BOOK REVIEW: CHRISTINE KORTE, York University
CLAIRE BISHOP Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 382 pages In her 2004 October essay “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” Claire Bishop inaugurated a now infamous debate about 1990s art in which she takes apart French curator Nicholas Bourriaud’s claim that relational art is an inherently emancipatory form—one that has replaced the grand modernist teleology of political utopias with humbler “microtopian” encounters. Bishop’s charge is that rather than changing the stakes for art, these “feel good” relational practices tend to be lauded by curators and critics on the basis of their social-ameliorative aims. With Artificial Hells, the art historian broadens her focus to the field of participatory art, which includes post-studio practices that use human beings as their primary material and artworks that seek to activate or engage the public.
Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship arrests the prospective reader with its title (taken from André Breton’s postmortem for a “failed” Dadaist excursion) and cover image of a mounted policeman directing a crowd of gallery spectators (a still of Tania Bruguera’s Tatlin’s Whisper #5).1 This image recalls the difficult experience of witnessing as well as assessing the everyday situations, happenings, events, and projects that constitute the field of participatory art. Bishop suggests that part of the challenge of evaluating these artworks is its practitioners tend to value what is invisible to the spectator or nonparticipant, whether a process, group dynamic, or shift in consciousness. For her, this does not excuse the artist from attending to the aesthetic component of the work or highlighting the inherent social contradiction of political art that inhabits the art system. Bishop’s main contention is that participatory art currently exists in a vacuum where it is neither capable of achieving concrete social change nor is it amenable to evaluation as art. According to Bishop, if critics were to refrain from using concepts particular to sociological discourses and stick with an art historical framework, these works would be less likely to be co-opted by neoliberal agendas. In this way, Bishop’s argument reinvigorates the appeal for art’s autonomy. In the book’s first chapter, Bishop introduces the tensions that have plagued the participatory form from the historical avant-garde to the present: “quality and equality, singular and collective authorship, and the ongoing struggle to find artistic equivalents for political positions” (3). Bishop’s analysis focuses on three key dates: 1917, 1968, and post-1989. At these moments, the stakes around a utopian vision for society become heightened, which manifests in the vigorous appearance of participatory practices. In the following chapters, Bishop provides case studies spanning more than a century of participatory art, including: early twentieth century experiments by the Futurists, Bolsheviks, and
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