ABSTRACT
Moscow, Russia. 15 January 15, 2010 David Riff
I've heard that you are working on a new book on "participatory aesthetics." I am curious to hear how do you define this topic, and how does it relate to your earlier work on "relational aesthetics." Could you tell us what you are working on? What is your book about?
Claire BishopIn the beginning, I wrestled a lot with terminology. I wanted to do a book about the kind of work that has emerged in the wake of relational aesthetics and which tends to be called "socially engaged art." But the term is ambiguous: what art isn't socially engaged? Doesn't most art have its eyes open to the world and engage with it in some way? There are other terms for this kind of process-based practice: Grant Kester refers to it as "dialogical aesthetics"; Carlos Basualdo calls it "experimental communities". To me the term "Relational aesthetics" isn't useful for this work at all; it denotes a brief period in the 1990s when a few artists from Italy and France and Britain were making work that engaged with social networks and the interactions between different media (for example, reconsidering the exhibition as a film). As such, I don't 'think relational' is such a useful term to describe the work produced later and often in reaction to Bourriaud's theory. Lygia Clark also used the word "relational", but in a completely different way. So the term has a heritage that is imprecise on the one hand, and historically confusing on the other.
As with all these things, you need to start deploying a new word to clear the ground and declare what you're talking about. Recently, I've come to use "participatory". I want to distinguish the participatory from the "interactive", by which I refer to work from the Sixties and Seveties based on a one-to-one relationship between the viewer and technology (eg pushing a button, or trying on a piece of clothing). For me, "participatory" connotes the idea of several people; more than one person producing the work, and people being the medium of the work. If you think back to relational aesthetics, only Rirkrit Tiravanija is participatory in that sense. The other artists make situations, objects, experiences that set in motion a train of relationships, expanding 231the logic of the exhibition along a spatio-temporal spectrum, but they're not really using people in this way. So, to summarise, I'm advocating two connotations to the word participation: involving lots of people, and people being the medium of the work. This can be seen visually when you look at photographs of these projects (I am interested in documents and not just in the process): what you have is an archive of an incredible number of photographs of people doing things, but on the whole you're not quite sure what they're doing. You have to rely on text, descriptions and other forms of supplementary knowledge to work out what is being proven by these endless photographs of people on the street, eating or drinking, sitting around a table or having a discussion.
DRSo what is the scope of your research?
CBI began this work in 2004, and it's become very long-winded. I wanted to make a history and theory of participatory art, which (at the moment) is not at all canonical, and has no history that we can easily fit together. The book begins with the historic avantgarde – Futurism, Paris Dada, and Russian experiments in the 1920s – as ways to think about spectatorship and public space. It picks up in the 1960s with four case studies looking at the participatory impulse as manifest under very different ideological conditions. The first is Paris in the 1960s: the Situationist International journal responding to consumer capitalism by rejecting art in favour of heightened experiences of everyday life ('situations'); I'm also looking at their relationship to Lebel's happenings, on the one hand, and the work of GRAV (Groupe Recherche d'Art Visuel) on the other. All are interested in activating viewers as participants, but strongly believe there is a wrong and a right way to be doing this. The next case study is Argentine conceptualism in the 1960s: aggressive forms of social performance produced in response to an increasingly repressive military dictatorship. Here I'm interested in the theorist Oscar Masotta and his influence on artists at that time.
My third case study is socially-oriented art under socialism, mainly focusing on actions and happenings produced in Czechoslovakia in the late 60s and 70s. This period I find fascinating: what does it mean to produce art collectively, when collectivism is ostensibly the state norm and requirement? This work requires a complete shift in our Western understanding of public and private space. What is notable in this work is the way in which artists relocate their work away from the streets and out to the countryside, making art with and for a small group of trusted friends. Collective Actions Group, here in Moscow, are a good example of this tendency. I am particularly interested in Monastyrsky's cerebral approach to participation: rather than emphasising pure presence and immediacy, he encourages a subjective, literary, and above all delayed response to the situation that participants thought they had experienced.
My final example concerns a pendant of cases from the UK in the 1970s: Artists Placement Group (set up by Barbara Steveni and John Latham) and the Community Arts Movement. These represent two different ways of working with society in the wake of 1968. In the latter, the artist becomes the facilitator of other people's creativity; APG, by contrast, sought to install artists in business and government, in the hope that they would have a long term impact on these organizations. The book ends with a handful of polemics about contemporary art since the 1990s: delegated performance art, art as education, and so on.
DRWhat makes it necessary to undertake this kind of massive rethinking today? Why is it necessary to search for an art historical geneology of participatory art now?
232CBFor me this question is urgent because I don't agree with the framework through which the art of social participation is presently discussed. This framework is grounded in a discourse of immediate social goals, political correctness, and a blinkered relationship to the present that lacks a historical perspective. It is also overridingly ethical: the dominant criteria for discussing participatory work is that if it has good intentions, it's good art. This has arisen largely because the discussion around participation derives from curators, who in general have a much better overview of a given project than critics. But their tendency is always to defend the work morally rather than artistically. This is very dubious, because when you operate in these terms you already know your position toward a work of art. I absolutely resist this pre-judgment. It gives rise to knee-jerk reactions to some important art (for example that of Sierra or Zmijewski). These artists, to my mind, are reflecting on ethics, rather than producing work to be judged ethically; they are thinking artistically (ie through images and performance) about how we construct ethical frameworks. I belive you need to engage with a work of art on its own terms, and not have your mind made up before you see or experience it.
DRSoit's time for an aesthetic rethinking of participatory practices? What would the aesthetic criteria be to look at participatory art?
CBWell here we have to be really careful to use the word"aesthetic." In recent years I've been operating with Ranciere's definition of aesthetics, but today I'm more aware of its limitations; maybe we should just talk about artistic criteria. What I would like to keep from Rancière is his insistence on an affective response to art, an appreciation of its unintelligibility, rather than a rational approval founded on other (eg social, ethical) criteria. The projects I like best are the ones that prompt in me an affective response, rather than a rational sense of "that's worthy" or "what a good solution to that problem".
This is not a question of visual pleasure but of there needing to be some kind of punctum (rather than just a studium), to use Barthes' terms.
DRWhat is this affect based upon? Is it the affect of watching people turn into objects and becoming the material of the art work? Or is it a vicarious pleasure from watching people participate in some social process?
CBI don't think it's either of those. I think it's more about the total meaning of the work, and in this regard it doesn't matter if I'm looking at something live in front of me or a document from the past. It's a matter of what the whole thing (gesture, context, documentation) amounts to, and whether the idea and its realisation somehow moves me. I want to get away from focusing on the work's functional outcome. We can leave that approach to the sociologists; what is important artistically is that something happens in a certain time and place.
Ekaterina DegotSo does it matter if a social gesture is effective or not? What about Thomas Hirschhorn's work? Does it matter that it fails to do what it promises as a social gesture?
CBIf it 's working as a work of art, then something is probably working on a social level too. In other words, for the project even to get realised means that his collaborators have agreed to do something.
EDBut what if a project failed, like Hirschhorn's Musée Précaire in Paris? Or do you think he was really able to teach them about Duchamp?
CBWhy do you say that Musée Precaire failed? For me it's one of his most successful projects. What you have have to recognise in Hirschhorn is that the educational outcome is not important; that's a red herring. He's not a teacher or a social worker; in fact his work 233is a critique of artists adopting that role, which is why he bends the stick the other way and goes on about art's autonomy.
EDSo it could be a simulation of a social project that fails but that is a work of art.
CBYes, possibly. But I also want to get away from the functionalist fallacy, ie that something is a work of art because it fails, that art is art because it lacks any other demonstrable function. Some good projects can have a function; Tania Bruguera has taught me this with her concept of arte util ('useful art'). The fact that people are present and participating in a Hirschhorn project of their own accord means that something is happening to shift social relations, that the project has acquired its own momentum.
For example, last summer I visited his Biljmer-Spinoza Festival, an installation in the dead space between several housing estates on the outskirts in Amsterdam. Rather like his monument to Bataille in Documenta 11, this was a monument to Spinoza: it contained an information center, a library, a computer room, a bar, and children's workshops every afternoon where they were taught to reenact 70s performance art.
The educational component was carried through to the adults too: every day at 5pm there was a philosophy lecture by Marcus Steinweg and at 7pm a performance (a play written by Steinweg and directed by Hirschhorn). With the latter, you never knew how many people would show up to perform; it was completely unpredictable. But the fact that some people did show up to hear the lecture, to attend the workshops and to perform the play, every single day, was both funny (in its chaotic inexplicability) but also really moving.
To continue your point about education: with the Biljmer-Spinoza Festival it was in fact impossible to be educated about Spinoza, because the lectures weren't really structured to be informational, but were more like a stream of philosophical consciousness. And although the performance was about Spinoza's life, it was also incomprehensibly avantgarde and really rather Dadaist: there were no characters, no action, no plot in the text that these kids were reading as they worked out on exercise machines. On one day I attended there was torrential rain, but rather than postponing the production, everyone moved under a plastic sheeted roof into a tiny crowded space. There were as many audiences as performers, who continued reading their lines from sopping wet scripts.
For me, the insanity and persistence of the project was its success, the collective will to keep this eccentric piece going every day. That was beautiful.
DRBut this is a collective experience something you saw as a witness, as an external observer. You were watching others participate.
CBYes, but the lines were so blurred; as in the Bataille Monument, there were two bodies of people producing the work: local residents and visitors. But rather than the slightly awkward stand-off that was produced in Kassel, in Amsterdam everyone was integrated, in part due to the formal compression of the installation's structure, which was one entity and much less sprawling than in Kassel. In between each activity you went to the bar, you talked to people.
In general I like to talk about a first and second audience: the first audience are the participants, the second audience are those of us who look at these projects afterwards, who try and decipher these experiences through images and descriptions. I like the way Hirschhorn is always trying to complicate these two entities; he always finds a way to transmit the complexity to subsequent audiences, usually in the form of a book.
DRSo the work's documentation is important?
CBYes, especially when documentation is factored into the piece. Another work that dealt with this problem intelligently was Tania Bruguera's action at last year's Havana Biennial, 234called Tatlin's Whisper #6. At the center of a large colonial courtyard, she placed a large brown curtain with a podium and many microphones. Cubans were invited to come and exercise one minute of free speech. Symbolically, something else was integrated too. Each speaker found themselves flanked by two people in army uniform, and who bundled them offstage if they didn't finish speaking after one minute.
And while each person was speaking, they placed a white dove on his/her shoulder, a live bird, as a reference to a famously charged moment during a speech by Fidel Castro in 1959 when a dove landed on his shoulder. So Bruguera is condensing two things: she triggers a historical memory but also provides a functional arena, giving people free speech in a country that doesn't permit it. To get back to the context of our discussion, what's important is how she dealt with documentation. She didn't arrange to have pictures taken of the performance, but instead issued 200 disposible cameras to the audience. Artistically, this was fantastic because every time someone went onto the podium you had 200 yellow boxes being lifted and flashing, creating the impression of a press conference or media environment. This means that there are 200 x 36 photographs of this performance distributed all over Havana. In addition, people filmed the event and put the videos onto YouTube, where it has had a massive circulation. I like it very much when the principle of documentation is factored into the work, when it's in keeping with the spirit of the work itself.
DRIn how far is it important that today, collectivity and collaboration are desired commodities? What I mean is that one could say: the desire for community affect is behind all the Facebook subcultures we see today, a desire used to promote certain models of cultural consumerism. You are shown an image of successful collaboration, and you buy into whatever model or technology is on sale, because of the image of people sharing the affect of a community experience. But that image is a fake a lot of the time. How important is it for participatory art to rest upon genuine collective moments, on genuine collaboration?
CBPart of my critique of participatory art today is that many people still operate with the old 60s (Situationist) paradigm of false consciousness versus authentic participation. It's as if mediation signals the death of authenticity. For me, the most interesting projects are those that take the binaries of mediated and spontaneous, false and genuine and do something interesting with these paradoxes, to show that participation doesn't only connote the desire for collective experience. Today, participation is not the radical alternative to privatisated individualism that it once was.
Today, participation also means reality television. It means Flickr and YouTube. It also means management consultants engineering collective events to make their staff feel more loyal and committed to a company. For neoliberal governments, participation is participation in consumer society.
So the question of contrived and authentic is much more complicated than a simple denigration of the participatory artist who makes a video or photograph that also circulates on the market, or a performance that can be bought and sold. Even those artists who place a premium on immediacy and refuse documentation, such as Tino Sehgal, end up subjecting us to experiences of extreme artificiality. I like very much some of Phil Collins' video installations, because he reflects on the construction of identity through mediation; his work seems to meditate on how an "authentic" subjectivity can emerge in a highly mediated, constructed situation; often he uses the conventions of reality television to achieve this, but the results are painfully funny, poignant and lyrical. Another artist is Artur Zmijewski, who also produces highly constructed situations for video. But 235Zmijewski is more narrative, and is a ruthless editor. Take, for example, Them (2007), shown at Documenta 12. I was at its first screening in Warsaw, for which many of the participants were present. After the screening was a discussion, and most of them were livid that he hadn't made a truthful document. Zmijewski is an artist who wants to tell a complex narrative; the truth embedded in the total meaning of this story is what's important to him, not the production of a truthful (accurate) documentation. His work uses people to speak about modes of collective identification and the role of images in forming and perpetuating these identifications.
DRSo participation does not equal collaboration? And participatory art still privileges the figure of the contemporary artists in the background always pulling the strings?
CBWell, it could equally be a collective authorship orchestrating the work. There's a lot of utopian rhetoric about equal collaboration, but the work of art as we understand it today always comes back to the sovereign space of the artist who initiates and creates it. This is true even with collectives, most of whom are led by one or two central thinkers. It's also true for Community Art – which until recently I had believed to be the most dehierarchized and de-authored form of collective practice, not least because it circulates outside the art world and the market. After doing some research into Community Arts, I now realize that even this depends on the charismatic leadership of its main instigator.
EDAt Frieze Art Fair, I just saw a work by Katerina Šedá who made a participatory project with the inhabitants of a small village close to Brno, in which they collectively made drawings. But these drawings were later sold at Frieze. What interests me here is: who gets the money in the end? Certainly not the members of the community.
DRThat kind of participation is often just another name for unpaid or poorly paid labor.
CBAgain, I think that's an ethical judgement. The fact that you think about that question could also be an indicator that the work itself is insufficiently interesting. In general, though, I am reluctant to engage in questions about money because it turns into a bottomless pit of moral queasiness: who funded the project? Public or private? Is there such a thing as 'clean' money? Even public funding comes with huge strings attached. And why stop there, why not think about us critics who talk about the work and profit from this participation? Unless economics is the subject of the work, these kinds of questions are for me secondary.
DRWould you say that participatory art is trying to comment on a changing situation in overall labor relations, where "creative" consumption and "creative" community affect are instrumentalized as unpaid labor? We could add to the work of the artist other "works": the work of art-related service industries (which run on unpaid labor of interns), the work of the audience. The more massive contemporary art become as an industry, the more important these other "works" become, and we really need a labor-theory of culture to talk about all these "works" that create a certain representation instrumentalized by new and old elites to show how wonderfully collaborative everything has become.
CBIf you want to talk about instrumentalization, the whole point of departure of this book for me is the British context and how New Labour has advocated participatory art in order to reinforce the social inclusion policy. Art is asked to assist in the improvement of public health, race relations, education, welfare to work programmes and economic development. It is used as a way to create the impression of reinforcing the social bond, of producing 'community' in the inner cities and deprived provincial towns. However, this solution is entirely homeopathic and does nothing to address the structural inequalities that bring about this alienation and division in the first place. As to whether 236participatory art comments on this situation, I find it hard to see direct evidence of this self-awareness. For me, the two tendencies run hand in hand, as concurrent symptoms rather than in a causal relationship.
DRCan participatory art move beyond this double bind by entering into more radical social movements? Can participatory art anticipate a future beyond capitalism, where real collaboration is possible?
CBI do doubt whether art is the entirely wrong domain to be experimenting with social movements. There is so much talk today of art as the free space for social experimentation, as the ideal arena in which to produce new social models and prototypes, but historically this has not been the case. The modern construction of the artist is one of a singular individual who creates their sovereign domain through the work of art. So I'm unconvinced that moments of social change are to be forged in art.
Art can lend its competencies to social movements, as critic and theorist Brian Holmes has argued, but you're not going to find the social movement starting in art.
Art is in fact incredibly vague when it comes to advocating change, even with groups that call themselves 'activists' like The Yes Men. They are like a PR company: they go for actions – the big visual stunt – rather than the long hard slow work of campaigning for specific goals. It's interesting that Paul Chan, an artist who also has a track record of activism, makes a clear separation between art and activism in projects like Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007). The site-specific production of Beckett's play was conceived as separate to the work of raising money to leave behind in the wake of the project. He has argued that his methodology was taken from his observation of activist campaigns, and it's interesting that what resulted from this was an absolute separation of art and activism, rather than its blurring.
In general, however, I am opposed to the idea of art as a model, as a good example that can be copied and replicated in society.
EDThat's exactly what happens under contemporary capitalism. Contemporary capitalism is constantly replicating art into life. The contemporary artist is a kind of model for the businessman.
CBExactly. This is the argument that Andrew Ross calls the 'industrialisation of bohemia' in No Collar: the mentality of artists became too valuable to be left to artists themselves, as their flexibiltiy and sacrificial work ethic fitted all the requirements of 'no collar' knowledge worker in the new economy. At the same time, in the UK, artists in receipt of public funding are asked to be model citizens or entrepreneurial social workers, as if arts activities have to show a 'good return on investment'. Another text that has helped me understand the broader social impetus towards participation is Boltanski and Chiapello's New Spirit of Capitalism. They provide a broad historical framework for understanding the emergence of the creative industries as an internalisation of what they call the 'artistic critique' of the '68 generation. In these and many other accounts, we find the flexible, creative lifestyle of the artist becoming the fantasy model for freelance and short-term contract labour whose precariousness reaps no public benefits.
