Searching for Art's New Publics

Jeni Walwin, Jeni Walwin, Jeni Walwin, Anna Teresa Scheer

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781841503110
• eBook ISBN: 9781841503943
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

Drawing on contributions from practicing artists, writers, curators, and academics, Searching for Art's New Publics explores the ways in which artists seek to involve, create and engage with new and diverse audiences—from passers-by encountering and participating in the work unexpectedly, to professionals from other disciplines and members of particular communities who bring their own agendas to the work. Bridging the gap between practice and theory, this exciting book touches on issues of relational aesthetics, but also offers an illustrated artist-based approach. Searching for Art's New Publics will appeal to students studying fine art (especially those with an interest in cross-disciplinary work and public art) and those studying curating.

Part I

Participation: Open or Closed

This section looks at the role of the art project participant, touching on some of the ethical issues in relation to this way of working. The writers analyse the status of the participant within the artwork to see how far they might be considered collaborators, inspecting the relationship they have with the author, and assessing whether or not they are unwitting contributors to the final evocation of the work.

Chapter 1

The Anatomy of a Participatory Project

Sally O’Reilly

public works is an art/architecture collective consisting of architects Sandra Denicke-Polcher, Torange Khonsari, Andreas Lang and artist Kathrin Böhm. All public works projects assess ways in which users of public space are engaging with their environment and how design and programmatic strategies can support and facilitate physical, economical and social infrastructures in the public realm. public works use the methodology of art-led processes to explore ways in which existing social dynamics can inform spatial, architectural and urban proposals. The writer and critic Sally O’Reilly investigates the role of the public participants in the Granville Cube, a public works project for a social housing development in Kilburn, West London. The Cube is a simple metal frame structure that will travel to various locations around the Granville New Homes development. The structure acts as a communication and facilitation device, hosting small-scale local events and collecting and staging ideas for the use of the public realm. The weekly programme ranges from carol singing to swap shops, flower planting to mega fish tanks. Simple add-ons can turn the cube into an exhibition space, small stage, outdoor screen or a workshop space. The cube will be appropriated over time, turning into an archive and an enactment of ideas for the public space in the area.

In her text Sally O’Reilly explores the experience of the authors and participants in this project – revealing its shortfalls and successes, the unexpected hazards and the rich legacy of this way of working. O’Reilly sets this research against the backdrop of two related issues – the current language of participation (which as Bohm points out ‘gets theorized, sometimes for its own sake, and highly refined by critics…’) and the progenitors of participatory practice within recent art history (in particular two projects by Rirkrit Tiravanija and Robert Morris). In a clever resolution of a format which allows for all these voices, for leaping backwards and forwards in time, and for asides and comments on the way, O’Reilly has written the piece as a script for a documentary which is yet to be made.

The following is a script for a documentary, The Anatomy of a Participatory Project, which is yet to be made. It includes interviews with many of the people involved with public works’ project the Granville Cube.

EXT. STREET SCENE — DAYTIME

A number of adults and children congregate around a yellow metal structure, planting seeds in small pots.

NARRATOR (voiceover)
This is the Granville Cube.

CUT TO:

INT. BUSY STUDIO — DAYTIME

Half a dozen men and women, wrapped up in coats and scarves, work at computers.

NARRATOR (voiceover)
And this is the studio of public works, a group of artists and architects who instigated the Granville Cube. I’m here to ask them how they view their role in the project, as authors of the situation, perhaps, or facilitators of an ongoing series of micro-projects. First, though, we need to address a fundamental question.

CUT TO:

CLOSE-UP OF STUDIO TABLE TOP — DAYTIME

A book lies open on the table and an anonymous hand turns the pages to show us a series of photographic stills of a noodle bar, an outdoor cinema, a ceramics workshop, a donkey derby, a group of knitters, kite flyers, etc.

NARRATOR (voiceover)
Why are participatory art projects so unphotogenic? Documentation of public events, whether donkey derbies, knitting marathons or snacking sessions, do not serve the visual art publication well. They look just like the jumble of ordinariness that life is generally made up of.

CUT TO:

INT: EMPTY WHITE GALLERIES — DAYTIME

Narrator walks around talking to camera.

NARRATOR
Rirkrit Tiravanija, the golden boy of relational aesthetics, forsook imagery entirely in his Palais de Tokyo retrospective, instead relying on spoken commentary delivered through headphones to evoke past projects.

Photographic documentation of these sorts of event-based projects, where people other than the artists generate content or activate a physical or social structure, invariably fails to communicate the experience of taking part. While we have known about this discrepancy between image and experience for some time – especially in live art quarters, where the documentary photograph or video has been all but outlawed as a purveyor of lies and ensnarer of souls – it is interesting to think of this lacuna in terms of authorship.

CUT TO:

INT. CLOSE-UP OF STUDIO TABLE TOP — DAYTIME

The book is still being leafed through, more images of haphazard looking events.

NARRATOR (voiceover)
While the composed or fortuitously grasped photographic moment speaks of virtuosity based in aesthetic judgement, the snapshot displaces classical composition with visual disorder. The participatory project, too, replaces the primacy of the well-ordered image with a hidden structure or concept that is equally authored, but whose outcome is less controlled or visually apparent.

CUT TO:

INT. GALLERY — DAYLIGHT

Two rails, frontally to the camera, bisect the screen, their perspectival foreshortening flattening the space even further. [A] ball runs unsteadily along the rails from the rear wall towards the camera, an unoriginated movement, which halts with a close-up of the object’s surface: not wood, it could be concrete, or, perhaps, polystyrene. This ‘to-and-fro’ action is repeated several times. CUT. The cylinder rolls across the screen only this time its space is occupied by a revolving clothed male figure, arms and legs tensioned against the interior surface like spokes of a wheel. Briefly we recognize the figure as Morris. CUT. A thick hemp rope stretches across the screen, suspended above the ground. Panning across the rope, the camera encounters a naked foot balancing on the rope exerting a gentle pressure, up…down…up…down…¹

Camera pulls out to reveal an extensive installation, which looks rather like an obstacle course and is being clambered over by children and adults alike. The fashions are outmoded, though – this is obviously archival footage from the 1970s.

NARRATOR (voiceover)
In 1971, for his retrospective at the Tate Gallery, Robert Morris fabricated a large installation that the audience could clamber over in an infamous response to the idea of the ‘open work’. The open work, as described by Umberto Eco, was kinetic, shattering the traditional fixity of optical reception. The simple fact of its movement was radical enough back then it seems.

ROBERT MORRIS walks to edge of gallery and talks to camera in his famously self-interrogational style.

ROBERT MORRIS
Could we say you always had a suspicion of the image? After all, greyness seems to predominate? No optical celebration of lush surfaces are to be found in your oeuvre. Your strategies had more to do with locating conditions that generated objects and divided spaces. Still, we are left with images when all is said and done. No, you are left with photographs and words when all is said and done. Still, there seems to have been in the past a certain resistance to the ‘image’, as if this offered you a certain purchase, a certain foothold (pardon the image here) from which to work. And how does such a stance feel today? Well, it is like standing in a station platform watching the express go by.²

NARRATOR (voiceover)
Critic Michael Shepherd found this lack of emphasis on the image most disconcerting, as if its displacement were a regressive barbaric act.

CUT TO:

CLOSE-UP OF BEARDED MAN IN SUIT

MICHAEL SHEPHERD
The trouble with participation, it seems, is that apart from making us forget what art’s all about, and inducing the very restlessness of mind which it’s suppose to ease, it makes people behave like wild beasts…³

CUT TO:

EXT. STREET SCENE — DAYTIME

Back at the Granville Cube, youths sit on its armature, people paste posters on to its walls and passers-by stop to chat.

An installation image of Robert Morris’s 1971 exhibition Bodyspacemotionthings.

Top left: public works, Granville Cube, South Kilburn, London, UK, Nov 2005 – ongoing.

Middle left: public works, Granville Cube – Launch of the Friends of the Cube Group, April 2008.

Bottom left: public works, Granville Cube Swap Shop, Feb 2006.

NARRATOR (off camera)
So here we are, back at the Granville Cube. I have to say that rather than behaving like wild beasts, the Cube seems to have a very different effect on the locals. Chris, you work on the council regeneration scheme. Can you tell me about your involvement in the Granville Cube and the problems and benefits it presents?

CHRIS
Sure. My predecessor commissioned the cube as part of a regeneration programme and the question was how to involve the local residents, how to get them to claim ownership of their community. The Cube is literally a skeleton. There were concerns from local business owners that it would encourage anti-social behaviour, but it hasn’t, it’s been adopted by everybody. You have local dance groups, people putting on celebrations, workshops. It’s a free-spirited piece of public furniture. It’s a bench that could be deemed to be dangerous – there are corners on there. The borough is taking a bit of a risk in that hasn’t been sanitised or made very, very safe, given soft edges and so on.

CUT TO:

EXT. STREET SCENE — DAYTIME

In a suburban play area some children are playing a game that involves throwing a knife into a cordoned off square of soil, which they then take as a corner marker and section off a square ‘territory’, which they then occupy.

NARRATOR (voiceover)
As we saw earlier, participatory practice, socially engaged or open artworks, call it what you will, are not new, and neither are the attendant health and safety issues. While we talk about the new North American-style litigious culture in Europe, even back in 1971 Robert Morris’s installation was closed after five days because of splinters. Artists know only too well the frustrations of health and safety, but they also know some cunning ways to get around it. This is a traditional Dutch street game that represents capturing land and marking territory. The artist Jeanne van Heeswijk proposed a re-presentation of the game in a gallery context but, when it came to the issue of the knife, this was vetoed on health and safety grounds. Van Heeswijk got around the problem by commissioning another artist to make a knife so that it was a ‘collaborative sculpture’ and therefore bypassed the usual evaluative procedures.

CUT TO:

INT. LECTURE THEATRE

A man takes the stage and sits behind a desk, preparing to deliver a paper.

NARRATOR (voiceover)
This incident is a rather cynical example of the perceived status of ‘collaboration’ as a cultural process. It implies cross-fertilisation between disciplines, which in turn has implications for audiences, which opens doors and purses alike. Artist and critic Dave Beech has been carefully reappraising words like ‘collaborator’ and ‘participant’, dissecting them for their ethical implications.

Sound fades up so that we can hear the lecture.

DAVE BEECH
In contemporary art, though, the difference between interactivity, participation, collaboration and co-operation, not to mention collectivity, is measured in terms of a sliding scale of the degree to which the work’s public is active within the work, including, crucially, how early or late that activity is […]

It is the shortfall between participation and collaboration that leads to perennial questions about the degree of choice, control and agency of the participant. Is participation always voluntary? Are all participants equal and are they equal with the artist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction
• Keynote Essay: Don’t Look Now! Art after the Viewer and beyond Participation
• Part I: Participation: Open or Closed
• Part II: Sonic Openness
• Part III: The Emancipation of the Spectator: The Viewer Completes the Circuit
• Part IV: The Art Object Reaches Out: Dissolves, Embraces
• Contributors’ Biographies
• Index
• Credits