The Participator in Contemporary Art

Art and Social Relationships

Kaija Kaitavuori

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781838609566
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

The early 21st century has seen contemporary art make continued use of audience participation, in which the spectator becomes part of the artwork itself. In this book, Kaija Kaitavuori claims that the `participator' is a new artistic role that does not fall under the auspices of artist or spectator and in proving such she devises a four-group typology of involvement. Her classification distinguishes between different forms of engagement and identifies their specific features. The key criteria she proposes are how concepts of authorship and ownership shift in relation to collectively created work, how contracts regulating the use and production of shared work are arranged and the extent to which involvement in making art can be regarded as democratic. This highly original book thus offers students and teachers the tools with which to improve their understanding of participatory art and removes the confusing terminology that has characterized so many other discussions.

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 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 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’ 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 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.

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.

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.

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 simila...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the author
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Participator: A New Role in Art
• 2. Typology of Participatory Art
• 3. Artwork as a Network
• 4. Contracts of Participation
• 5. The Public Sphere and Politics of Participation
• Postscript
• Appendix: List of Works
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright