ARTIFICIAL HELLS
Claire Bishop
Claire Bishop looks at three historically important (revolutionary) moments in the presentation of the development of the art of participation, the role of artists in society, and the connection between artistic and political projects. These are 1917 (when art production was associated with Bolshevik collectivism), 1968 (when art was associated with criticism of authorities, oppression), and 1989 (when art produced new participatory-collaborative practices at the time of losing the collective political goal). Historically, participation developed first from the sphere of avant-garde theater and performance in the 1920s through the practices of Italian Futurists (Variety Theater) and their mix of spectacle, slapstick, singing, recitation and poetry reading ... and actions of direct provocation of spectators: glue on chairs, traffic jam in the audience by selling one and the same ticket for ten people, etc. This antagonism did not really mean a negative attitude, but respect for the viewer in order to emancipate the audience for modern society through the values of nationalism, militarism, destruction, and war. However, in that way, the Futurists only slipped into right-wing nationalism and fascism. In contrast, the Parisian Dadaists (Andre Breton) wanted to re-examine the audience and sociability by moving from cabaret and theatrical conventions to the streets, so that people, through the self-reflective re-examination of moral and aesthetic norms, understood the connection between art and life. They formed excursions of people through Paris to locations in front of buildings without major historical significance and organized various situations, games, readings of the Dadaist manifesto in front of them, with the goal of creating a "social sculpture". Also, they realized false public trials of artists or personalities who once advocated anarchism, freedom, individuality and turned to e.g. fascism ... The goal was to redirect Dada's scandal and anarchism towards specific moralistic, ethical goals, which only more clearly politically positioned the Parisian Dada against the general Dadaist position: the denial of all political positions. In her artistic interventions, she became "tacitly political", and the connection between artistic and political practice was later built through the Situationists through the decades.Istovremeno, u Rusiji se nakon Oktobarske revolucije insistiralo na zajedničkoj, kolektivnoj produkciji kulture sa ciljem da se odbace vrednosti prethodno ustanovljene visoke buržoarske kulture koje proizvode i konzumiraju isključivo individue. Kultura se revolucionalizovala kroz rad (spajanjem umetnika u radnika), kroz način života (u kući i na poslu) i kroz osećanja (revolucionarnu osvešćenost i sentiment) - čime se gradio transnacionalni proleterski identitet. Autorstvo se više nije definisalo kao ekspresija umetničke individue već njegove/njene aktivne participacije u kreiranju kolektivnog života. Dva su oblika: Proletkult pozorište (formirala ga radnička klasa) i masovni spektakli. Proletkult je nastao na pozorišnom amaterizmu, grass-roots grupama, kako bi se kultura gradila participacijom ljudi/radnika u dehijerarhizovanim kreativnim procesima. Masovni spektakli su se zasnivali na participaciji u kojoj je apparatus državne propagande koristio pozorište za mobilizaciju svesti javnosti i stvaranje slike zajedništva. Npr. brojne rekreacije Revolucije ispred Zimske palate sa 8000 učesnika ili “Simfonijski orkestri” sačinjeni od mehnaničkih zvukova fabričkih sirena, motora, parnih uređaja, turbina, kojima je rukovodilo stotine ljudi pod komandama dirigenata sa krovova zgrada, mahanjem zastava. Madjutim, učešće u kolektivnom procesu je bilo mnogo značajnije nego gledljivost takvih projekata ili demokratski uticaj, tehničke sposobnosti itd. Zanimljivo je i to da su se ovakvi projekti paradoksalno uvek vezivali za individualna imena (reditelja) iako su insistirali na vrednostima jednakosti i kolektiva.At the same time, after the October Revolution, Russia insisted on joint, collective production of culture with the aim of rejecting the values of the previously established high bourgeois culture, which is produced and consumed exclusively by individuals. The culture was revolutionized through work (by merging artists into workers), through the way of life (at home and at work), and through feelings (revolutionary awareness and sentiment) - thus building a transnational proletarian identity. Authorship is no longer defined as the expression of an artistic individual but of his / her active participation in the creation of collective life. There are two forms: the Proletcult Theater (formed by the working class) and mass spectacles. Proletkult was created on theatrical amateurism, grass-roots groups, in order to build culture through the participation of people/workers in dehierarchized creative processes. The mass spectacles were based on participation in which the state propaganda apparatus used the theater to mobilize public awareness and create an image of the community. For example. numerous revolutions of the Revolution in front of the Winter Palace with 8000 participants or "Symphony Orchestras" made up of mechanical sounds of factory sirens, engines, steam devices, turbines, led by hundreds of people under the command of conductors from the roofs of buildings, waving flags. However, participation in the collective process was much more important than the visibility of such projects or democratic influence, technical capabilities, etc. It is also interesting that such projects have paradoxically always been tied to individual names (directors), although they insisted on the values of equality and the collective.The idea of democratizing art and everyday culture, accessible to everyone, as opposed to elitist culture, developed during the 1950s / The idea of democratizing art and everyday culture, accessible to everyone, as opposed to elitist culture, developed during the 1950s / 60s in Paris, by hiring artists from the Situationist International (SI). Although initially dedicated to art exhibitions and individual authorship, under the influence of Guy Deborah, the group stopped looking at art separate from revolutionary practice. The task was not to subordinate art to politics but to overcome both by integrating everyday life and art. Thus, SI had a threefold identity: the artistic avant-garde, the experimental research of the free constitution of everyday life, and the theoretical-practical articulation of revolutionary attitudes. The goal was to produce instability and interruption (with the beautiful in traditional art), immediacy (in the form of directly organizing sensations instead of reporting on them), and self-determination (to build ourselves, not the things we enslave). SI, however, seldom delved into issues of class difference and social inequality. Inspired by Dada's practices, they carried out three types of actions: Derivatives (aimless, disorienting guiding people through the city to get rid of disciplinary, homogenizing, dehumanizing forms of urban life), detuornament (the subversive practice of undermining existing meanings of things/images) and constructed situations. central urban spaces, in order to resist capitalism, bureaucracy, consumerism, and to encourage mutual communication, non-alienation, social life). The constructed situations had similarities with other types of open forms of artwork and participation (eg the post-Brecht and Artovo theater, the Happenings). Although they shared common values in criticism against spectacle, museums, commercialization, mediatization, alienation, advocacy for revolution, etc. - SI saw the Happenings in Europe and America as attracting media attention and trivializing political ideas. The works of Alan Kaprow, John Cage, and Jackson Pollock in the United States were based on easy forms of structured audience participation and apolitical means of changing people's attitudes toward life. On the other hand, European happenings, like the works of Jean-Jacques Lebel, took place through unstructured participatory events with the free expression of nudism, sexuality, mythology, and hallucinogen consumption. The goal was to give people less to do something, and more to introduce them to collective transformations and erasure of dualisms: viewer/audience, politics/art, revolution/creativity, subject/object, art/life, active/passive, conscious/unconscious, individual socially. The role of the artist is to be a moral transgressor by giving voice and space to everything that is conventionally oppressed in society. The European happenings of weaker politics were the actions of the GRAV (Groupe d Reserche d’art Visuel) in Paris. Two- and three-dimensional optical and kinetic installations and games stimulated psychological and physiological responses to movement, color, and light as a means of affecting the viewer's perception, and questioning conventional experiences of time, eye-work relationships, and so on. However, the experiences that these installations stimulated were more individual than social and more interactive than participatory, and the viewer was always manipulated to complete the work "properly" with his participation. The only political effectiveness was in expanding the perception that would lead to sharing in society (which did not happen).While participatory art in Western Europe and North America in the 1960s was conceived as a critique of the spectacle in consumerist capitalism, advocating collective activity versus individual passivity, Argentine artists pushed for stronger immediacy in opposition to a particular political dictatorship. Their production of happening/situation was based on two aspects: merging life and art (using people as a medium) and at the same time distancing oneself from both. The works of art: either included human bodies within the installations (a group of lower-middle-class people, retirees, etc. in a space that emits a strong electronic sound - Oscar Masota; exhibiting a real working family in a museum - Oscar Bonnie) or gave visitors/viewers a role/tasks within unpredictable but predetermined situations (August Boal's "invisible theater"; locking the audience in the gallery until they find a way out - Ciclo de Experimental, Graciela Carnevale). That is why Carnevale's work best illustrates the provocation with the unpredictability of the reaction/response, which constitutes the core of the artistic and political aspect of the work in South America. This work is both metaphorical and phenomenological - because it enlightens viewers to understand and feel on their own skin the violence (of the state) in which they live (‘I can’t stay neutral, I have to do something). It was the South American practices of direct confrontation with/in the public sphere and precarious relations with artistic institutions that set a precedent for today's practices of participation in art, questioning the assumption that participation itself is synonymous with democracy.In contrast to South American practices of participation as a means of raising awareness and action against dictatorship, and Western European or North American artistic practices of creating a participatory public sphere as a counterpoint to the world of individual consumption, Eastern European and Russian promising practices of the 1960s and 1970s glorified individual aesthetic experiences. a sphere based on artistic evaluation according to its position within the Marxist-Leninist dogma. The work of art was more about researching the aesthetic than the political with the idea of transforming individual life into art, rather than changing the entire system under which he lives. The artists did not want their works to be interpreted as political or dissident, but as apolitical research on existential freedoms and inconsistencies within the imposed paradigm of collectivism and equality with the highly regulated and hierarchical systems of the time. In Czechoslovakia, Milan Knižak organizes events with groups of people and ritualistic ceremonies, Jan Mlčoch locks the audience in an apartment as he goes out the window through a rope, and Jan Budaj organizes lunch in a public parking lot. In Moscow, the work of the Collective of Group Actions stands out, which led groups of people to rural areas and conducted mysterious games with them. In Yugoslavia, the happenings and paratheatrical events of the groups Kod, Oho, 143 stand out; The individual performances of Miroslav Mandić, Tomislav Gotovac, Marina Abramović, Katalin Ladik, Zoran Popović, etc. are still classified as conceptual performances (art) because they question art institutions, the status of artists, the characterization of a work of art - unlike the activism of avant-garde performance of futurism. Examples of artistic production of socialist contexts, from today's perspective, can hardly be read as uncritical. Especially because they problematize contemporary claims that participation is synonymous with collectivism, and thus automatically in opposition to capitalism.In the UK, a welfare state of social democracy, 1970s participation developed through two principles. The first sees the role of artists in society through work within corporations or public institutions (Artist Placement Group APG). The second defines the role of artists in society as facilitators of creativity among people of everyday life (Community Arts Movement). Although politically naive and unposted, APG re-examines whether it is better for art to be engaged in society even when it implies compromises or to maintain ideological purity at the expense of social isolation and powerlessness. Although Community Art is created with the goal of producing liberalizing self-determination through which groups of people will gain control over their lives, this impulse grows over time depending on grants, positioning artists not as activists but as quasi-employees of one or another dominant government. That is why this movement hardly remained a counter-culture until it received the approval and support of the state. Also, the definition of the work of these communities has always focused more on how they work than on what they specifically do with the participants. That is why the artistic quality of the results has never been the focus of these communities because they produced art for marginal groups. Advocating the “process above the product” makes it impossible to create a discursive framework or culture of reception as a criterion for the artistic evaluation of such projects.The 1990s brought two terms/practices from the business world that penetrated the art market: “project” and “outsourcing”. Although applied in the 1960s, the project became the umbrella name for artwork during the 1990s, replacing a work of art as a finalized object with works of open-end, based on research, social process, and changing forms. The key year was 1993 when new art groups of activist orientation (Superflux, N55…) emerged in Europe as a counterpart to the North American art groups engaged in the AIDS crisis. The works/projects of the new collectives come from site-specific practice - not theater and performance as before the 1990s - treating the location more as a socially constituted phenomenon with an authentic everyday life than as a formal or phenomenological entity. This transition is best illustrated by Project Unite in France (1993) - an exhibition of works by American and European artists within the LeCorbusier residential complex inhabited by single parents, immigrants, retirees, students, etc. This collaborative authorship between artists, tenants, and curators underlined the distinction between North American and European criteria for social engagement. While American artists under the influence of critical theory in psychoanalysis, critical ethnography, identity politics, and postcolonialism had a more pragmatic and critical attitude in working with tenants, French artists under the influence of poststructuralism - for which there is no position outside - nurtured the aesthetics of relationships through insincere, uncritical engagement and fictitious relationships with tenants. This diversity during the 1990s remains the root of the establishment of two approaches to human participation as a central artistic medium and material. On the one hand, it is about the aesthetics of relation (Nicolas Borrioud) that base the artistic process on the aesthetic aspect of a harmonious interpersonal relationship and social context, remaining in the field of the art world rather than within the framework of social change. On the other hand, there are practices of relational antagonism - in which artistic experience is built through structures of relations between everything different that is repressed, polemical, antagonistic, uncomfortable, uncomfortable, absurd, and divided in order to constitute social harmony and a comfortable community. Instead of transcending empathy to alleviate the discomfort between differences within relationships and "sociability" (Rirkrit Tiravaniya), relational antagonism insists on social responsibility through dialogue and negotiation between unequal positions and questioning the quality of the relationship itself - what kind of relationship is being made? for whom? why? can it be separated from the theme of the work or introduced into its context? And what polemical foundations are being created for rethinking new relationships and a new world (Thomas Hirshhorn, Santiago Sierra, Tania Burgera, Arthur Zhmivsky, Phill Collins, Jeremy Deller, Tino Sehgal). These practices reflect socio-politically and aesthetically together (their mutual antagonism) and, more importantly, resist their subordination to the ethical: whereby in artistic criticism the ethical evaluation of participatory works of art dominates the aesthetic evaluation and the discussion of the conceptual significance of the work and its social and aesthetic forms. The focus of the critique is on the ethics of human interaction (identity politics: respect for the Other, acceptance of diversity, protection of fundamental freedoms, human rights, etc.) and the assessment of the author's intention and work process, instead of the artistic identity of the work and social justice policy. In contrast, Bishop refers to Ransier's definition of the aesthetic - as a specific way of thinking about the contradiction in the relationship of art to social change, which is based on the paradox of believing in the autonomy of art and its inextricable link with the principle of a better world. As Ransier says: A political work of art disturbs the relationship between the visible, the utterable, and the thoughtful, without using the expression of the message as a means. It conveys meaning in the form of ruptures before it simply gives us "awareness" of the state of the world.
Along the lines of relational antagonism, types of participatory works are developed that rely on "outsourcing" - in which the artist would rather hire non-professionals or professionals from other fields than perform them himself. Delegated performances fall into three groups: Actions delegated to non-professionals to perform aspects of their identity in a museum, gallery, etc. (Annika Erikson, Jeremy Deller, Santiago Sierra, Tania Burgera, Santiago Sierra ...); Actions delegated to professionals from other fields who are involved in the artist's work as ready-made to perform it (Tania Burgera, Tino Sehgal (); Actions delegated and designed specifically for video and film (Phill Colins, Artur Žmijevski). In delegated performances, the author gives his power to the performer temporarily, while in return the performer delegates to the artist his authenticity of everyday social reality in a situation where the result is uncertain (it is not known what reaction the work will produce), and which the artist completes and defines its representativeness. These works do not use modern working conditions simply but emphasize our attitude towards them through the representation of conventionally unexposed groups of people with common interests or political opinions. At best, the delegated performance produces devastating events that testify to the common reality between spectators and performers and that defy not only the agreed ways of thinking about pleasure, work, and ethics but also the intellectual frameworks we inherited to understand these ideas today.
