ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AESTHETICS, Michael Kelly, Editor-in-Chief

(Oxford University Press, 2014)

Participatory Art.
In recent decades, contemporary visual and performance art created
through a participatory process has drawn increasing attention. Its value is
the subject of considerable debate, including a lively conversation around
the ethics and aesthetics of the practice as well as the vocabulary best
suited to describe and critique it. Participatory art exists under a variety of
overlapping headings, including interactive, relational, cooperative,
activist, dialogical, and community-based art. In some cases, participation
by a range of people creates an artwork, in others the participatory action
is itself described as the art. So the conceptual photographer Wendy Ewald
gave cameras and photography training to a group of children in a village
in India, who, in turn, depicted their community, and the resulting
photography show was considered participatory art. On the other hand,
the multimedia visual artist Pedro Lasch collaborated with a group of
“Sonidero” DJ’s on a party at an art center in Mexico City, and he called
the social interactions leading to, and including, the public event an
artwork co-authored by a range of participants—including the people who
simply showed up for the event.

Click to view larger

Tatlin’s Whisper #5, 2008 (mounted police, crowd control techniques, audience), Tania
Bruguera. Photo by Sheila Burnett.
courtesy of tate modern

Of course participation in the collective creation of art is not new. Across

the globe, throughout recorded history people have participated in the
creation of art—from traditional music and dance to community festivals
to mural arts. And the emergence of participatory art as a distinctive field
has antecedents at least through the modernist period, as many scholars
have argued. For example, recent books on the topic have traced these
origins through the European and Latin American avant-gardes (Bishop,
2012), in the context of the participatory politics of feminism and the civil
rights movement since the 1960s (Finkelpearl, 2013), in a global context
(Kester, 2011) and in relation to twentieth-century performance and theater
innovations (Jackson, 2011). This entry takes as its subject not the history of
participation in art but the recently designated genre of participatory art in
the last three decades.

Before proceeding to a brief outline of recent participatory art, it is worth

considering some categories that have emerged within a field that
encompasses such diverse practices as a meal served in a gallery in New
York; activities in a cluster of buildings in Houston, Texas; and mounted
policemen herding unsuspecting visitors around the gigantic atrium of a
museum in London. Clearly, these projects are not unified by medium.
Rather, they share only one characteristic: They were created through the
participation of people in addition to the artist or art collective. In
participatory art people referred to as citizens, regular folks, community
members, or non-artists interact with professional artists to create the
works. Each of these three projects is emblematic of a very different
approach to participatory art.

Three Modes of Participation.

Starting in the early 1990s the Argentine-Thai-American artist Rirkrit
Tiravanija initiated a series of exhibitions that consisted of cooking pad
thai (a Southeast Asian stir-fried noodle dish) for gallery visitors. This
performance, called Untitled (Free) was often enacted within a gallery
whose environment had been altered by the artist, but the gesture was
radical in its simplicity: a shared meal. The artwork was defined as the
social situation, the relations of the visitors within the environment set in
motion by the meal. The visitor, who ate, conversed, shared, and generally
interacted was not a spectator but an active participant in the creation of
the social art. The participants tended to be art world insiders, members of
the audience for avant-garde contemporary art. In this performance
installation, participation is voluntary. Here, social art is a social event.
Untitled (Free) became Tiravanija’s signature piece, appearing in shows in
the United States, Europe, and Asia, and, in 1996, it was included in the
exhibition “Traffic,” the seminal show organized by the French critic and
curator Nicolas Bourriaud. In the show’s catalogue, Bourriaud coined the
term “Relational Aesthetics” to refer to the sort of work that creates
temporary and small-scale convivial moments and experiments in
interpersonal relations that he hails as models for positive social
interaction.

Also in the early 1990s, a group of African American artists in Houston,

Texas, began to meet to discuss how to make a difference in their
community. After several years of planning, they opened Project Row
Houses in 1994 within a set of eight renovated shotgun houses dedicated
to artists’ projects. Over the years, they added major new initiatives,
including a residency/education program for single mothers, in-depth
education programs for local kids, a nonprofit community development
arm that has built low- and middle-income housing, a laundromat, a
ballroom for public events, and experimental architecture projects in
collaboration with Rice University’s architecture program. While it
resembles an activist community art center, Project Row Houses is often
defined as a work of art, as a neighborhood-wide, interactive, participatory
public sculpture. If there is an author of this large-scale project it is the
founder, Rick Lowe, who often invokes Joseph Beuys’s notion of social
sculpture and his idea that every person is an artist. Participants in Project
Row Houses range from the staff to the resident mothers to architecture
students and planners to the visitors who daily engage the social setting to
the exhibiting artists who create works within the overall artwork. These
participants come from a variety of social and economic sectors and from
across the region and around the United States. Rhetoric around the
project is unapologetically idealistic, instrumental, and activist—the
project is meant to make a positive difference in people’s lives. This sort of
project is referred to as socially engaged, interventionist, or activist
participatory art.

When “Tatlin’s Whisper #5” (2008) by the Cuban-born artist Tania

Bruguera is on view, visitors arrive at the Great Hall of the Tate Modern in
London only to encounter two mounted policemen directing the audience
around the space. Using the skills they acquired as mounted officers, they
move the crowd from one side to another, clearing certain areas or
pathways although with no specific crowd control goals to be
accomplished. While visitors at the Tate have certainly entered the space
anticipating an art experience, “Tatlin’s Whisper” is not clearly announced
as a performance nor, once the audience is under the policemen’s
authority, can participation be said to be voluntary. One simply finds
oneself being told where to go by an authority figure—a police officer on a
powerful animal not usually encountered at a museum. This sort of
project—experimenting with power relations, working with participants
who have not necessarily agreed to the terms of engagement, seeking no
apparent social good—could be characterized as an example of
destabilizing, contradictory, and/or antagonistic participatory art. Claire
Bishop is the most vocal advocate of this tougher, more confrontational
version of participatory art. Indeed, an image of “Tatlin’s Whisper” graces
the cover of Bishop’s 2012 book on participatory art, Artificial Hells.

So, in broad strokes, participatory art can be considered to fall into three
categories: relational, activist, and antagonistic. But while the motivations
in the three cases are quite different as are the means, all depend on
participation. A painting alone in a gallery would still be a work of art. If
Tiravanija prepared pad thai and no participants arrived at the gallery,
however, there would be no artwork, and just so for Project Row Houses
and “Tatlin’s Whisper.” In these projects, it is the social space, the
interactive moment, that is the subject of aesthetic consideration, not the
food, architecture, or equine choreography.

Participatory Art in the Mainstream.

In the United States and Europe, critical discussion of a range of art
practices that are interactive and include non-artists in the creation of
work, as exemplified by the three cases above, has been ongoing most
especially since the late 1990s. While numerous important examples of
participatory art took place in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States, a
major milestone in terms of public perception was a pair of projects in the
early 1990s orchestrated by Mary Jane Jacob—first, “Places with a Past” in
1991 in Charleston, South Carolina, and then “Culture in Action” in 1992–
1993 in Chicago, which truly brought participatory art into the
mainstream. “Culture in Action” had a well-known museum curator
(Jacob), a sizable budget, and was accompanied by a substantial
publication. In the context of the project, Marc Dion collaborated with a
group of teenagers on an urban ecology collective, Daniel Joseph Martinez
orchestrated a multisite parade through communities in Chicago, and
Suzanne Lacy worked with a coalition to recover and reinscribe the
memory of notable Chicago women in the urban setting. The projects were
interactive and there was a clear social agenda—including the direct
participation of marginalized communities. There was an imperative to
create art with (not about or for) people not included in traditional
museum audiences. The idea was to build social bridges through art that
embraced aesthetic interaction. One of the prominent critics of “Places
with a Past” and “Culture in Action” was Miwon Kwon. Her complaint,
first expressed in October magazine in 1997 and eventually published in
her book on site-specific art in 2002, was multifaceted: that the cultural
action undertaken in Jacobs’s projects could be used for urban boosterism,
that the voice of the community could be appropriated by itinerant artists
in the name of inclusive participation, and that the curator had
overdetermined the sort of social partnerships that were appropriate
(Kwon, 2002). This argument between those committed to direct social
action, on the one hand, and critics suspicious of the social efficacy and
aesthetic complexity of participatory art, on the other, has continued to
play out since that time.

Around the same time in Europe, participatory practices were also

bubbling to the surface. Most famously in France, in 1996, the curator and
critic Nicolas Bourriaud mounted “Traffic” at the contemporary art
museum in Bordeaux. His formulation, that there could be an aesthetics of
human interaction, rippled through the European art world and made
landfall in the United States upon its translation in 2002. In the 1990s and
2000s important examples of participatory art were beginning to gain
recognition and funding across the globe, including Ik-Joong Kang’s
collaborations with children in South Korea, Najot Altaf’s water projects in
India, Pawel Althamer’s cooperative projects in his housing estate in
Poland, and Tania Bruguera’s experimental school in Cuba.

This is not to say that an international embrace of participatory art ensued.

In the late 1990s the mainstream press was cautious to even consider the
process of participation as art. In 1997 the New York Times art critic Roberta
Smith reviewed “Uncommon Sense,” a show at the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (which this author co-curated with Julie
Lazar) that included projects by participatory art veterans, including
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Mel Chin, and Rick Lowe, and participatory
theater/performance artists such as Cornerstone Theater and Ann
Carleson. To Smith, much of what she saw was not art. She wrote of the
show that there was “nary an artwork in sight,” and that “nothing changes
a museum more quickly than removing art from it” (New York Times, 11
May 1997). She was particularly dismayed by the amateur creation of
participants in the projects, such as the fire fighters who had worked on
Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s installation. In many of these projects, Smith
correctly noted, the participatory moment had taken place prior to the
exhibition’s opening, so the museum audience was excluded from the
most interesting and engaging element of the works. So from the
beginning of the surge in interest in participatory art, skeptics of the social
value of the practice, as well as critics who doubted its status as art, could
be found.

But perhaps the clearest debate regarding participatory art has played out
between the art historians Claire Bishop and Grant Kester. Since a well-
read exchange on the topic in 2006, Kester and Bishop have come to
embody two sides of the debate—Bishop calling for a critical,
problematizing art of negation and Kester looking for affirmative models
of communication in dialogic art. This debate coincided with a burst of
mainstream attention. “Social Practice” programs, often teaching the
intricacies of participatory art, sprung up in graduate Master of Fine Arts
programs. In 2008 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art mounted
“The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now.” In 2009 New York’s Guggenheim
Museum presented “theanyspacewhatever,” which reunited the artists
from Bourriaud’s “Traffic.” Though these shows did not garner positive
press across the board, few questioned the aesthetic status of the works in
them. Over the last decade, it has become commonplace to understand
participatory moments as art. Art can now be a meal, a free school, an
immigrant services community center, a dance party, or a collectively
designed park.

Agreeing on the possibilities of participation as art is one thing. Agreeing

on aesthetic criteria, however, remains particularly difficult in the light of
the diversity of practices and the fact that the aesthetic, ethical, and social
values can be diametrically opposed. While one artist or critic might seek
healing through participation, another might valorize rupture. Some see
political potential in artistic social action; others see the likelihood of the
cooptation of artists and communities. But perhaps the most fundamental
questions arising from participatory art revolve around authorship and
use.

In the visual arts, authorship has important implications, perhaps most

obviously in the economic sphere. A painting has only a fraction of the
value it would otherwise possess if it fails to be authenticated as a Cézanne
or a Rembrandt. There are art historical implications as well. Critics are
used to writing about a body of work by an artist. Audiences are interested
in who a work is “by.” So, making art through participation and ascribing
authorship to a group—especially a group of nonprofessional artists—has
created difficult issues of authorship and interpretation. Artists and critics
invested in this art form often contend that a social and aesthetic value
exists in creating a participatory process that moves away from the
individualistic model to a more socially horizontal structure. They
sometimes argue as well that non-artists have perceptions, local
knowledge, professional expertise, or visual ideas that are unique and
unattainable without their participation. Furthermore, participation does
not necessarily erase authorship. While public participation is required to
activate “Tatlin’s Whisper #5,” the author remains Tania Bruguera, and, in
fact, the Tate Modern has acquired the piece for their collection in the form
of a set of instructions of the interactive experience. Project Row Houses,
on the other hand, is not available for sale. Its bureaucratic structure is that
of a tax-exempt nonprofit. There is an acknowledged author, Rick Lowe,
but there is a bit more distance between Lowe and individual authorship.
The project’s website and printed literature do not refer to Project Row
Houses as being “by” Lowe as much as critics may do so. Still, across the
field of participatory art, most well-known projects are identified with an
artist who has orchestrated the interaction and initiated the participation.
So the claims of horizontal structure and participatory decision making are
often made in a zone of contention.

Perhaps more contentious than the arguments around authorship are those
about the use of participatory art projects, particularly the relational and
activist projects that are often accompanied by declarations of social gain.
Authors such as Hal Foster have questioned the social claims of relational
aesthetics while the aforementioned Miwon Kwon and Claire Bishop have
interrogated the politics of participation. Some artists, such as like Thomas
Hirschorn from Switzerland, are careful not to make any social claims for
their art, though participants in his work often make the case for the
positive value in their community. But many others, from Rick Lowe to
Tania Bruguera, look unapologetically to the notion of social usefulness.
The debate around use often manifests itself in two questions: If a project
takes the form of a useful social service such as a center for immigrant
rights or a safe haven for sex workers, what is the value of calling it art?
And, if the aspiration of a participatory art project is social good, should it
be judged on the basis of instrumental results without reference to what is
traditionally considered aesthetic value? A variety of answers to the first
question ranging from the bureaucratic to the psychological can be given.
Simply put, it can be useful for an artist to call a project art in order to
gather resources. Project Row Houses received its first funding from the
National Endowment for the Arts, an agency that recognized the potential
value of the arts intervening in a distressed neighborhood. It was only later
that the project was able to garner urban development funding, having
built a foundation through the arts. Second, if Project Row Houses had
been framed as a social services initiative, it would have joined a number
of other similar organizations and agencies in the third ward of Houston.
There is a very different psychological frame if a community member says,
“I am participating in an experimental art project” than if that member
were to say, “I am receiving social services,” even if the activity (housing,
education, gardening) seems exactly the same. The goals of social
participation and community creativity can be reached more efficiently by
calling certain projects art and, instead of passive recipients of service,
working with a group of active participants. And finally, the question of
evaluation hovers over the field of participatory art with no clear set of
criteria in place. Many artists resist the simple math of calculating the
social utility of social art. Even proponents of activist, socially motivated
participatory art, such as Grant Kester, point more to the quality of the
interaction and dialogue than to simple social usefulness.

Discussion of participatory art seems to be in its infancy. A new crop of

books, shows, funding opportunities, and debates has appeared since 2000.
But a field that includes both a neighborhood in Houston and a meal in a
gallery in New York seems ripe for further classification.

[See also Beuys, Joseph; Collectivism; Dialogical Art; Politics; Public Art;
and Relational Aesthetics.]

Bibliography
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London: Verso, 2012.

Bishop, Claire, ed. Participation. London: Whitechapel, 2006.

Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon, France: Presses du Réel, 2002.

Doherty, Claire, ed. Contemporary Art from Studio to Situation. London: Black Dog,
2004.

Finkelpearl, Tom. What We Made: Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation.

Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2013.

Jackson, Shannon. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York:
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Jacob, Mary Jane, Michael Brenson, and Eva M. Olson. Culture in Action: A Public
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Kester, Grant. Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art.

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Tom Finkelpearl