Stephen Willats

Viewers of contemporary art are often invited to involve themselves actively in artworks, by entering installations, touching objects, performing instructions or clicking on interactive websites. Why have artists sought to engage spectators in these new forms of participation? In what ways does active participation affect the viewer's experience and the status of the artwork? Spanning a range of practices including kinetic art, happenings, environments, performance, installations, relational and new media art from the 1950s to the present, this critical anthology sheds light on the history and specificity of artworks that only come to life when you - the viewer - are invited to 'do it yourself.' Rather than a specialist topic in the history of twentieth- and twenty-first century art, the 'do-it-yourself' artwork raises broader issues concerning the role of the viewer in art, the status of the artwork and the socio-political relations between art and its contexts.

in this PDF you will find:
- the list of contents
- the list of contributors
- the list of figures
- the editor's introduction

Bernard Stiegler (1952–2020) was a French philosopher, introduced to philosophy by Gérard Granel, and subsequently became a distinguished graduate of Jacques Derrida. Leonid Bilmes named Stiegler as one of the most influential European philosophers of the 21st century. This dissertation brings Stiegler’s thought to Polish philosophy, which is still relatively unfamiliar with his oeuvre. Stiegler’s heterogeneous thinking – to mention only a few sources of influence on his thought – draws from Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Karl Marx, Gilbert Simondon, Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, and the Frankfurt School. Stiegler was a critical thinker who transformed how philosophy could address industrialization, technology, epistemology, and art history. Unique ideas developed by him and analyzed in this dissertation include tertiary retentions, symbolic misery, the complexity of the process of (trans- and co-) individuation, the pharmakon, mystagogy, neganthropology, and aesthetic war. Stiegler is one of a handful of contemporary philosophers who developed an existential-philosophical system, and his oeuvre is performative in form. He has recast aesthetic theory to necessarily include political economy and personal agency questions in symbolic and aesthetic interchange processes.
The primary focus of this thesis is to provide an account of behavioral aesthetics in the practices of selected 20th and 21st-century artists while also raising Stiegler’s questions about aesthetic war and symbolic misery in the context of industrialization and systems theory. Jean Galard is recognized as a precursor to behavioral aesthetics, and Jennifer Hall receives credit for her work in a post-humanist context. The subject matter is innovatively analyzed concerning behavior in art and how it is addressed by artists developing artistic behavioral schemes that provide a framework of open systems for initiating arborizations across acquired behavioral patterns and cognitive processes. Stiegler is examined for his inclusion and supplementation of the paradigm of new materialism, namely metaphysical performativity formulated by Karen Barad. This paradigm is integrated into Stiegler’s writing, primarily in Technics and Time and Symbolic Misery. Aesthetics is considered broadly qua the capacity to feel. The research methodology leads from new materialist agential realism to general organology and the genealogy of behavioral aesthetics in case studies involving Stephen Willats, Tania Bruguera, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, Judson Wright, Marcus Young, and Joseph Beuys. 
The dissertation reveals the phenomenon of the uptake of psychological and structural behaviorism in the activities of particular separate artists for the period under discussion. It shows that although these artists differ in their projects, they are united by the assumption that behavior constitutes a medium or form of artwork. The study reveals their works as examples of responding to the contemporary problem of an aesthetic war based on aesthetic conditioning through market-driven values, a tendency described by Annie Le Brun as globalist realism. In contrast, the study emphasizes aesthetic experience and experimentation and a re-evaluation of the role of the amateur. Artworks developed from the mid-20th century to the present day can serve as a basis and cause for additional research on contemporary questions of exclusion and alienation in an environment that increasingly resembles a Skinner Box – a remote-controlled system of algorithmic governance, data-driven behaviorism, or psychoinformatics. The dissertation addresses Stiegler’s call to elevate the value of spirit, synonymous with various modes of consciousness and cycles of noetic thinking that are materially sustained, stimulated, and extinguished. This aspect is the fabric of Beuys’s social sculpture, which Stiegler also identifies as necessary for the cultivation of a new epoch and a forward-looking vision engaged in an active struggle in the face of symbolic misery, i.e., a person’s loss of a sense of belonging and participation in the process of symbolic and aesthetic exchange.