The gestures of participatory art

Sruti Bala

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526107701
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

The study critically reclaims participatory art beyond its co-option as a fuzzword of neoliberal governance. It examines a range of artistic practices from community theatre, immersive performance and the visual arts in different sites around the world. It offers a refreshing theorisation of participatory art as gesture.

1

Gestures of institutional critique

We must know what mistake to make with a specific text and must also know how to defend that mistake as the one that will allow us to live. (Spivak, 2012, p. 28)

In the context of contemporary art, the concept of ‘institutional critique’ refers to the scrutiny of the power of (art) institutions through artistic means. This might include a range of artistic practices: artworks that examine the modus operandi and hidden mechanisms of the institutions they are affiliated to or implicated in, artworks that problematize which persons, subjects and aesthetic modes are allowed to enter the art world and be counted as art. Institutional critique might also refer to the curatorial attempts of art institutions to be self-critical and transparent, for instance by laying bare the motives behind their programming choices. It attempts to account for how institutions ideologically and materially influence the way the history of art is written, determining how its standards must be upheld and when they may be appropriately breached. For a variety of reasons, which have to do with their political economies and the specific relations of artistic domains to institutions, the practice of institutional critique has been far more influential in the visual arts than in theatre and performance. It has a legacy that is often traced to two waves or phases, first in the 1970s and later in the 1990s, both seen as originating in European and North American visual art history (Ray and Raunig, 2009). The first wave of institutional critique can be ascribed to artworks that sought a critique of the authority or authoritarianism of art institutions, thus self-reflexively juxtaposing the ideals to which art institutions normatively pledged allegiance with the material realities and ideological contradictions within which they operate. The aim thereby was to shift viewer perspectives on the claims of art, to reveal the underlying mechanisms at work, to make the structures visible and thus ultimately alterable. A belief in the power to reform, transform and rehabilitate the faults of institutions through artistic practice is prominent in these attempts. The second wave added to this fundamental critique of institutional authority the problem of representation, drawing attention to the classed, gendered and raced dimensions of institutional power and seeking to reassess the relationships between the centre and the periphery and to dismantle the divisions and models of classification that effectively maintained a status quo and allowed privileges to be kept intact. This aspect foregrounds the formation of social, political or cultural subjects and subjectivities through the practices of institutional critique. Institutional critique is therefore not an established form or genre of art with fixed rules and characteristics, but changes continually across different sites and historical circumstances. It combines social critique and self-critique in reflecting on the relationship between institutions and art, and therefore on the relationship between institutions and critique.

What is the place of institutional critique in relation to participatory performance? Where might institutional critique be located here and how is it practised? In the following, I reflect on the challenges and conundrums of institutional critique from the vantage point of participatory practices. As a first step I examine the formation of participatory art as a genre, specifically community-based, applied art, as emergent from the critique of mainstream art institutions. In a second step, I inquire into some modalities of institutional critique which foreground questions of participation or non-participation, and examine their disciplinary configurations within the arts.

Participatory art as the critique of institutionalized art

The category of participatory art might be seen to imply that it is a specific kind of art, a genre in its own right. It might suggest that a certain artistic practice is recognizable and classifiable according to whether and how it enables the participation of audiences or the public, usually conceived as non-professionals or non-artists. In an extended sense, it could also refer to the degree and nature of participation of the artistic practice itself in public life. If we use participatory art as an umbrella concept, encompassing what is variously referred to as community arts, arts in development, art in education, art in therapeutic, rehabilitative or restorative processes, it becomes clear that these are by no means neutral, descriptive categories but indicate inheritances of specific operations of demarcation, with their own implicit ideological assumptions. To that extent, viewing participatory art as a genre in its own right primarily has the purpose of setting up the conditions to be able to ask different kinds of questions of the practices: questions that are not necessarily asked when studying proscenium theatre productions or installation-based performance art or any other interactive forms; questions that lead to different kinds of analyses, in terms of how they frame and bring to life the subjects of study vis-à-vis the existing frameworks of the discipline. When posited as a genre, participatory art therefore does not merely register or serve as a repository for a homogeneous community of practices, in the sense of ‘genus’, but also ‘generates’ and makes these practices visible in ‘general’ terms (Derrida and Ronell, 1980, pp. 56–57).

Yet genre also entails problems of exclusion and stratification. Participatory art, especially in theatre and performance studies, is sometimes perceived as synonymous with the applied arts or community arts, and research on this area is rarely discussed on the same platform as studies on, say, scenography or multimedia interactive art, even if the latter may be deeply concerned with issues of participation.¹ The participation of rural women in a so-called theatre for development project in India would thus be deemed as belonging to a different order, when placed alongside the participation of visitors in an interactive performance art installation in a European or US contemporary art museum. The immersive participation of the public in ritual or religious performances is rarely considered on a par with so-called immersive or experiential performance productions, the former largely deemed the metier of cultural anthropologists and the latter that of art historians or theatre and performance scholars. Yet on what assumptions is this difference in aesthetic or medial order based? There seems to be a Bourdieusian ‘fine distinction’ at work in the scholarly literature on participatory art, where the quest for a taxonomy based on formal criteria is simultaneously accompanied by implicit classificatory schemes that merely serve to keep certain things together and other things apart (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 472). We know from Bourdieu that ‘the mode of expression characteristic of a cultural production always depends on the laws of the market in which it is offered’ (1984, p. xiii). While this sociological argument may suggest some reasons why a participatory theatre or music workshop with slum-dwellers is rarely (deliberately or otherwise) discussed together with contemporary art projects using a participatory pedagogy in a gallery or exhibition context, it also implicitly demands that this legitimization of differences between these domains through institutions and academic scholarship be questioned and recalibrated from time to time. It cautions against taking the logics governing their separations and divisions for granted, and emphasizes the need to formulate alternative schemes of appraisal and critique, however inconvenient and unwieldy such a task might be (Bourdieu, 1984, p. 7).

If this could be read as a criticism of a problematic segregation of participatory art from broader disciplinary platforms, it is equally a result of the insistence in the scholarship on participatory art on its being distinct from ‘conventional’ theatre or visual art settings. The relationship of participatory art to institution and institutionalization may be charted in terms of three interrelated moves: a move away from conventional art institutions, a move towards alternative institutions and settings, and a transformative movement within existing institutions (Ray and Raunig, 2009).² It is frequently argued, for instance, that the emergence and recognition of participatory theatre as a distinct genre in theatre and performance partly derives from its critique of the canons and regulatory restrictions of high art institutions and its preference for counter-institutions and non-institutionalized spaces of theatrical activity. The critique of the inadequacies of one domain could lead to the formation of another domain, which comes with its own set of institutional entanglements. Participatory theatre is thus viewed as a move away from theatrical forms because of its emphasis on ‘ordinary people’ and their stories, rather than on professional actors and pre-written scripts, its sustained embeddedness in local contexts, as well as its explicit commitment to combining social and artistic goals (van Erven, 2001). It is seen as emerging from a critical response to the absence of these features in the established national, bourgeois or commercial theatre circuits.

A move away from these institutions implies a search for other institutions, which is characterized by a quest for alternative institutional spaces in cooperation with the people who dwell or work in these spaces on a daily basis, which could take the form of civic institutions such as schools, old age homes, youth clubs, prisons or clinics, or could involve the temporary occupation of common or private spaces such as the street, public squares, rooftops, homes and gardens, inviting the participation of passers-by. The Indian theatre director Safdar Hashmi, founder of Janam, or Jana Natya Manch [People’s Theatre Association], powerfully argued that ‘since mainstream theatre is by and large out of tune and touch with the majority of our people, the need remains for a fully developed people’s theatre’ (1998, p. 32). For Hashmi and his workers’ theatre group in the 1980s, the streets were incorporated into the performances of Janam, not simply as a backdrop, but as an active and vibrant feature of social life. The move away from the spaces of established theatre institutions is accompanied by a move towards institutions such as labour unions and political parties, whose rallies and public activities often take place in the streets. At the same time, the rejection of established institutions and the embrace of alternative institutions tend also to be accompanied by attempts to transform existing institutions and institutional practices. This could take the form of a call to alter processes of working within the theatre and a questioning of the hierarchical relations between theatre director, actors/actresses, dramaturges, translators, production assistants, stage, lighting and costume designers, such as in the radical experiments of the creación colectiva and new theatre movement from Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s. The history of participatory theatre practices across the world testifies to an institutional critique in a combination of gestures of fleeing from, forging new and transforming existing relationships to institutions.

Carefully differentiated critical yardsticks and historical routes are thus required to distinguish different legacies of institutional critique from each other, not in order to retreat into a safe particularism, but rather in order to theorize them from their very finite locales and social and disciplinary bases. What exactly is deemed a ‘critical’ practice thus differs hugely from one context to another. The following two examples instantiate how a public denunciation of institutional power may be a powerful critical mode in one context, whereas it may be entirely counter-productive in another.

When a support group of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement protested the Tel Aviv staging of Cape Town Opera’s performance of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in 2010 by staging a flash mob in front of the Tel Aviv Opera House on the night of the premiere, the event acutely drew the political context and historical legacy of the performance into the spotlight, and at the same time called attention to what was at stake for audience members who chose to attend it (Dana, 2010). Popular tunes from the musical were deployed by the protesters with altered lyrics: ‘Summertime, and the living is easy’ became ‘Palestine, and the living ain’t easy’, and ‘It Ain’t Necessarily So’ was rendered with references to the comparability of apartheid in South Africa and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. The flash mob becomes an interesting case for discussing institutional critique only when seen in relation to the specificities of this context. This unsolicited event at the fringe of a performance places the responsibility of art institutions under scrutiny, i.e. how audience participation in such a performance may be a conscious or unconscious endorsement of Israeli government policies and actions, or how the decision of Cape Town Opera to perform in Tel Aviv Opera House may be a manifestation of complicity with a political regime they may not necessarily perceive themselves as having anything to do with. This context is undoubtedly connected to the complex performance history of Porgy and Bess, from its emergence in the racially segregated US, to its widespread rejection by the American civil rights movement, to its renewed politicization during the apartheid era in South Africa, with failed attempts to stage performances featuring an all-white cast, to its resurgence and commercially popular reworking in the twenty-first century (Noonan, 2012). The use of a performative flash mob by a group of protestors sought to draw attention to the clout of institutions such as Cape Town Opera in influencing public opinion and taking a stance in support of the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which is modelled on the South African anti-apartheid boycott movement, by not cooperating with Israeli government-funded institutions.

The very same question of the order of cooperation with hegemonic institutions can take on an entirely different valence in another context. Consider the case of a Sudanese independent theatre production featured at an international theatre festival in Rotterdam in the Netherlands in 2009, with a grant from the Sudanese national government. Given the anti-democratic track record of the Sudanese government, the theatre group might be accused of being co-opted by nationalist agendas in accepting travel grants from a regime it criticizes. Walid Al-Alphy, the theatre director of an independent ensemble from Darfur, Sudan, addressed this point during an after-talk following a performance of The People of the Cave. When a member of the audience asked how it was possible to be critical of the ruling powers while simultaneously accepting an award from them in order to present their work abroad, Al-Alphy’s response was revealing.³ Given that Sudanese (not to speak of Darfurian) independent theatre is hardly taken notice of in the rest of the world, and that Sudan is a country often negatively represented in the press, the task of retaining artistic independence inevitably needs to be done from within, and not in an imaginary bubble presumably untouched by the country’s messy political environment. Under these circumstances, Al-Alphy pointed out, he perceived it as the responsibility of his theatre group to accept the privilege of showcasing their work abroad, adding that it was not only by authoritarian regimes but also and equally by art circuits and self-appointed guardians of free expression that dissident artists might be co-opted. Refraining from these matters and ‘staying in the cave’ was not an option, he said, using a metaphor derived from the play. The People of the Cave, adapted from an episode in the Quran known as the Sūrat al-Kahf, is set in a cave, where five men have fled from a tyrant and fall into a miraculous 300-year-long sleep.⁴ When they wake up, they hear radio reports of bombardments, chronic illnesses and attacks on villages. The men fight among themselves about who ought to be the king, and the battle for power results in the new king leaving the cave promising to help the others, though he never returns. One by one, the people of the cave desert each other and look to their survival in the midst of war. The play enunciates a critique of structures of governance that instil fear in people, stultify them and turn them against each other. As a production, it exemplifies theatre as an institution that participates in public debates and takes a stance on current issues. The cave and the world outside were metaphors for the theatre and the world outside. To avoid stepping out of the cave would have been to avoid the possibility of participating in the world. In an interview, Walid Al-Alphy remarked:

In Sudan, everyone is part of the war. There are perpetrators and victims, but beneath that there is shared responsibility. The new sultans in People of the Cave threaten their followers, but the followers themselves are afraid to leave the cave to see the world with their own eyes. They remain in their dormant state. (Heemstra, 2009)

For Al-Alphy’s theatre ensemble, the choice to travel abroad with Sudanese government funding, knowing that their work might be misperceived or misrepresented, was an eth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Gestures of institutional critique
• 2 On the inconvenient means and ends of participation
• 3 Unsolicited gestures of participation
• 4 Vicarious gestures of participation
• 5 Delicate gestures of participation
• Conclusion: between image, act, body and language
• Bibliography
• Index