Just finished Claire Bishop’s Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012)1 Great book, very clearly written and based upon a huge amount of research. Provides a very useful survey of participatory art practices across various regions (chiefly Europe and Latin America) in relation to key historical periods (the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the 1968 student revolts and the 1989 dissolution of the Soviet Union and related rise of neo-liberal socio-economic regimes). Bishop demonstrates convincingly, through a close examination of many specific projects, that participatory practices have had very different implications in different historical contexts. They are not necessarily tied to fond, feel-good notions of collective, citizen-based democracy (which she tends to associate with US participatory art). They can also, for instance, unsettle conceptions of immediate engagement (many Latin American works) and even provide mechanisms for supporting illicit forms of artistic individuality (many Eastern European examples).
Bishop’s main argument is that participatory art should not be reduced to questions of ethical-political efficacy. The aesthetic dimension, which is never simply closed and autonomous, which is always transversal in orientation, demands that something like an image take shape – that any participatory event engage with issues of aesthetic form. This is not some abstract demand for formal beauty, but rather the suggestion that any event is instantly doubled when it is aesthetically cast or inflected. It is is once a singular event and the theatricalisation of that event. In this context it is worth noting that Bishop charts a close relation between traditions of participatory art and traditions of theatre and performance art. The quality of any piece of participatory art is not, in her view, aesthetically determinable at the level of its immediacy, ethical integrity and political efficacy, but in terms of the necessary dimension of distancing that aesthetic form entails. She suggests then a complex intertwining of multiple interests in contemporary participatory art that resists the glib rhetoric of an essential unification and blurring of the political and the aesthetic.
At the very outset of the book, Bishop explains her preference for the term “participatory art” rather than “socially-engaged art” or “social-practice” by explaining that “participation” is more precise (signalling work that involves multiple people). In contrast, the term “social” is imprecise. She argues that all art ultimately responds to its social environment, “even via negativa“.2 I take her point, but in consequence the potent space of the via negativa is excluded. While it may not belong within a discussion of neatly defined participatory art, it is certainly central to any consideration of art’s relation to the social. Neglecting it ignores how ostensible turns away from the social, positing an indirect, mediated relation to the social, may in fact be emblematic of key dilemmas of sociality, communication and interaction in contemporary society. The tendency of non-participatory art to manifest the awkwardness, the unlikelihood and even the impossibility of group sociality is pertinent to any consideration of notions of participatory art.
Fairly evidently, I say this with a sense of self-interest. I am interested in the mediated relation to sociality that computational art represents – its interplay of solipsistic and engaged tendencies. I am also concerned with practices that are couched in individual terms – that tend towards isolated experience (solo walking and the like) – but that are plainly also socially inscribed, manifesting a negatively determined utopianism. While these are certainly not, strictly speaking, participatory practices, they are oriented via negativa towards the same underlying social problematic.