ABSTRACT
The chapter explores the concepts of performance, public assembly and civic reenactment in order to see how they can inspire our thinking about 21st-century cultures of participation. Shannon Jackson links two broad and often overlapping scholarly arenas of interdisciplinary arts and social justice. The first is an inter-arts conversation on what it means to engage in performance within and across visual arts, installation, film and new media - an arena in which the turn to performance is often synonymous with the turn to participation. The second research arena involves a focus on issues of social justice and the public good and especially on the role of the arts in activating urgent political and economic issues of inequality and social justice - political contexts give the theme of participation a different kind of urgency. These two research domains are linked in the essay, which starts with a meditation on performance as an inter-art topic and then moves into the various resonances of public (re)assembly, especially its social and political character. Using the artistic and social work of Aaron Landsman and Paul Ramirez Jonas in particular as touchstones, Jackson combines the trajectories mentioned in her reflections on the ubiquitous 21st-century process of civic reenactment as a structure for socially engaged, participatory art practice. Considering what happens when civic processes are reenacted, i.e., publicly reassembled, she discusses the relationship between aesthetic reenactments and the other technological and policy domains at work in contemporary participatory culture.
