2013). 34. She notes the simultaneous rise of outsourcing in both economics and in art in the 1990s and applies it to describe a variety of projects, such as the runners in Martin Creed’s Work no.850 (2008), or the young people in a discodancing marathon in Phil Collins’ They Shoot Horses (2004 in Ramallah) as well as Santiago Sierra’s art. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 230– 1; and Claire Bishop, ‘Delegated performance: Outsourcing authenticity’, October 140 (Spring 2012), pp. 91– 112. 35. In Jingdezhen, the per capita disposable income of the urban residents is 13,583 Yuan; per capita net rural income is 5,253 Yuan. Wikipedia, ‘Jingdezhen’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingdezhen#Economy (accessed 27 February 2013). 36. This was for one ton of seeds. In early 2011 at Sotheby’s in London 100 kg of the seeds generated $559,394. That means that a small portion (less than a hundredth) of the total produced, has been sold for over $1.3 million at auction. International Business Times, Yifei Zhang, 11 May 2012. Available at

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Notes to Pages 132 –135

37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

http://www.ibtimes.com/chinese-dissident-ai-weiweis-sunflower-seeds-pull782000-698049 (accessed 27 February 2013). The exploitative aspect of Al€ys’ work was in fact implied by the curator of the project in the catalogue Francis Al€ys and Cuauhtémoc Medina, Francis Al€ys: When Faith Can Move Mountains (Madrid and Mexico City: Turner Ediciones, 2005). Immaterial labour ‘creates immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response’. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2004), p. 108. As an activity that produces the ‘cultural content’ of the commodity, immaterial labour involves skills and activities that are not normally recognised as ‘work’, such as defining cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms and public opinion. Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘Immaterial labour’, in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, eds, Radical Thought In Italy: A Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 13 –47; also Michael Hardt, ‘Immaterial labor and artistic production’, Rethinking Marxism 17:2 (2005), pp. 175 – 7. The original idea was that people could walk on the seeds. According to Pascal Gielen, the globalised art scene is an ideal production field for economic exploitation. He claims that not only are there structural similarities between the mode of production in arts practice and the new forms of economy, but that the features of cultural production with its dynamic, flexible working hours, short-term contracts or lack of contracts have fostered the post-Fordist production model. Pascal Gielen, ‘The biennial. A postinstitution for immaterial labour’, Open 16 (2009), pp. 8–17; and Pascal Gielen, The Murmuring of the Artistic Multitude (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2010). See also Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism; and Richard Sennett, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). Angela Dimitrakaki has identified the portrayal of physical labour as a ‘turn to an economic subject’ or ‘economic turn’ in contemporary art. According to her, it is connected to the globalisation of the labour market and the elevation of the conceptual ‘South’ and ‘the poor’ as a theme of art. Angela Dimitrakaki, ‘The spectacle and its others; labour, conflict and art in the age of global capital’, in Jonathan Harris, ed., Globalisation and Contemporary Art (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). For an examination of labour and art, see Marina Vishmidt, ‘Situation wanted: Something about labour’, Afterall 19 (Autumn/Winter 2008), pp. 21– 34. See Vishmidt, ‘Situation wanted’; according to Fraser ‘we are the 1%’. Andrea Fraser, ‘1% Art, who are the patrons of contemporary art today?’ Adbusters (2012). Available at https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/100/1-percent-art. html (accessed 18 January 2015). See e.g. Mega Monumental Garage Sale at the MoMA in 2012. Available at http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/garagesale/about

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Notes to Pages 135 –139 (accessed 1 March 2015). Museum visitors browse and buy second-hand objects and haggle with the artist. 44. Nina Möntmann, ed., Scandalous. A Reader on Art and Ethics (Stockholm: Sternberg Press, 2013), pp. 143– 4. 45. Episode III. Enjoy Poverty. Available at http://www.enjoypoverty.com/ (accessed 18 January 2015).

5

The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation

1. In terms of media education, he promotes a move from the idea of literacy to community involvement. Henry Jenkins, Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture. Media Education for the 21st Century (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2009), pp. xi –xv. 2. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 11 –40. 3. For Peter Weibel participatory art means ‘the birth of a new kind of democratic art in which everyone can participate’. Peter Weibel, ‘Globalization and contemporary art’, in Hans Belting, Andrea Buddensieg and Peter Weibel, eds, Global Contemporary and the Rise of New Art Worlds (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013), p. 27. Even Bishop, in one of the pioneering texts in which she criticises relational aesthetics for its shallow claims to democracy, acknowledges the value of democracy as such: ‘But does the fact that the work of Sierra and Hirschhorn demonstrates better democracy make it better art?’ she asks and, a bit later, answers positively. Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics’, October 110 (Autumn 2004), p. 77. 4. Markus Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation. Crossbench Praxis as a Mode of Criticality (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010). 5. Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation. He develops his ideas especially in the introduction: What is at stake (pp. 13– 25), chapter 2: Undoing the innocence of participation (pp. 41– 57), chapter 4: Consensus as stasis (pp. 83– 9) and chapter 5: Collaboration and the conflictual (pp. 91– 104). 6. Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation, pp. 55, 120. 7. Ibid., pp. 47, 51– 4, 57. 8. Ibid., p. 45. 9. Ibid., p. 13. 10. Ibid., p. 49. 11. Ibid., pp. 91–104, 191–201. The crossbencher refers to the members of the House of Lords who do not belong to any party. For Miessen, they represent independent alternative practitioners, free to act against consensus. Ibid., pp. 243– 4. It is surprising to characterise a crossbencher – an appointed lifetime or hereditary member of the upper house of the Parliament (even if unaffiliated) – as an outsider or as uninvited.

213

Notes to Pages 139 –144 12. Miessen interviews Mouffe, ibid. pp. 105 –59. Miessen is not alone in turning to Mouffe: Bishop already relied on Mouffe for support in her first article about relational aesthetics (Bishop, ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics’), although for her, curiously, the reference point was ‘antagonism’ instead of ‘agonism’, as discussed in the section on ‘Material’. ‘Agonism’, for Mouffe, transforms the open hostility of polarised ‘antagonism’ into an adversary relationship. 13. Essentially, Miessen is using the ‘straw man’ strategy, constructing an enemy that he then attacks. 14. This applies as well to ‘produsage’ projects in general, as discussed earlier. 15. Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation, pp. 54, 106, 123. 16. Chantal Mouffe, ‘Deliberative democracy or agonistic pluralism’, Political Science Series 72 (Vienna: Institute for Advanced Studies, 2000). 17. Chantal Mouffe, ‘Art as an agonistic intervention in public space’, Open 14 (2008), pp. 6 –15. 18. Mouffe, ‘Art as an agonistic intervention in public space’, pp. 12– 13. She also cites Richard Noble’s four types of political art as different forms of agonistic interventions in public space. These range from politically engaged projects (e.g. Hans Haacke) to identity-based political art, to institutional critique and utopian experimentations. 19. Bishop, ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics’, pp. 67– 8. 20. Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), pp. 10– 14, 163– 6. 21. E.g. Nato Thompson in Nina Möntmann, ed., Scandalous. A Reader on Art and Ethics (Stockholm: Sternberg Press, 2013), p. 121. 22. Bishop, Artificial Hells, pp. 236– 8. 23. On the contrary, for example ‘the man in the ditch’, Reijo, had perfectly pragmatic reasons for his participation and did not allude to any pleasure of subordination. See the section on ‘Material’. 24. Bishop explains that the exchange taking place in this framework between the artist and participants is a delegation of power (from artist to participant) and a guarantee of authenticity (from participant to artist). Bishop, Artificial Hells, pp. 236– 8. 25. Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation, p. xx. 26. See e.g. ‘Emdash Award’. Available at http://www.friezeprojects.org/emdashaward (accessed 1 February 2015). 27. The Complaints Choir of Singapore was banned from performing; the Ministry of Information, Communication and Arts did not allow critique of the administration. 28. Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation, pp. 41 –4. 29. Regarding participation in civil society, ‘new systems of participation often reflect existing wider systems of power and control of resources’; Ellie Brodie, Eddie Cowling, Nina Nissen, Understanding Participation: A Literature

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Notes to Pages 144 –149

30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42.

43.

Review (London: NCVO, 2009), p. 19. In the arts context, the limits and the contrived nature of cultural quasi-participation comes up in numerous research reports, e.g. Bernadette Lynch, Whose Cake is it Anyway? (London: Paul Hamlyn Foundation, 2011). Miessen collapses citizen-initiated referendum and politician-initiated popular vote (plebiscite), a public consultation, as one; or, more correctly, he does not consider the first at all and should in fact talk about plebiscite and not referendum. For a definition of referendum, initiative and plebiscite, see Rolf Büchi, Activating Democracy. Available at http://www.activatingdemocracy. com/typology/ (accessed December 2014). Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation, p. 47. Cf. Büchi, Activating Democracy. Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, pp. 360– 1. Ibid., pp. 371–80. Bruns does not seem to be aware of direct democracy, despite similarities in understanding the citizens’ role and models of participation; at least, he does not mention it or any examples of direct democracy in practice, and calls his version ‘molecular politics’ instead. See e.g. Lynch, Whose Cake is it Anyway? Jacques Rancière, ‘Ten theses on politics’, Theory & Event 5:3 (2001). Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 52 –3. Ibid., pp. 4, 7– 8. Kaija Kaitavuori, ‘Participation in the gallery: (Re)negotiating contracts’, in Marika Leino, Laura MacCulloch and Outi Remes, eds, Performativity in the Gallery: Staging Interactive Encounters (Bern: Peter Lang Publishing, 2014). The concepts come from Putnam’s ‘bonding capital’ and ‘bridging capital’. He explains, ‘Bonding occurs when you are socializing with people who are like you: same age, same race, same religion, and so on. But in order to create peaceful societies in a diverse multi-ethnic country, one needs to have a second kind of social capital: bridging. Bridging is what you do when you make friends with people who are not like you, like supporters of another football team.’ Robert Putnam, The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000). Hito Steyerl, ‘Politics of art: Contemporary art and the transition to postdemocracy’, e-flux 12 (2010). See for example Möntmann, Scandalous; Anthony Downey, ‘An ethics of engagement: Collaborative art practices and the return of the ethnographer’, Third Text 23:5 (2009); or Pilar Villela Mascaró, ‘Not in my name. Reality and ethics in the work of Santiago Sierra’, Santiago Sierra 7 trabajos / 7 works, pp. 7 –41 (London: Lisson Gallery, 2008). Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Dijon: Les presses du reel, 2002 /1998), p. 28.

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Notes to Pages 150 –153 44. The Free Association, ‘Worlds in motion’, Turbulence #1 (2008). Available at http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-1/worlds-in-motion/ (accessed 27 February 2015). 45. Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: CommunityþCommunication in Modern Art (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004). 46. Carlos interviewed in Dias & Riedweg, exhibition catalogue (Barcelona: Macba, 2003), pp. 204– 5. 47. The negative aspect of visibility is elaborated by Foucault in his studies of vision as a form of power: the history of how madness, illness and crime are made visible and disciplined through the development of ‘technologies of the visual’ and the individual as the object rather than the subject of vision. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon, 1995/1975). For Peggy Phelan, the ‘usual traps of visibility’ are surveillance, fetishism, voyeurism and colonialist appetite for possession. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked. The Politics of Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 6. 48. For a detailed discussion of contemporary photography of people and the ethnographic tradition, see Julian Stallabrass, ‘What’s in a face? Blankness and significance in contemporary art photography’, October 122 (Fall 2007), pp. 71– 90. More generally, the idea of visuality as commodification, and of spectacle as the crystallisation of consumerist attitude, stems from Guy Debord’s Society of spectacle, in which human relations are mediated via images rather than by authentic participation. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red Press, 1977/1967). 49. For example, Judith Butler: ‘For politics to take place, the body must appear.’ Judith Butler, ‘Bodies in alliance and the politics of the street’, Transversal (2011), pp. 120–3. Available at http://eipcp.net/transversal/1011/butler/en (accessed 28 September 2013). 50. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1989/1958). 51. The campaign was against the passivity of the US administration in the AIDS crisis. Modern social movements and political actions, such as Madres de Plaza de Mayo, Pussy Riot, Femen and Greenpeace, make effective use of visual and performance strategies. 52. Claire Doherty, ed., Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation (London: Black Dog Publishing 2004), p. 145. 53. This is not what Bishop appreciates in art. According to her, the value of Hirschhorn’s and Sierra’s art is that they deal with ‘the role of dialogue and negotiation in their art, but do so without collapsing these relationships into the work’s content’. Bishop, ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics’, p. 70. For our example, Gormley’s One & Other is interesting just because participation, dialogue and negotiation are not only the form or the method of the work but also the content, the question that is explored.

216

Notes to Pages 154 –157 54. Dario Gamboni, ‘Composing the Body Politic. Composite images and political representation, 1651 –2004’, in Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds, Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 162 –70. 55. For an in-depth investigation of this genre, see Stallabrass, ‘What’s in a face?’ 56. Not all the pictures in the Nude Adrift series show people facing the camera but also, for example, lying on the ground and forming a unified surface. 57. One & Other. Antony Gormley (London: Jonathan Cape / Random House, 2010). 58. Among the professionals are Martin Herbert identifying the public as unpaid content providers, and Jonathan Jones according to whom ‘“plinth people” don’t stand up for democracy, they just stand there – and they look stupid’. Martin Herbert, ‘One and Other by Antony Gormley: Review’, The Daily Telegraph, 29 October (2010); Jonathan Jones, ‘Fourth Plinth: A monument to bad art’, The Guardian, 18 September (2009). Art Monthly September 2009 editorial accuses it of manipulative populism. For lay opinions, see e.g. comments after Charlotte Higgins, ‘The birth of Twitter art’, Guardian, 8 July (2009). 59. Higgins, ‘The birth of Twitter art’. The title of the article was not chosen by the writer. 60. Even public media, such as ‘The Guardian plinth watch’ on Flickr provided social media channels for the public to share their photos and experiences about the work. Available at https://www.flickr.com/groups/plinthwatch/ (accessed 27 February 2015). 61. Higgins, for example, ponders on the project as ‘according dignity to the everyday creativity of ordinary lives; in political terms, its corollary could be to angle policy away from how institutions grandly “provide” arts and culture to the masses, and to think about how citizens exist in a cultural ecology in which their own expressive gestures take on new importance’. Higgins, ‘The birth of Twitter art’. 62. Judith Butler, talking about demonstrations and gatherings in public squares, underlines the importance of bodies appearing in public and claiming the public sphere. Butler, ‘Bodies in alliance and the politics of the street’. 63. This rejection seems to be echoed in the way Miessen talks about the participation of faceless unidentified masses as a war and as violence of participation, and warns about how participation can be dangerous. Miessen, The Nightmare of Participation, pp. 53, 120. 64. Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 25. See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 2004). I am using Virno’s rather than Hardt and Negri’s concept, as it provides a more concise idea and an applicable tool to the art context, as opposed to Hardt and Negri’s more sweeping and rather inconsistent notion, dealing with transnational global governance.

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Notes to Pages 157 –161 65. According to Virno, the Hobbesian concept of ‘people’ is united by fear and anguish, as two different aspects of dread, and the search for security or refuge. Today, these aspects overlap in the form of risk or the ‘uncanny’ as a collective experience. 66. Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude; also Chantal Mouffe, ‘Democratic politics in the age of Post-Fordism’, Open 16 (2009), pp. 39– 40. For Hobbes, multitude is a pre-political body. 67. This is Bishop’s criticism of Tiravanija’s projects and other relational art. Bishop, ‘Antagonism and relational aesthetics’, pp. 67– 9. 68. For an analysis and critique of actual projects and a discussion of types of communities, see Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another. Site-specific Art and Locational Identity (London and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), pp. 118– 55; for a follow-up of the discussion, Dave Beech in Paul O’Neill and Claire Doherty, eds, Locating the Producers. Durational Approaches to Public Art (Amsterdam: Antennae, 2011), pp. 313– 25. 69. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998/1986); Jessica Morgan, ed., Common Wealth (London: Tate Publishing, 2003). 70. Nora Sternfeld discusses ‘inclusive’ participatory projects and their (im)possibilities in the museum context in which the rules are set by the institution and the participants have no choice but to play by them. She calls for a ‘post-representational’ museum, which would not treat participants as target groups or ‘marginalised’ groups. Nora Sternfeld, ‘Playing by the rules of the game’, CuMMA Papers (Helsinki: Aalto University, 2013). Available at https://cummastudies.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/cummapapers1_sternfeld. pdf (accessed 27 February 2015). 71. One and Other. Antony Gormley. Hans Ulrich Obrist, in the same publication, on the other hand, denies such an interpretation (ibid., p. 244). 72. Charlotte Higgins, ‘Opening of Trafalgar Square Plinth begins Gormley’s “picture” of Britain’, The Guardian, 6 July (2009). 73. Gamboni ‘Composing the body politic’, pp. 193 –5. The War President was made by Joe Wezorek in 2004 and it inspired the Daily Mail to produce the Blair portrait in 22 April 2004. 74. Julie Steinmetz, Heather Cassils and Clover Leary, ‘Behind enemy lines: Toxic Titties infiltrate’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31 March (2006). The plan could be compared to internet ‘trolling’ – users pretending to participate and using participation to secretly undermine the project. Instead of anonymity provided by internet platforms, they were faced with real people. 75. Agnieszka Gratza, ‘Conversation pieces’, Frieze (February 2013), p. 22. 76. John Hartley expresses a polarisation: ‘User-created content is critiqued as a corporate ruse or celebrated as an opportunity for “digital democracy”’. John Hartley, ‘From the consciousness industry to creative industries: Consumercreated content, social network markets and the growth of knowledge’, in

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Notes to Pages 161 –163

77.

78.

79.

80.

81. 82. 83.

84. 85.

Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren, eds, Media Industries: History, Theory and Methods (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), p. 8. Critical voices are heard from, for example, Andrew Keen who accuses it of ‘tyranny of amateurs’, and Markus Miessen who, as we have seen, crusades against the Nightmare of Participation. Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture (New York: Currency, 2007). More optimistic discussants include Axel Bruns and Charles Leadbeater, among others, as discussed earlier. Axel Bruns, ‘The future is user-led: The path towards widespread produsage’, Fibreculture Journal 11 (2008). Available at http://eprints.qut.edu.au (accessed 28 July 2013). Nathalie Heinich analyses contemporary art in general in the light of Thomas Kuhn’s theory and shows how it presents a paradigmatic change in art as opposed to classical and modern art. Nathalie Heinich, Le Paradigme de l’art contemporain. Structures d’une révolution artistique (Paris: Gallimard, 2014). In this chapter, participatory art is studied as part of a wider process of reorganisation of societal relationships. For Library 2.0 see Michael E. Casey and Laura C. Savastinuk ‘Library 2.0’, Library Journal (21 May 2010). Available at http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2010/ 05/technology/library-2 – 0/; for museum, Nina Simon, Museum 2.0 blog. Available at http://www.museumtwo.blogspot.fi/ (both accessed 13 August 2013). Tim O’Reilly, ‘What is Web 2.0? Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software’ (2005). Available at http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/ what-is-web-20.html; and Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0 (both accessed 12 August 2013). Silke Helfrich, ‘The logic of the Commons and the market’, in David Bollier and Silke Helfrich, The Wealth of the Commons. A World beyond Market and States (2012). Available at http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/ logic-commons-market-shorthand-comparsion-their-core-beliefs (accessed 14 January 2015). Michel Bauwens, ‘A Peer-to-peer economy’, Paper.li blog (2011). Available at http://blog.paper.li/2011/11/30/michel-bauwens-a-peer-to-peer-economy/ (accessed 31 January 2015). This is not, however, to say that nobody should be paid for their work in the arts. For ways of including audiences in institutional practices, however, see Nina Simon, The Participatory Museum (Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0, 2010), or Kaija Kaitavuori, ‘Open to the public. The use and accessibility of the object for the benefit of the public’, in Encouraging Collection Mobility. A Way Forward for Museums in Europe (Collections Mobility 2.0 project, European Culture Programme 2007– 2013, 2010), pp. 276 – 98. Bruns, ‘The future is user-led’, pp. 338–41. Museums, for example, have acknowledged that much interpretation and meaning-making about their content is produced and shared by audiences

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Notes to Pages 163 –165

86.

87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92. 93.

94.

95.

without passing through the museum authority, and many museums are in fact actively encouraging this. Kaitavuori, ‘Open to the public’. Kalleinen and Kochta-Kalleinen’s recent project (produced by Helsinki Festival in 2013) invites people to a private home and asks them to talk about their relatives and ancestors. This happens through a set of social games; the stories are shared with others and then adapted as an instant improvisation by two actors. Typically, the process is collective; no one person is responsible but together they produce a rich content. Unlike the Complaints Choir, in this project there is no secondary audience and the participants are also the audience who buy a ticket to the event – an event that has no pre-existing content before the participants make it. As a relatively open profession (compared to professions with restricted qualifications and licences), the art field may be particularly prone to anxiety and protective of its borders. Keen, The Cult of the Amateur. Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook, Rethinking Curating. Art after New Media (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2010), pp. 301 –2. Claire Bishop, meanwhile, ponders why the digital has had so little influence on contemporary art on any deeper thematic level, and comes to the conclusion that contemporary art deliberately disavows the digital revolution (albeit depending on it in practical terms) and entertains a fascination with analogue media. Claire Bishop, ‘Digital Divide’, Artforum (September 2012). Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 359 –85. Alana Jelinek, This Is Not Art. Activism and Other ‘Not-Art’ (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2013), pp. 112 – 13. BAVO, ‘How much politics can art take?’ Open 14 (2008), pp. 110 –11. Gielen uses Gay Pride as an example of how critical and subversive acts are incorporated in communal, governmental culture to tap into a new economy and attract the ‘creative class’. Pascal Gielen, ‘Mapping community art’, in Paul De Bryene and Pascal Gielen, eds, Community Art. The Politics of Trespassing (Amsterdam: Valiz, 2011), pp. 26 –7. Wu writes how inclusion in a corporate collection redefines the meaning of socially critical art such as Hans Haacke’s On Social Grease: ‘[a] work that set out to criticise the corporation has ironically ended up standing for the so-called liberal and “enlightened” face of business’. Chin-tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention since the 1980s (London: Verso, 2001), p. 267. Gerald Raunig, ‘Flatness rules. Instituent practices and institutions of the common in a flat world’, in Pascal Gielen, ed., Institutional Attitudes. Instituting Art in a Flat World (Amsterdam: Antennae, 2013), p. 169. See also Rancière on the confusion of democracy with consumerism. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 22– 3. Kaija Kaitavuori, ‘Museum education: Between the devil of business model and the deep blue sea of public service’, Engage journal 28 (2011).

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Notes to Pages 165 –170 96. Andrea Fraser, ‘1% Art, who are the patrons of contemporary art today?’ Adbusters (2012). Available at https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/100/ 1-percent-art.html (accessed 18 January 2015). See also Steyerl, ‘Politics of art’ on how political art never deals with the politics of art production, for example funding or working conditions; also Jelinek, This Is Not Art, pp. 84– 91. 97. Quoted by Angela Dimitrakaki and Lara Perry, eds, Politics in a Glass Case (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), p. 9. 98. Nancy Proctor, ‘Feminism, participation and matrixial encounters: Towards a radical, sustainable museum (practice)’, in Dimitrakaki and Perry, Politics in a Glass Case, pp. 51– 2. 99. Simon Critchley, ‘Absolutely-too-much’, The Brooklyn Rail, 1 October (2012). Available at http://www.brooklynrail.org/2012/08/art/absolutely-toomuch (accessed 31 January 2015).

Postscript 1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, second edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 2. See also Paulo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), p. 49. 3. Georg Simmel, ‘The persistence of social groups: I’, American Journal of Sociology 3 (1897), p. 663. 4. Charles Leadbeater, For, With, By and To (2010). Available at https:// charlesleadbeater.net/2010/05/for-with-by-and-to/ (accessed 18 July 2015). 5. For this topic, see also Kaitavuori, ‘Participation in the gallery: (Re)negotiating contracts’.

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Index

Abramovic, Marina, 39– 40, 47, 52, 58, 98, 127 actant, 49 –50, 69, 100, 102, 104, 105, 112, 115 see also actor-network theory (ANT) activist art, 22, 26, 141, 149, 152 actor-network theory (ANT), 49 –52, 69, 100, 106, 115–16 agency, 18, 25, 30, 48, 51, 62, 70, 93– 4, 126, 142, 153, 160, 168 delegation of, 155, 158 expository agency, 109 agonism, 141–143, 196n.135 see also antagonism; democracy Ai Weiwei, 41, 104– 5, 114, 116, 131–4, 166 AIDS, 26, 43, 82 Al€ys, Francis, 21, 25, 32, 57, 62, 114, 131, 133–4 antagonism, 60 –1, 85, 91, 141, 166 see also agonism anti-art, 25, 187n.21 Arendt, Hannah, 152, 167 Arnstein, Sherry, 80 art fairs, 2, 112–14 market, 78, 97, 112– 14, 126– 7, 132, 134– 5, 162–3 arte útil, 48 Artist Placement Group, 76 artist residencies, 31, 41, 76, 79, 112–13 authenticity, 12, 214n.24

author, 9 –12, 99– 100, 108, 209n.6, 210n.16 death of the, 9 –10 function, 6, 9– 11 authorship, 7, 9, 70, 90, 94, 99, 107 – 8, 124–5, 126– 7, 148, 163 multiple authorship, 52, 99 see also ownership Bal, Mieke, 108 –9 Barthes, Roland, 9 – 10, 13 Bauwens, Michel, 162–3 BAVO (artist collective), 164– 5 Becker, Howard, 116, 124 Beech, Dave, 5 Beecroft, Vanessa, 56– 7, 62– 3, 66 –8, 94, 149, 152 –3, 161 Berger, Peter and Thomas Luckmann, 65 Beuys, Joseph, 144 Bhabha, Homi, 110 biennials, 2, 31, 79, 84, 91, 112– 14, 165, 210n.19 Bilal, Wafaa, 98 Bishop, Claire, 4 black box, 51– 1, 106 Boal, Augusto, 31, 185n.10 Boltanski, Christian, 41 Bony, Oscar, 58 Bourdieu, Pierre, 107, 109, 206n.45 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 4, 41 –4, 49, 60–1, 81, 85, 90– 1, 109– 10, 149–50

237

The Participator in Contemporary Art breaching experiments, 27, 31–2 see also Garfinkel, Harold Bruguera, Tania, 48, 84, 87, 161 Bulloch, Angela, 130 Bruns, Axel, 95– 7, 145, 161, 163– 4 see also produsage co-option, 25, 114, 165 Collins, Phil, 61 commodification, 126, 149–50, 185n.12 commons, 95, 162, 203n.213 creative commons, 21, 97, 135, 162 community, 83 community art, 75, 77– 8, 85, 90, 142, 158 composite portraiture, 154– 5, 158–9 conceptual art, 1, 39 conflict, 3, 26– 8, 31, 60 –1, 89, 119– 20, 128, 139–41, 143, 162 –3, 166 see also consensus consensus, 61, 106, 138 –40, 143 see also conflict; democracy contract, 7, 28, 62 –3, 70, 90, 97, 119–32, 146, 168 social contract, 154, 157 Cook, Sarah, 4 copyright, 97, 120, 124, 126, 129 see also ownership Counter-Strike (online game), 47 Crary, Jonathan, 10 Creed, Martin, 21– 2 Critchley, Simon, 166 cultural tourism, 114 curating, 41, 79, 91, 108, 110– 11, 139 curator, 40, 79, 83, 91, 107 – 11, 113– 14, 117, 126, 134, 168 curatorial turn, 206n.40 the curatorial, 139 Dadaists, 25 dark matter, 106 Dartington College of Arts, 77 David, Catherine, 83

de Certeau, Michel, 29, 48 –9, see also tactics Debord, Guy, 42, 216n.48 delegated performance, 60–1, 142 democracy, 61, 81, 89, 138 –48, 161–5, 213n.3 agonistic, 139– 43 deliberative, 140– 1, 143 direct, 88, 144 –6, 158, 164 representative, 88, 145–6 see also consensus détournement, 25 –6 dialogical art, 61, 81 –3, 88 Dias, Mauricio and Walter Riedweg, 73–5, 82 –5, 87, 90, 96, 102 –3, 113–14, 124, 143, 147, 149–51, 158, 169 Dijkstra, Rineke, 59, 155 documentation, 5– 6, 12, 14, 21, 25, 31, 57, 66, 70, 78 –9, 111– 12, 155 education (in museums), 78– 9, 86–8, 110– 11, 115, 165, 184n.12, 207n.57 educational turn, 207n.56 Elias, Norbert, 3, 69, 93, 168, 197n.152 see also figuration Eliasson, Olafur, 94, 96, 113 – 14 ethical turn, 83, 142 ethnography, 24, 31, 60, 152 ethnomethodology, 27 see also Garfinkel everyday life, 21, 26 –8, 32, 39, 44, 48–9, 65, 140 experience (art as), 1, 5, 37– 8, 63– 7, 81, 84– 5, 124, 131, 133, 142, 150, 153, 161, 208n.64 experience economy, 113, 196n.141 field (sociological concept), 9, 49, 77, 107, 109, 111, 125, 135, 148, 166, 207n.57, 220n.87 figuration, 3, 69 –70, 93, 149, 153, 168 see also Elias, Norbert

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Index Fluxus, 25, 37 Foster, Hal, 24 Foucault, Michel, 6, 9– 11, 126–7 see also authorship Fourth Plinth, 1, 89, 104 Fraser, Andrea, 58, 165 Freire, Paulo, 88 Fried, Michael, 37 Fusco, Coco, 23 –4, 60, 64, 104 Futurists, 25 Gablik, Suzi, 82 Gamboni, Dario, 154– 5, 159, 160 Garfinkel, Harold, 27 –8, 31 gift, 125, 130– 1 Gillick, Liam, 4, 36, 40– 1, 43, 47 Goffman, Erving, 27– 30, 44–6, 120–121 Gomez-Peña, Guillermo, 23– 4, 60, 64, 104 Gonzalez-Torres, Felix, 36, 42– 3, 98, 117 Gormley, Antony, 1, 89, 96, 104, 113, 116, 125, 131, 152–4, 159– 60 Graham, Beryl, 5 –6, 191n.66, 202n.228 Graham, Dan, 37– 8 Gran Fury, 152 Group Material, 43 Groys, Boris, 108–9, 194n.113 Haacke, Hans, 117 Habermas, Jürgen, 81, 140 hacktivism, 26, 32 Harding, David, 76 –7, 85 Heeswijk, Jeanne van, 87 Heinich, Nathalie, 219n.77 Helguera, Pablo, 87– 8, 183n.6 Hirschhorn, Thomas, 39, 61 –2, 98, 152, 166 Hobbes, Thomas, 154–7 Höller, Carsten, 12, 40, 43– 7, 49, 51, 113–14, 121–2, 128, 149, 161 Hou Hanru, 49

human zoo, 60, 69 Huyghe, Pierre, 166 ideal type, 17– 18 installation (as artform), 1, 5, 17, 37–8, 41, 50, 53, 70, 91, 113, 162 institutional critique, 41 instruction art, 37, 40 –1 interaction, 4– 6, 13, 37 –8, 40, 75, 81, 94, 98 interactive art, 6, 40, 75, 91 interstice, 43, 49 intervention, 4, 17– 18, 21– 31, 55, 66, 85, 96, 105, 129, 141 invisible theatre see Boal, Augusto Jacob, Mary Jane, 79, 89 Jelinek, Alana, 164 Jenkins, Henry, 137 Kalleinen, Tellervo and Oliver KochtaKalleinen, 71– 3, 86, 88, 90, 95– 7, 112–13, 117, 124, 135, 143–5, 147, 151, 158, 162, 220n.86 Keen, Andrew, 219n.76 Kelly, Owen, 77 Kester, Grant, 4, 61, 79, 81–91, 106, 109, 114, 142, 151 Kids of Survival see Rollins, Tim Kimsooja, 22, 26, 29, 31 Klein, Yves, 58 Krauss, Rosalind, 189n.50 Kwon, Miwon, 83 –4, 98, 107, 125 labour, 52, 62 –4, 114, 121, 123–4, 130–5, 162, 167 Laclau, Ernesto, 61 Lacy, Suzanne, 75 –6, 78, 81 Ladder of Citizen Participation see Arnstein, Sherry Latham, John see Artist Placement Group Latour, Bruno, 50, 69 see also actor-network theory

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The Participator in Contemporary Art Leadbeater, Charles, 168, 204n.18 Leviathan, 154– 6 Lin, Michael, 11, 34 –6, 41, 43 –9, 51, 94–5, 104 Lind, Maria, 201n.213 Littoral art, 4, 77 live art, 23, 53, 58 Macuga, Goshka, 47 Mann, Sally, 59 Manzoni, Piero, 58 Marcus, Greil, 187n.19 Martens, Renzo, 135, 149 Mayer, Helen and Newton Harrison, 77 McQueen, Steve, 160 Medalla, David, 77 –8 Miessen, Markus, 138 – 42, 144 –5, 201n.204 Minimalism, 37 Morris, Robert, 37– 8, 122–3, 127, 130 Mouffe, Chantal, 61, 139– 41 multitude, 157–61 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 158– 9 Nauman, Bruce, 37– 8 Nesbit, Molly, 40 new institutionalism, 41 nudity, 64– 8 objectification, 24, 57, 62, 69, 142, 188n.40 Obrist, Hans Ulrich, 40– 1 observer, 10, 13, 37, 85, 93, 95, 169 see also spectatorship Ono, Yoko, 37, 39 open-source, 95 –7, 124– 5, 162, 164 ownership, 7, 18, 111, 121– 6, 162 Parreno, Philippe, 41, 166 participator function, 6 –12, 168 see also author function performance art, 1, 5, 22 –5, 28, 53, 56–7, 59 –60, 126, 131 performative, 129, 150

Phelan, Peggy, 64, 184n.10, 216n.47 phenomenology, 37 photography (in participatory art), 14, 34, 36, 59, 60, 66 –8, 79, 86, 152–3, 155 platform, 17, 32, 35, 39– 40, 43 –9, 70, 74, 79, 95, 104, 110, 147, 156, 161 politics (the notion of), 84, 91, 145 – 6, 148, 150–3, 157– 8, 160–1, 167 body politic, 155 Proctor, Nancy, 166 produsage, 95– 9, 119, 124, 137, 145, 158, 161–4 see also Bruns, Axel public art, 76 –7, 83 new genre, 75, 83 public space, 21, 31, 43, 55, 67, 169 Putnam, Robert, 127, 215n.40 quasi-objects, 50, 104 Rancière, Jacques, 13, 146, 158 Rawls, John, 140 Raymond, Eric, 97– 8, 107 re-enactment, 22, 25 ready-made, 60, 131 Rehberger, Tobias, 36, 46 Rollins, Tim and The Kids of Survival, 78 Rosler, Martha, 135 Sehgal, Tino, 21 –2, 27, 29, 70, 104, 112, 114, 117, 126, 131, 161 self-organisation, 47 Serra, Richard, 206n.34 Sholette, Gregory, 106 Sierra, Santiago, 55 –7, 59– 62, 64, 69, 84, 86, 100–7, 109– 17, 124, 130, 132–5, 141– 2, 147, 149, 152– 3 Simmel, Georg, 3, 167–9 site-specific, 1, 5, 37, 75, 111 Situationists International, 25– 6 socialisation, 65

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Index socially engaged art, 4, 26, 78, 82, 85, 87, 90, 165 sociology, 2 – 3, 116 spectacle, 14, 25, 42, 68, 82, 86, 117, 134 spectator, the role of, 6, 10– 14, 46, 68, 70, 79, 88, 93– 4, 105, 146, 152 – 3, 167–9 spectatorship, 1, 5, 12 –13, 37– 8 spect-actor, 31 see also observer sponsorship, 114– 15, 165 Steveni, Barbara, 76 Steyerl, Hito, 148–9 Superflex, 20 –2, 25, 29, 47, 128–9, 135, 150 Szeemann, Harald, 40 tactics, 29 –30, 48, 49, 188n.37 Takala, Pilvi, 19– 22, 25–32, 112– 13, 115, 135, 141, 143, 149 Tiravanija, Rirkrit, 40– 1, 43 –4, 85, 98, 117, 125, 135 town artist, 76

Tunick, Spencer, 12, 52– 5, 57, 62– 9, 86, 94, 112, 124, 147, 150, 152– 3, 161, 169 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman, 58, 64, 117, 155 Virno, Paulo, 157 – 9 visibility, 64, 117, 151–2, 166 Wearing, Gillian, 151, 155 Willats, Stephen, 77– 8, 81 Wilson, Mick, 110, 207n.57 workshop (method), 17, 59–60, 70– 3, 78, 86– 9, 95– 7 worlding, 150– 1 Wu, Chin-tao, 220n.93 Wurm, Erwin, 1, 11– 12, 32 –6, 40, 43, 48, 50, 52, 112, 117, 153, 161 Young, Carey, 129 Zmijewski, Artur, 61

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