Include me out! Dave Beech on
participation in art.
From: Art Monthly | Date: 4/1/2008 | Author: Beech, Dave
PARTICIPATION FIRST BECAME A BUZZWORD AS PART OF
THE NEW LEFT'S CRITIQUE OF 'ACTUALLY EXISTING'
DEMOCRACY IN THE 50S AND 60S. It was then taken up by CB
MacPherson in his theory of participatory democracy in the 70s but
went missing during the monetarist 80s only to return in the 90s as
a description of relational art. When you consider that participation
in the new art includes having dinner, drinking beer, designing a
new candy bar and running a travel agency, there seems to be
justification in talking about a declining ambition for the politics of
participation.
This is not to say that participation in contemporary art has been
entirely removed from the political legacy of participation.
Participation in contemporary art resonates with political promise.
In her anthology Participation, Claire Bishop correctly distinguishes
between participation and interactivity, explaining that the latter,
especially in connection with developments in digital technology,
merely incorporates the viewer 'physically' (pressing buttons,
jumping on sensitive pads and so on). Participation, Bishop points
out, is not so much 'physical' as 'social'. This is a political
distinction. In fact, it is precisely this sort of distinction that fuels the
theory of participatory democracy.
Needless to say, most if not all participatory art falls well short of
the political promise of participation. Bishop signals this when she
criticises Bourriaud for putting sociability--what he calls
conviviality--where dissent and critique ought to be. Her agonistic
theory of participation raises the stakes but in doing so, I would
argue, she inadvertently highlights the limitations of the whole
enterprise. Simply put, participation cannot deliver what
participation promises. In both art and politics, participation is an
image of a much longed for social reconciliation but it is not a
mechanism for bringing about the required transformation. In
politics, participation vainly hopes to provide the ends of revolution
without the revolution itself. And in art, participation seems to offer
to heal the rift between art and social life without the need for any
messy and painful confrontations between cultural rivals.
Consider, for instance, Gillian Wearing's 'Signs that say what you
want them to say and not Signs that say what someone else wants
you to say', 1992-93. When someone complains that such work is
ultimately controlled by the artist, or that the work addresses those
internal to contemporary art rather than those represented by the
images, what is tapped into is the underlying tension between art
and the rest of culture. The point behind the complaint is that the
participation of civilians in artworks does not fundamentally
challenge the cultural distinctions that separate them from the
artist and the minority community of art. In fact, participation simply
re-enacts that relationship in an ethnographic fashion. It would be
unfair to expect a single artwork to overcome such systemic ills,
but this is precisely the problem with the concept of participation: it
is based on the misconception that properties of the artwork could
offer a technical solution to art's social marginalisation.
Miwon Kwon, in her book One Place After Another, interprets the
rhetoric of participation within 'new genre public art' as precisely
that of democratising art with 'pluralist inclusivity, multicultural
representation and consensus-building' that shifts the focus 'from
the artist to the audience, from object to process, from production
to reception, and emphasises the importance of a direct,
apparently unmediated engagement with particular audience
groups (ideally through shared authorship in collaborations)'. Kwon
remains sceptical about such claims, rightly so. Stewart Martin has
recently argued in Third Text that the critique of the commodified
art object in Bourriaud's the-ory of relational aesthetics paves the
way for the extension of the commodification of art by
incorporating social events and exchanges into the field of art's
commodities. A parallel argument can be made about the politics
of participation. Kwon goes some way towards this by suggesting
that the utopian narrative of the challenge to Modernism's
fetishisation of the art object that leads to site-specificity and then
community-specificity can be re-read as a transplantation of art's
investment in its objects, first through the reification of site and
then the reification of the public.
Participation, within this historical trajectory, although disguised as
a generous shrinking of cultural division, is an extension of art's
hegemony and, as Grant Kester argues in his book Conversation
Pieces, an opportunity for the artist to profit from their social
privilege. So, when Bishop explains that participation 'strives to
collapse the distinction between performer and audience,
professional and amateur, production and reception', it would be
naive to accept this without also seeing these aspirations as
ideological currency.
Bishop's reference to performers and audiences (rather than
artists and publics) indicates Bishop's debt, here, to Allan Kaprow's
militant elimination of the audience in his development of the
Happening. 'A group of inactive people in the space of a
Happening is just dead space,' he said. Kaprow's persistent
dissatisfaction with the division between performer and audience-and the unlikely experiments that this brought about--testifies to a
genuine and radical critique. He took participation too seriously to
be content with anything short of its full realisation. To 'assemble
people unprepared for an event and say that they are
"participating" if apples are thrown at them or they are herded
about is to ask very little of the whole notion of participation', he
argued. His performances to mirrors point away from the false
reconciliation of a cheaply won participatory art. Following him, we
might be more inclined to echo Louis B Mayer's acerbic motto
'include me out'. Or Bob & Roberta Smith's slogan, 'make your
own damn art'.
There is a temptation, within this earnest tradition of participation,
to treat it as a solution to the problems endemic to the whole range
of established forms of cultural engagement, from the elitism of the
aesthete to the passivity of the spectator, and from the compliance
of the observer to the distance of the onlooker. Acknowledging the
problematic social histories of these forms of engagement, which
are still in the process of being written up, the rhetoric of
participation proposes a break that deserves to be called
revolutionary. In fact, it comes very close to Marx's theory of the
proletariat as a revolutionary class by virtue of being that class
whose historical destiny is to abolish all classes. Participation is
thought of as a form of cultural engagement that does away with
all previous problematic forms of cultural engagement by
eradicating the distinction between all of the previous cultural types
and all cultural relations between them.
It is vital to the critique of participation, therefore, that we locate it
within--rather than beyond--the differential field of culture's social
relations, as a particular form or style of cultural engagement with
its own constraints, problems and subjectivities. We can begin by
noting that the participant typically is not cast as an agent of
critique or subversion but rather as one who is invited to accept the
parameters of the art project. To participate in an art event,
whether it is organised by Rirkrit Tiravanija, Jeremy Deller,
Santiago Sierra or Johanna Billing, is to enter into a preestablished social environment that casts the participant in a very
specific role.
The point is not to single out individual artists who fail to meet the
potential of participation's promise. The point, rather, is that
participation always involves a specific invitation and a specific
formation of the participant's subjectivity, even when the artist asks
them simply to be themselves. The critique of participation must
release us from the grip of the simple binary logic which opposes
participation to exclusion and passivity. If participation entails its
own forms of limitations on the participant, then the simple binary
needs to be replaced with a constellation of overlapping
economies of agency, control, self-determination and power.
Within such a constellation participants take their place alongside
the viewer, observer, spectator, consumer and the whole panoply
of culture's modes of subjectivity and their social relations.
One way of getting a handle on the limitations and constraints
imposed on the participant is to contrast participation with
collaboration. It is the shortfall between participation and
collaboration that leads to perennial questions about the degree of
choice, control and agency of the participant. Is participation
always voluntary? Are all participants equal and are they equal
with the artist? How can participation involve co-authorship rather
than some attenuated and localised content? The rhetoric of
participation often conflates participation with collaboration to head
off such questions. Collaborators, however, are distinct from
participants insofar as they share authorial rights over the artwork
that permit them, among other things, to make fundamental
decisions about the key structural features of the work. That is,
collaborators have rights that are withheld from participants.
Participants relate to artists in many ways, including the
anthropological, managerial, philanthropic, journalistic, convivial
and other modes. The distinction between them remains.
Jacques Ranciere highlights another pernicious distinction that
participation cannot shake off: that between those who participate
and those who don't. Even if we view participation in its rosiest
light, Ranciere argues that its effects are socially divisive. The
critique of participation is, here, immanent to the development of
participation as an inclusive practice that does not and cannot
include all. Seen in this way, participation must be excluding
because it sets up a new economy which separates society into
participants and non-participants, or those who are participationrich and those who are participation-poor.
Another strand to the critique of participation can be derived from
Jacques Derrida's critical analysis of the politics of inclusion in his
book The Politics of Friendship. Despite all its humanistic and
democratic promises, inclusion, for Derrida, is a brand of
neutralisation. Look at how the European Union is including former
Cold War enemies from Eastern Europe. Is there a more effective
way of neutralising them? Incorporating the other into the body of
power while repressing anything that escapes this incorporation is,
according to Derrida, inclusion as neutralisation. Participation does
a similar job for art and its institutions. It confronts the case against
art and the gallery by bringing the culturally excluded into the orbit
of art, providing much needed statistics of new audiences and
proactive relations with the public, too. Participation often
neutralises the individuals it brings into art, but it also neutralises
cultural conflict more generally by presenting itself as a viable
alternative. As such, even though a very small number of people
actually participate in these works of art, the rhetoric of
participation neutralises everyone nonetheless.
Judith Butler, on the other side of fence, so to speak, makes the
case in Gender Trouble against being included. By examining the
effects of what she calls 'compulsory heterosexuality' on the
thematisation of gender and sexuality, she articulates a theory of
resistance to incorporation. It is not just that being included within
the dominant framework blocks off vital forms of subversion, which
it does, but also that inclusion is never merely a technical question.
The naive advocates of inclusion, incorporation and participation
believe that the problem is how to include more people, not
whether to do so. However, what if, as Butler shows, that inclusion
is a form of subjection or violation? What if you are being invited
generously to be incorporated into a foreign body? If Butler's
objections are valid then incorporation--or participation--has to be
completely reconsidered in terms of that which precedes it: what
pre-existing state is on offer for participation? In other words,
technical questions about how to participate must always be
preceded by questions about what sort of activity, and subjectivity,
people are being invited to participate in.
There is great potential in the proposal of participating in a
promising situation--and this is presumably the only scenario
envisaged by the supporters of participation. Participation sounds
promising only until you imagine unpromising circumstances in
which you might be asked to participate. However, there is
potential horror within the threat of participating in an unpromising
situation. Participation presupposes its own promise, therefore, by
assuming the existing promise of the situation to which the
participant is invited. The critique of participation that can be
teased out of Derrida, Butler and Ranciere asks fundamental
questions of participation as such. In their different ways they each
call attention a political fissure that runs right through the centre of
any and every participatory event. The social and cultural
distinctions that prompt participation in the first place, which
participation seeks to shrink or abolish, are reproduced within
participation itself through an economy of the participants' relative
proximity to the invitation. Outsiders have to pay a higher price for
their participation, namely, the neutralisation of their difference and
the dampening of their powers of subversion. Participation papers
over the cracks. The changes we need are structural. .
DAVE BEECH is an artist.