Conclusion: between image, act, body and language

I have argued throughout this study that participatory art practices need to be understood in conjunction with the anxieties and contradictions that accompany them. Whether or not this is a formally constitutive characteristic worthy of naming as a genre is, in my view, less important than finding ways to account for and be responsive to the questions it poses. This is the place that this study departed from, yet oddly, it also the place it finds itself arriving at. For if this study has inquired into some of the conditions for and articulations of participation in the arts, it has also turned out to be an investigation of the ways in which participation is already circumscribed by the questions we ask of it, such as the social impact of participatory art, or its specific aesthetic features. The frictions in this endeavour will have become apparent to the perceptive reader: on the one hand I attempt to identify commonalities and systematic coherences in a field named as participatory art, and on the other hand I seek to analyse it in terms of its deviations from, and incommensurability with, a systematic narrative, in the emphasis of unruly, subtle, non-formalizable modes of participation. I treat participatory art as an inherited category, looking at its diverse, specific operations, or disciplinary routes and historical legacies. At the same time, I try to alter the terms of received wisdom by extrapolating principles and observations from the confines of one disciplinary arena into another. I search for ways in which affiliation to a given type of participatory practice might be described, only to find that formal coherences are perforated by aspects that exceed those same terms of affiliation. The analysis of participatory art and the conceptualization of participation in and through art thereby become intertwined in complex ways....

Delicate gestures of participation

Chapter V examines an installation-based project titled Nomad City Passage (2005-2009) by the German scenographic and visual artists Rebekka Reich and Oliver Gather, in which visitors are invited to spend a night in a tent in an unconventional urban site, such as the top floor of a high-rise building or inside a shopping mall. The analysis focuses on how common-sense assumptions around audience participation in theatre and performance theory are called into question by the artwork’s foregrounding of sleep as a mode of participation. The delicacy of this is evidenced in the ambivalence of sleep in a scenically prepared setting, oscillating between being an intense, active, dynamic experience on the one side, and a non-performance, an absence of activity on the other. The chapter suggests that audience participation in the artwork and in the artwork’s participation in urban spaces differ in significant ways from sociological and political concepts of participation. Where social theory conceives of civic participation in terms of being a part of a social unit, the aesthetics of Nomad City Passage emphasizes participation in a counterintuitive way: it becomes possible to participate precisely because of not being a part of some shared community ideal.

Vicarious gestures of participation

Chapter IV follows two conceptually inspired performance projects by the Amsterdam-based Lebanese artist Lina Issa, Where We Are Not (2009) and If I Could Take Your Place? (2010 – ongoing). These works explore the question of what it means to take someone else’s place, to participate in someone’s life by doing something on their behalf, in the mode of ‘as if’. By analysing how this vicarious participation unfolds, the chapter foregrounds the spectatorial parameters of participation. The theorization of participation calls for an interweaving of the aesthetic with the social or political. Issa’s playful performances of standing in for others point to larger questions of what it means to participate in collective processes of imagining selfhood. The chapter suggests that the solidarity in the gesture of vicarious participation lies not so much in recognizing the so-called ‘other’ or in celebrating differences, but rather in being willing to dispossess oneself of the fixity of one’s ideas of the self, a potentially transformative gesture.

On the inconvenient means and ends of participation

Chapter II addresses the relationship between participatory art and the concept of ‘impact’. It investigates the assumptions around impact, as well as the methodological challenges of thinking the impact of a work of art. Using the 2012 Spanish language production Afuera: lesbianas en escena (Outside: Lesbians on Stage) by the theatre collective Teatro Siluetas from Guatemala and El Salvador as a point of departure, the chapter reflects on the assessment of impact in relation to the question of participation. It critically engages with the field of evidence-led impact studies in the arts. It situates the debate on the usefulness or non-utility of participatory art in relation to social science scholarship pertaining to the ascendancy of ‘participation’ in the context of international development. It suggests that it is worthwhile extending the kinds of activities considered as relevant to a participatory aesthetic, to thus not only analyse performances as distinct works, but to place them in a longer-term aesthetic continuum with workshops, rehearsals, after-talks, meetings with the artists, and other para-theatrical events. The chapter grapples with the question of how to discuss impact in relation to participatory art without it being mortgaged into a matter of quantifiable impact alone.

Gestures of institutional critique

Chapter I deals with the question of institutional critique in relation to participatory art. What is the place of institutional critique in relation to participatory performance? The chapter reflects on the conundrums of institutional critique, exploring the formation of participatory art forms as emergent from the critique of mainstream art institutions. It compares a number of approaches to institutional critique: the institutional affiliations of a community-based theatre project from Darfur, Sudan, a flash mob performance by an Israeli activist group protesting a Cape Town Opera production in Tel Aviv Opera House, a breaching experiment by visual artist Pilvi Takala, of trying to enter Disneyland dressed as Snow White, amongst others. Sometimes the gesture of critique consists in building counter-institutions, and sometimes in fleeing them. Institutional critique, understood as the explicit use of an artistic practice to interrogate, oppose or break out of art institutional frameworks has very asymmetrical trajectories across the world and across domains. The chapter argues that the changing institutional conditions of participation expose not just the norms of a certain institution, but also its specific traditions of institutional critique.

Introduction

The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader’ and not just a simple orator. (Gramsci, 1996...

Unsolicited gestures of participation

Chapter III examines one workshop setting using the methodological framework of the Theatre of the Oppressed in the context of a political party-led women’s empowerment programme in rural South India, launched in 2013. The analysis focuses on identifying instances and moments of unsolicited participation in a theatrical format explicitly defined as participatory. I question the status of participatory art in the developmental context as forging cohesion and understanding amongst participants and instead turn to its ambiguities. The analysis of participation seeks to link the macro-dimension of participation in social development with the micro-dimension of community theatre practice. Of particular interest is how participation occurs by way of a nuanced range of reactions, with functions ranging from the disruptive to the ameliorative. The case study calls for methodological attention to ancillary activities that take place at the margins of the theatre event. The chapter argues for paying attention to the gestures of participation that may not find their way into discursive iteration, because the gestures may arise out of the very impossibility of such an iteration in language or in formal conventions.