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Interpreting participatory art
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Content
INTERPRETING PARTICIPATORY ART
by
Alice Schock
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC, ROSKI SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF PUBLIC ART STUDIES
August 2008
Copyright 2008 Alice Schock
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
I want to give my particular thanks to my advisers, Janet Owen Driggs and Ruth
Wallach, who gave me incredibly strong support and thoughtful advice throughout
this somewhat elongated process. Also, thanks to my family and friends, especially
my sister, Katie Schock, who always listened and cheered me up. The entire Public
Art Studies program was a wonderful supportive resource, in particular the PAS
Faculty, and the 2008 PAS student cohort, made up of twelve amazing women. I
am also indebted to Joshua Decter, Caryl Levy, Zipporah Lax Yamamoto, Sarah
Cifarelli, Dawn Finley, Karin Sponholz, Olga Ogurtsova, and Jo Ortel.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements ii
Abstract iv
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Recent Trends in Art Practice 7
Participation and Interaction 8
In the Public Realm 12
Shared Authorship 14
Chapter 2: Participatory and Public Projects 18
Paul Sermon, Telematic Dreaming 18
Judy Baca, Guadalupe Mural Project 20
Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) 22
Chapter 3: Content and Form 25
Chapter 4: Meaning 28
Conclusion 33
Bibliography 36
iv
ABSTRACT:
In the 20th
and 21st Centuries, art trends which muddy the spaces between artists,
participants, and audience members have become increasingly present. Exploring
notions of authorship, human interrelations, and impact within the public realm,
these participatory works alter previous conceptions of how art can be experienced.
Artworks which ask or demand participation imply, even at their minimum, that the
participants are needed for the work of art. How should documentation of these
works treat their participants? This thesis argues that art historians and writers who
wish to document and discuss participatory works, especially their impacts, should
deeply explore the effects the specific participants have on the art, as well as the
impacts the artworks have on their individual participants.
1
INTRODUCTION
The republicans were caught in a dilemma: how to commemorate
Washington without reproaching the people. Some of them
searched for answers, and by far the most extraordinary idea came
from John Nicholas of Virginia, who called for nothing more than “a
plain tablet, on which every man could write what his heart dictated.
This, and this only, [is] the basis of [Washington’s] fame.”…In this
monument the leader retains his legitimacy only by dissolving
himself into the all-embracing identity of the citizenry; once
merged, the icon and the people together testify to the virtue of their
republic. – Kirk Savage, “The Self-made Monument: George
Washington and the Fight to Erect a National Memorial.”
1
In 1800, a year after George Washington’s death, the federal government
began discussing how the United States should officially honor its first president.
The above idea, offered to Congress by John Nicolas of Virginia, was one of the
more unique suggestions. Even now, over 200 years later, when the popular
conception of a monument or memorial remains a solid object created in tribute,
Nicolas’ idea seems radical.
If Nicolas’ idea had been realized, it would have been the first time the
content and meaning of a U.S. monument were determined by a vast number of
public citizens. The monument would not have been the product of a single artist
or government body, but would have been the collaborative work of an ever
increasing group of individuals. The interpretation of George Washington’s legacy
would have been in the grasp of the “citizenry.” Instead of a fixed edifice,
constructed by a large entity such as the U.S. government, Nicolas’ monument
would have produced an ever changing record of individual self-expression. In
2
other words, Nicolas’ concept was revolutionary. Its revolutionary nature lies in
these two aspects – the sharing of authorship with numberless citizens and the flux
and instability that would have resulted from such sharing.
In his article about the history of the existing Washington Monument
(quoted above), Kirk Savage describes how Nicolas’ concept would have honored
both Washington and the public by denying that there is “any legitimate distance
between the hero and the common man.”
2
While such a monument would not
deny the distance completely – it would, after all, have been dedicated to discussing
one man’s importance – it would have narrowed the gap and left Washington’s
meaning in history to be decided continuously by the present public.
Nicolas’ monument would have acknowledged that history is determined by
individuals who form multiple collective ideas – narratives that are not (ironically)
carved in stone, but written on paper. It would have given the individuals who
comprise the public as much significance as Washington or the U.S. government.
And, as time passed and events occurred, the monument itself would have become
a record of the thoughts and opinions, responses and addendums, of a large swath
of the public. Furthermore, this would not mean “the public” as a monolithic body,
but “the public” as thousands and thousands of individuals, each with a different
point of view.
A concept such as this, which would have initiated response and
participation, shared authorship, and operated within the public realm, does not
seem like a 200 year old idea but a contemporary one. For in recent decades artists
3
have increasingly included others in both creating and determining the form and
content of their artworks. This means that artists are not only increasingly placing
their works in more public locations, outside of studios and galleries, but also that
they are more and more incorporating public participation into the artwork itself.
This trend toward participation, which has roots over half a century ago,
leads to a lessening of authority and power for a single artist, and stakes a claim for
the authority of shared voice. Rather than locating the power of an artwork in the
encounter between audience and object, the participatory trend locates power at the
encounter between artist and participant, individual to individual. It locates the
power of art in expression – not strictly the expression of one artist, but of many
persons.
Such inclusive works throw into question many traditional ideas of art,
authorship, and expression and make the meaning, content, and importance of an
artwork difficult to determine. In Nicolas’ monument for example, not only would
George Washington’s legacy have been in a state of constant flux, but by
challenging the traditional distinction between artist and audience member, so
would the nature of the artist and the author. Furthermore, in a work composed of
numerous equal parts, each created by a different author, the following questions
arise: where should a viewer look for the meaning and significance of the work;
and how do individual and personal experiences relate to a public and participatory
work?
4
In addition to challenging traditional ideas concerning authorship and
meaning, participatory works also mount a challenge to traditional definitions of
“documentation.” Had John Nicolas’ idea been actualized for instance, then the
documentation of the monument’s origins – such as its approval by Congress or the
building of its edifice – would have been less important than documentation of the
public’s writings and responses. Works that center themselves on encounter, on
transformation, and on communal (and yet individual) authorship, cannot be
adequately documented without incorporating these very characteristics of
individual experience.
Participatory art questions the traditional artist-focused concept of
artmaking by using the actions and responses, individuality and creativity of the
individuals who were previously only part of the audience. This change in focus
throws static and artist-determined meaning away. To understand these works the
participants must be more than just another medium or format. They must be
documented as individuals and their personal experiences, subjective point of view,
and changes and exchanges over time should be included in any discussion of the
work itself.
The participants, their experiences, and their separate voices should be
documented concurrently alongside the documentation of the works that use them.
With the participatory trend in art, there must also be a trend in art documentation
to do the same.
5
Such ongoing documentation itself raises numerous questions. For example,
how can a participant’s experiences and responses be understood more fully? How
can the significance of an encounter for a participant be interpreted? If works are
designed to directly affect a broad array of individuals, how should their impact be
investigated? How can the documentation of these works negotiate the
contributions that individuals make to them? How important is it to understand
someone’s personal experience in order to understand an artwork?
John Nicolas’ Washington monument was designed not merely to honor
Washington, but to pose a question about what Washington means (in the ever
changing present) to the United States public. That question is unending and
infinite – the monument simultaneously records the numberless responses and
becomes them. The questions it raises about individual and shared voice are also as
numerous.
What is hard to refute is that art which incorporates participation benefits
from individuals, and consequently, in the documentation of these works personal
and subjective experiences should be included. Where the importance lies must be
explored – in which specific experiences, memories, and encounters. By
acknowledging the mutual effects that participants and participatory artworks have
on each other, and by exploring the various qualities of these impacts, it might be
possible to create documents that mirror these new works in their attempts to
broaden the definition of art and artist.
6
The space between participatory art works and their participants is difficult
to chart. If a participatory art is composed not solely of objects, but of individuals,
then the experiences and thoughts of its participants should be explored with all of
their subjective, personal, and transformative messiness.
1
Kirk Savage, “The Self-made Monument: George Washington and the Fight to Erect a National
Memorial,” in Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy (Washington D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), 11-12.
2
Savage, 12.
7
CHAPTER 1: RECENT TRENDS IN ART PRACTICE
These three concerns – activation; authorship; community – are the
most frequently cited motivations for almost all artistic attempts to
encourage participation in art since the 1960s. – Claire Bishop
1
The increasing trend of interacting with the public and creating artworks
based around participation has recently been given many terms. Grant Kester in his
work, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art, outlines
the sources of major terms as such: “new genre” public art from the artist and critic
Suzanne Lacy; “Littoral art” from artists and organizers Ian Hunter and Celia
Larner; “relational aesthetics” from French critic Nicolas Bourriaud;
“conversational art” from the post-colonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha; and
“dialogue-based art” from public art administrator and writer Tom Finkelpearl.
Kester’s own preferred term is “dialogical art” because he views these works as “a
kind of conversation – a locus of differing meanings, interpretations, and points of
view.”
2
Each of these terms refers to a slightly different set of situations and
practices, but they are all describing a trend of new models that work beyond the
parameters of the “object” and invite public experience, action, relationship,
exchange, encounter, and communication. These terms describe three major trends
in art practice, with the works falling into one, two, or three of them: participation
and interaction, shared authorship, and placement in the public realm.
8
PARTICIPATION AND INTERACTION
In 1998, when Nicolas Bourriaud published Esthétique Relationnelle (later
translated into English as Relational Aesthetics), he wrote that a new model of art
began to appear in the 1990s. He described it as a model that reduced emphasis on
the art object and shifted art’s line of communication from an artist-to-viewer
hierarchy towards more of a two-way communication between artist and audience.
Bourriaud stated that:
What is collapsing before our very eyes is nothing other than this
falsely aristocratic conception of the arrangement of works of art,
associated with the feeling of territorial acquisition. In other words,
it is no longer possible to regard the contemporary work as a space
to be walked through (the ‘owner’s tour’ is akin to the collector’s).
It is henceforth presented as a period of time to be lived through,
like an opening to unlimited discussion.
3
With such statements, Bourriaud suggests that relational art somehow
produces artworks that belong more to the participants and audience members than
either to the artists or the eventual owners of the project. The “owner’s tour”
though, becomes hazy, because often participants are still invited to act in whatever
the artist has planned, in a space that the artist usually knows much better than the
audience does. However, it is true that by participating or performing an action, by
“living through” a work, the work both consists of and initiates many separate
experiences, including experiences that the artist could not predict or know of.
The concept of less proprietary art objects naturally has its antecedents.
Although the Dada movement in Europe during World War I incorporated
9
performance and audience reaction, Claire Bishop, in her edited volume,
Participation, draws a through-line from movements of the 1950s and 60s to the
works of the 90s and beyond, “although there are important examples of social
participation in the historic avant-garde, it is not until the eve of the sixties that a
coherent and well-theorized body of work emerges: Situationism in France,
Happenings in the United States, and Neo-Concretism in Brazil.”
4
Although each
of these movements had different sets of goals and practices, they all stepped
beyond the art object and into the realms of space, movement, and instigation. The
object became less important as direct communication and interaction between
artist and viewer became more so.
Bishop then sketches her timeline from those movements of the 60s to the
participatory art of today, tracking it through Joseph Beuys’ social sculpture
Bureau for Direct Democracy (1972) for which Beuys discussed politics with
anyone who wanted to speak with him, Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons (1983) for
which Piper taught white audiences about funk and how to dance to it, and Martha
Rosler’s ongoing garage sales which began in 1973. The common factor among
these works is their focus on “collaboration, and the collective dimension of social
experience,” and they collapse “the distinction between performer and audience,
professional and amateur, production and reception.”
5
They are all putting more of
a focus on what is outside of the artist, on the audience members who react and
interact with the artist and on the participants who help form the artists’ works.
10
Curator and writer Claire Doherty, using a definition created by Grant
Kester, also defines these works’ commonalities as an engagement with their
audiences which is dialogical in nature and which invites their participants to
respond directly to the artist within the frame of the artwork.
6
In these participatory
works, although engagement is usually controlled and directed by the artist, there is
still an element of the unknown, just as there are certain predictabilities and social
rules involved in having a conversation, but it can ebb and flow in surprising
patterns. It is impossible to predict what will happen exactly before a participatory
artwork is “complete.” The audience fills in the final stages of the artwork’s
production.
Bourriaud also states that relational (participatory or dialogical) works want
to use “various communication processes, in their tangible dimensions as tools
serving to link individuals and human groups together.”
7
This aspect goes beyond
merely exploring the sphere of human interactions, but also implies that there is a
need that these artists feel a need to both connect to their audiences and to connect
their audiences together. Bourriaud believes that the artists’ need for contact arises
out of time spent in the vast virtual space on the internet, as well as the
overwhelming individualistic and privatized society in which we now live.
8
Participants in relational works then become a desired touch of reality, desired
because they are physically present and unpredictable in their actions, thoughts, and
movements within a shared space.
11
Bourriaud’s other proposition is that this need for more human touch is born
out of the current “generalization of supplier-customer relations to all levels of
human existence, from work to living space and taking in all the tacit contracts that
determine our private life.” He believes that this generalization is the “enemy” for
most participatory artists as they seek specificity and face-to-face contact. When
Rirkrit Tiravanija cooks a meal for gallery goers for example, Bourriaud asserts
that he is creating a new paradigm, different from the usual dynamics of an
audience being a generalized mass of viewers to the artist. He shares a unique
experience with a limited number of individuals. Bourriaud quotes Karl Marx,
stating that “reality is none other than the result of what we do together.’ The
relational aesthetic integrates this reality.” It is a new reality consisting of acts of
service, by both the artist and the participants. It is a reality where the participants
are as necessary to the work as the artist, and in which the artist can become a
participant himself.
9
In 1968, Brazilian neo-concretist Lygia Clark wrote that, “the object for me
has lost its significance, and if I still use it, it is so that it becomes a mediator for
participation.”
10
She does not say that objects are useless, only that they are
insignificant if unconnected to human interaction. The trend in participatory art
over the last 50 years, does not necessarily reject previous object-based art, but
claims that today more significant and meaningful work can be done working in the
intangible sphere of direct human relations. For some artists this is a necessary
reaction to non-physical virtual space, for others it is a rejection of the
12
commodification of human relations. These works place worth on individual
human beings and interpersonal interaction. The space between one individual and
another becomes more valuable than material creations.
IN THE PUBLIC REALM
Beyond inviting art audiences to contribute to a work of art, some artists in
recent decades have also sought for their works to participate in the broader social
and public realm. Claire Doherty writes about these trends of site-specificity,
temporary public installations, community and art in the public realm, and political
and social activism as arising out of artists’ frustrations with the limits of working
in a studio.
11
Much like Bourriaud’s belief that some artists are responding to the
alienation of technology, Doherty locates a trend towards participatory and site-
specific art as arising from the alienation that artists experience in their studios
which are “in isolation from the real world.”
12
The political movements of the sixties connected art and politics, art and
society, and many artists never retreated from this connection. The “real world”
became a site for works of art and a material for them.
Grant Kester also sees the emergence of artists from their studios in the
1960s and 70s as a way of eliminating constraint, but he believes that it is partially
located in the need to enlarge their works’ size and impact, “At a time when scale
and the use of natural materials and processes were central concerns in sculpture,
13
the comparatively small physical space of the gallery seemed unduly
constraining.”
13
Kester and Doherty’s belief that the need to go outside of the
studio lies in ambition is also echoed by Bourriaud, but in his case, he feels that it is
the supreme ambition of changing the world by creating “ways of living and
models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist.”
14
Both are attempting to alter the “real world” and the individuals who live in it,
whether through transforming the landscape, or by focusing attention on one
person’s small action.
Sometimes entry into the public realm lies in the smaller artistic aspiration
to make things better for a brief time for a specific community, whether this is
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s Tele-Vecindario project, which asked Chicago youth to
describe their neighborhood on video, and then displayed these videos outdoors in
local front yards and vacant lots to create a sense of their particular community
15
or
Jens Haaning’s Turkish Jokes project which used a loudspeaker to transmit jokes in
Turkish in a Turkish immigrant community in Denmark. This project lasted
briefly, but tried to create a small amount of levity in a community of exiles.
16
Both projects looked to what the particular neighborhoods concerned might want or
appreciate. Although Turkish Jokes is transmitted to an audience, it needs that
specific audience to be understood. It is dependent on a specific amount of
individuals who form that community to listen.
Peter Bürger, a German professor and social art theorist, believes that artists
who enter into the public realm and the realm of the everyday are not rejecting
14
studio and gallery art, but are rejecting art which is uninterested in the actual way
individuals live now and the way art acts within society. Art that enters into the
public realm is “practical” and not strictly conceptual or theoretical because it looks
at actual problems and situations currently existing in our society.
17
It is the
emphasis on actual lived experience that seems to connect all artists who enter into
the public realm. Many of these artists feel a need to alter actual individual lived
experience, whether only slightly by changing someone’s day as they walk through
a city square and hear a joke, or more profoundly as when Gran Fury (a united
coalition of artists) used art to subvert the popular conceptions of homosexuality
and AIDS.
18
SHARED AUTHORSHIP
A third trend in art practice that broadens the amount of interaction between
artist and individuals, is the notion of shared authorship between artists and
participants. Instead of an autonomous art object created by an individual and
imbued by him with authority, artists began attempting to lessen their authority
through muddying where and with whom the creation process begins and ends.
Grant Kester notes that this type of creation exists in the “messy space between the
viewer and the work of art.”
19
These works are not isolated objects on pedestals,
but ones that are created through the actions of multiple individuals.
15
Although many works with shared authorship are participatory,
participatory works do not necessarily share artistic credit. In 1962 semiotician
Umberto Eco, writing about new types of participatory art, still maintained that
these works were the product of one person’s vision. He stated that although the
work might outline possibilities for an outside performer, “The author is the one
who proposed a number of possibilities which had already been rationally
organized, oriented and endowed with specifications for proper development.” The
author and artist still held the control over the finished product.
20
In this model, the
solitary artist is still more important than the participant if the work is to be
analyzed or interpreted.
Claire Bishop delineates two kinds of participatory artwork: “These two
approaches continue to be seen throughout the multiple instances of participatory
art that develop in their wake: an authored tradition that seeks to provoke
participants, and a de-authored lineage that aims to embrace collective creativity;
one is disruptive and interventionist, the other constructive and ameliorative.”
21
Although exactly linking authored art to disruptiveness and de-authored art to
amelioration may be simplistic, de-authored art does imply a willingness to
empower an audience. Grant Kester suggests that artists like Iñigo Manglano-
Ovalle let others contribute content because they are primarily interested in
listening.
Their sense of artistic identity is sufficiently coherent to speak as
well as listen, but it remains contingent upon the insights to be
derived from their interaction with others and with otherness. They
define themselves as artists through their ability to catalyze
16
understanding, to mediate exchange, and to sustain an ongoing
process of empathetic identification and critical analysis.
22
The phrase “ongoing process” is important, because to share authorship, an
artist cannot merely take content from someone and end it there. Often with
community created public works such as the Tele-Vecindario project, the work
branches out beyond the initial content gathering and continues. Tele-Vecindario,
which was exhibited in 1993, evolved into an organization called Street Level
Youth Media which is still offering media arts workshops and after school
programs to Chicago youth. Kester calls this a redefinition of the relationship
between viewer and artwork, “not simply as an instantaneous, prediscursive flash
of insight, but as a decentering, a movement outside self (and self-interest) through
dialogue extended over time.”
23
Unlike Claire Bishop’s dichotomy between an
authored tradition that is disruptive and a de-authored tradition that is ameliorative,
Kester notes that redefining authorship can also be disruptive as it shifts power
among individuals.
A more radical idea than this is the concept that it is not the artist, or the
critics, who create a work or determine its meaning, but any individual who
interprets it. Originating out of the theorist Roland Barthes’ notion of the death of
the author, which removes the limits of a text and makes its meaning infinite with
possibilities, artworks can allow not just for shared participation, but also shared
reception. This is an ongoing and unending process which allows viewers and
readers to speak and respond to each other both within the artwork and outside of it
to interpret its meaning. Claire Bishop notes that “the politics of participation
17
might best lie, not in anti-spectacular stagings of community or in the claim that
mere physical activity would correspond to emancipation, but in putting to work
the idea that we are all equally capable of inventing our own translations.”
24
In this
sense there are no longer audiences, artists, or participants, but an infinite number
of authors.
1
Claire Bishop, Participation: Documents for Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
2006), 12.
2
Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2004), 10.
3
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (France: Les presses du réel, 2002), 15.
4
Bishop, 15.
5
Bishop, 10.
6
Claire Doherty, Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation (London: Black Dog Publishing,
2004), 12.
7
Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 43.
8
Nicolas Bourriaud “Berlin Letter about Relational Aesthetics,” in Contemporary Art: From Studio
to Situation (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2004), 44.
9
Nicolas Bourriaud “Berlin Letter about Relational Aesthetics,” 45-46, 48.
10
Lygia Clark “Letters,” in Participation: Documents for Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 2006), 110.
11
Doherty, 9.
12
Doherty, 9.
13
Kester, 124.
14
Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 13.
15
Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York:
The New Press, 1997), 10.
16
Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 17.
17
Peter Bürger “The Negation of the Autonomy of Art by the Avant-garde,” in Participation:
Documents for Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 48.
18
Richard Meyer “This is to Enrage You: Gran Fury and the Graphics of AIDS Activism” in But is
it Art?: The Spirit of Art as Activism (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1995), 56.
19
Kester, 48.
20
Umberto Eco “The Poetics of the Open Work,” in Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 36.
21
Bishop, 11.
22
Kester, 118.
23
Kester, 84-85.
24
Bishop, 16.
18
CHAPTER 2: PARTICIPATORY AND PUBLIC PROJECTS
What does it mean for a work of art to rely on participants? How can these
works and the experiences of their participants be understood? The following three
projects and artists illustrate some of the trends described above. Each one
includes participation as an integral part of the work and incorporates some sort of
documentation of the participant’s experiences. They are: Paul Sermon’s Telematic
Dreaming, Judy Baca’s Guadalupe Mural Project, and performances by the Los
Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) that were and are dependent on the
participants involved.
PAUL SERMON, TELEMATIC DREAMING
Artist Paul Sermon has created many works using telecommunications
technology. Telematic Dreaming, originally performed in Finland in 1992, like
several of Sermon’s other pieces linked two remote sites through phone lines and
cameras. In the case of Telematic Dreaming, the sites were two beds. At one site,
a participant lay on a bed and was filmed while another participant performed a
similar action in a separate location, making it appear as if they were in bed
together. Each could see the film of the other in real time, and their actions could
affect what the other person saw and felt.
1
19
Writer Edward A. Shanken summed up participant’s reaction to Sermon’s
telematic works as “difficult to grasp without experiencing it directly. One
participant reported feeling rejected by a person at a remote location who sat next
to him on the sofa, but would not respond and soon left.”
2
Sermon himself
described these works as
Extremely intense, and audiences are sometimes reluctant to take up
the role of the performer. This is usually because they are initially
concerned about performing in front of an audience. However, once
the viewer takes on the role of the performer they lose contact with
the audience and discover that the actual performance is taking place
within the telematic space, and not in the bed or sofa…Bringing your
self back to your actual body is as hard as getting your self onto the
bed or sofa in the first place.”
3
In this work, Sermon has created a highly technical and elaborately
designed situation for the participant to experience. The non-participants in the
audience cannot fully “grasp” it. Although the participants are actors who perform
the piece according to Sermon’s directions, they also appear to be his primary
reason for the piece. They are there to be the ones who truly have a transformative
experience, who experience leaving their body, and who then experience a return to
it. Their responses, even when Sermon records them, are acknowledged by Sermon
to be more of an interior event than an exterior one. The artwork’s purpose is
nebulous to the outside viewer.
If the piece is only fully understood by the performers of it, what happens
when it is not being performed? Sermon’s emphasis on the transformative
experience of the work might suggest that Telematic Dreaming, when not being
performed, resides in the performers’ remembrance of their transformations. In
20
that case, the performers carry an element of the artwork with them. The Telematic
projects are not merely the technological devices, but the experiences and
remembrances that the participants have.
JUDY BACA, GUADALUPE MURAL PROJECT
Judy Baca’s Guadalupe Mural Project was created in Guadalupe, California
from 1988 to 1990. Baca, a Los Angeles artist, traveled to and lived in Guadalupe
(a town of about 5,000 people) for months before she painted her murals for a
central town park. She spoke with hundreds of locals in every economic and racial
group, ate in local restaurants, and based her headquarters in Guadalupe’s
downtown. Local residents assisted her in her project by gathering historical
information and describing their own impressions, stories, and opinions.
Baca explored many aspects of the town’s history and contemporary
existence in the late 1980s – its industries, citizens, and situation within the wealthy
Santa Barbara County. The panels of Baca’s mural include visual elements that
relate to Guadalupe’s history and residents. This ranges from local legends to real
life tragedies such as the deportation and internment of Japanese-Americans in the
1940s.
Baca formulated her mural and participation process while working in Los
Angeles in the 1970s and 80s, particularly while working on the Great Wall of Los
Angeles, a mural project that attempted to tell the entire history of Los Angeles,
21
with special emphasis on its history of oppression. For the Great Wall, Baca
worked with high school students of many different ethnicities and economic
classes. Erika Doss in her book, Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs, described Baca’s
process while working on the Great Wall as becoming part of the work itself:
The process of creating the Great Wall [is] instrumental to that
consciousness-raising. Throughout the project Baca and the crews
interacted with the community: giving numerous talks, conducting
open forums on the mural, posting the designs in public places.
4
Judy Baca has stated that she attempts to encourage the people she works
with to “take possession of their community” as they work with her to complete a
mural.
5
This is a process that Baca believes happened during the Great Wall and
Guadalupe Mural projects. After the Guadalupe Mural’s completion, the town’s
response was overwhelmingly positive and its reputation improved within
California.
6
Baca’s mural process has been described as a method that creates a
Habermasian public sphere – one in which the citizenry is “engaged in a longtime,
ongoing, and unfinished conversation.”
7
In fact, Baca believes that the method is
more important than the resultant art object and she states that, “If there was no
mural, this would still be art.” The Guadalupe Mural project collected over 6,000
slides which were later made into a historical archive for the town.
8
However, although participation is crucial to Baca’s work, there is still a
resultant art object that has her name on it as the artist. Unlike Paul Sermon’s
Telematic Dreaming, which places the importance of the work on the inner
transformation of its participants, Baca attributes importance to exterior elements –
how has the community improved? – and the evidence of that change is her mural.
22
Although she states that the process to create the murals is more important than the
murals themselves, the process is fixed in the past by the mural. It is evidence and
documentation of an experience that is finished.
LOS ANGELES POVERTY DEPARTMENT (LAPD)
John Malpede, a performance artist from New York City, arrived in Los
Angeles in 1984, and after witnessing brutal police treatment of the homeless
during the Summer Olympics, was inspired to volunteer for activists and lawyers in
the City’s Skid Row neighborhood. In 1985, he initiated a performance workshop
in which Skid Row residents could develop their own theatrical material and then
perform it in the neighborhood, and this became the Los Angeles Poverty
Department (LAPD).
9
The LAPD’s performance content is usually developed through workshops
with Skid Row residents as well as with local community feedback. Both the
performers and the community determine the issues they would like to see
addressed in the productions. Writer Robert H. Leonard describes one play’s
process as such:
[it] evolved during workshops intended to help abusers accomplish
effective transitions during recovery. The material of the show was
initially articulated and then rehearsed in the workshop environment.
[Ferdinand] Lewis states in his field notes: ‘The aesthetic lines that
separate theatrical and actual community interaction are
intentionally and vigorously blurred. LAPD’s research,
development, and production style rely on an almost continual
exchange of feedback with the community.’
10
23
Thus each piece is an amalgam of personal experience, research, and community
feedback. One performance, South of the Clouds (1986), consisted of monologs
based around significant actions in the performer’s personal life history. The
performers deeply analyzed an action, and the action’s placement within their life
and their cultural context. One performer, Jim Brown “recreated a sandlot baseball
game from his youth ‘between the White Plains Road Wops and the Jerome
Avenue Jews’ that spun out in all directions to create a picture of ‘growing up in
white-ethnic urban-America.’”
11
LAPD’s most famous show to date is Agents and Assets; a performance of
the exact literal transcript of the United States House Congressional Hearing on the
CIA’s trafficking of crack cocaine in Los Angeles. This hearing, which occurred in
1996, was largely ignored by both the U.S. media and society, but each time LAPD
performs the piece, they draw attention to a chapter in U.S. history which greatly
impacted Los Angeles.
LAPD, although the initial brain child of John Malpede, now encourages
local residents to author and perform their own collaborative artworks. The
participants in this case are the artists and vice-versa. Like Judy Baca’s goals for
her mural projects, the LAPD wishes to create a more cohesive community within
Skid Row, an area that has had a difficult time organizing itself for local
government battles due to the transience and vulnerability of its population. Unlike
Baca’s murals, however, the emphasis is not on creating an object, but on the
24
interior experiences and transformations among the performers. Even in Agents
and Assets, a work that is not developed from personal memories, the importance
of the play lies in the transformation each performer makes from being a potential
victim of the government to being an author of the government’s story.
The works of the LAPD, Judy Baca, and Paul Sermon are vastly different
and the artist’s all possess different goals. What they have in common, however, is
a dependence on participants and a desire to change the participant’s lives. How
can the importance of the participant on the work and the work on the participant
be examined? How can interior transformation be described when it is so
important to these works of art?
1
Stephen Wilson, Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology (Cambridge, MA:
The MIT Press, 2002), 519.
2
Edward A. Shanken, “Tele-Agency: Telematics, Telerobotics, and the Art of Meaning,” Art
Journal vol. 59, no. 2 (Summer 2000), 70.
3
Wilson, 520.
4
Erika Doss, Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American
Communities (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 181.
5
Doss, 184.
6
Doss, 195.
7
Doss., 193.
8
Lucy R. Lippard, The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society (New York:
The New Press, 1997), 192, plate 7.
9
Linda Frye Bumham “Hands Across Skid Row: John Malpede’s Performance Workshop for the
Homeless of L.A.” Community Arts Network Reading Room (Summer 1987) posted online.
10
Robert Leonard “Theater as an Act of Citizenship: Thoughts on the Los Angeles Poverty
Department” Community Arts Network Reading Room (October 2002) posted online.
11
Bumham, “Hands Across Skid Row”.
25
CHAPTER 3: CONTENT AND FORM
Every artist whose work stems from relational aesthetics has a world
of forms, a set of problems and a trajectory which are all his own.
They are not connected together by any style, theme or iconography.
What they do share together is much more decisive, to wit, the fact
of operating within one and the same practical and theoretical
horizon: the sphere of inter-human relations. Their works involve
methods of social exchanges, interactivity with the viewer within the
aesthetic experience being offered to him/her, and the various
communication processes, in their tangible dimensions as tools
serving to link individuals and human groups together. – Nicolas
Bourriaud
1
In the above paragraph, Nicolas Bourriaud declares that artists who use
relational aesthetics in their practice do not share similar forms, but I would argue
that their “methods of social exchanges” become a new kind of structure for
artworks. Although the exchange may differ from sharing a meal to sharing
information, they are each about encounter and face-to-face experience. When
Grant Kester writes that participatory artworks
encourage their participants to question fixed identities,
stereotypical images, and so on, they do so through a cumulative
process of exchange and dialogue rather than a single, instantaneous
shock of insight precipitated by an image or object. These projects
require a shift in our understanding of the work of art – a
redefinition of aesthetic experience as durational rather than
immediate.
2
he delineates an important new type of relationship of form, process, and
information exchange – one based on transformative experience through
time. And one in which the people being transformed are as important as
the artist. Because they include people and their perceptions, these works
26
must become “durational rather than immediate” due to the fact that
experience and encounter cannot remain fixed. Participatory art relies on
people and ever after the works and their participants are then tied together
through time. As Bourriaud stated, these works of art are “presented as a
period of time to be lived through, like an opening to an unlimited
discussion.”
3
Works based around discussion and interactions are no longer any one
“thing.” Although Judy Baca’s Guadalupe Mural project resulted in a mural, a
description of it should include the year she lived there, and, more importantly, the
experiences and thoughts of the thousands of people who spoke with and interacted
with her. Grant Kester states that participatory art is not a thing, but a process of
“exchange and negotiation” and he will evaluate it as such.
4
Bourriaud says much
the same thing but with a heavier emphasis on the artist’s importance, “The form of
an artwork issues from a negotiation with the intelligible, which is bequeathed to
us. Through it, the artist embarks upon a dialogue. The artistic practice thus
resides in the invention of relations between consciousness.”
5
That is, the relation
of the artist to another individual.
But although this is a shift from art practices based in the production of
objects to a practice based on dialogue and the exchange, it is still a form created
by an artist. If participants are only performers in an already written play are they
just another material that composes a work of art? How can their participation be
documented as more than a form, how can it be examined to include all of the
27
richness of their experience? If an artist asks for participants’ contributions, they
will become negated in the artwork unless their response can reach beyond the
work of art itself. In her edited volume about participation, Claire Bishop discusses
Jacques Rancière’s argument that “the opposition of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ is
riddled with presuppositions about looking and knowing, watching and acting,
appearance and reality. This is because the binary of active/passive always ends up
dividing a population into those with capacity on one side, and those with
incapacity on the other. As such, it is an allegory of inequality.”
6
In the past fifty years many artists have left objects and moved onto human
interaction, implying by this transition that people and their behaviors, exchanges,
and daily lives are important and of value. If this importance is true, if it is
essential to address and interact with the public, than the next move is to stake a
claim for the power of the “non-artists” in the understanding of the work of art.
Participatory works place the emphasis on the ability to change how people
interact and feel and think, whether it is for the moment when they perform a
simple action, or if it is intended to change behavior and thoughts for the rest of
their lives. That possible transformation within the participants should be
examined more closely when an artwork is documented.
1
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (France: Les presses du réel, 2002), 43.
2
Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2004), 12.
3
Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 15.
4
Kester, 12.
5
Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 22.
6
Claire Bishop, Participation: Documents for Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
2006), 16.
28
CHAPTER 4: MEANING
When Judy Baca declares that her final art object is not necessary for her
work of art – that the art is the thousands of interactions and conversations,
offerings and gatherings that occurred in Guadalupe – it is hard to know how to
discuss and examine her work. How can projects which depend upon, or consist
exclusively of participation be understood? How should they be documented and
what should be documented?
Claire Doherty asks of a participatory art project, “Where does meaning
reside – in its execution and/or documentation, in the fledgling idea or in the
posthumous circulation of the anecdote?”
1
Doherty does not answer her question,
but calls for the development of a language that can perhaps eventually answer it.
However, if the meaning resides in the idea, than it still belongs to the artist and
remains on the more or less traditional continuum of art projects created in the last
few hundred years. If the meaning resides in the anecdote and its circulation, it
then appears to be a different sort of art. This is why the question is so difficult
because it takes us into a new category – one in which an art project is not based on
a particular object or event – but on what people make of it and with it. This is an
art where the participation is not just the content but is also the meaning and the
transmission of meaning.
Doherty’s argument for a new kind of criticism for this new kind of art is
echoed by Grant Kester. He believes that
29
the meaning of a given dialogical work is not centered in the
physical condition of a single object or in the imaginative capacity
of an individual viewer. Instead, the work is constituted as an
ensemble of effects, operating at numerous points of discursive
interaction…Criticism of dialogical practices should, in my view, be
less concerned with arranging a canonical hierarchy of works than
with analyzing, as closely as possible, the interrelated moments of
discursive interaction within a given project.
2
This is not quite the same as Doherty’s questions and problems – Kester is not
asking writers to analyze the aftereffects of an artwork – the “right of boom” after-
period,
3
but to look at the intangible encounters within the work itself.
This leads to a question about where participatory projects are heading and
what their goals ultimately are. What do participatory works imply about the
people who contribute to them? Given that these works make a point of including
action that is outside of the artist, should they also give weight to the experiences of
the individual participants? In documenting them, should the personal experiences
of the participants be included – even long after the work is “over”?
Anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote that it is impossible to understand things
based on generalities, “It is not a mater of reducing large things to small, the United
States to Middletown, General Motors to the shop floor. It is a matter of giving
shape to things: exactness, force, intelligibility. For it is still the case that no one
lives in the world in general.”
4
Where are the individuals in participatory works? Are they merely one part
of a piece – a medium like paint or clay? In Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming
are the participants on the bed contributing content or are they the content? Are
30
their experiences being used to show the audience new revelations or does that
experience become what the audience examines?
If one goal of participatory artwork is to activate both participants and the
audience, then the participants should be more than just another medium. They
must be documented as individuals and their personal experiences, subjective point
of view, and changes over time should be included in any discussion of the work
itself. Grant Kester noted that traditional, “Mainstream art criticism focuses on the
formal appearance of physical objects, which are understood to possess an
immanent meaning, and the critic’s judgments, which are authorized by their
individual, pleasure-based response to the object.”
5
Participatory art and its
criticism should do the opposite, letting inherent meaning dissolve and
acknowledge that subjectivity that the participants, critics, and audience possess. A
participatory work implies that its content is determined by both the random and
specific features of those individuals who happened to contribute to it. If a work’s
meaning is infinite and specific (and not finite and universal), it needs to have a
consciously subjective and explicit history.
In Roland Barthes’ essay, “The Death of the Author,” he writes about
empowering both the reader and the text by negating the author’s original
intentions. This emphasis on the many and varied subjective readings of a work
not only opens them infinitely, but also empowers the audience to become more
than an audience – to become the work’s co-creators.
6
Artworks which incorporate
participation, whether consciously or not, state the importance of the participants
31
and their subjective experience. A likewise openly subjective approach to the
documentation of these projects, whether by one author or many, recognizes the
participant’s importance while the project is being interpreted as well.
To acknowledge in a document that the truth of a work might depend on
who is defining it, also acknowledges the power that the public has even when
there are official authors – to determine their own truths, perceptions, and histories.
Although this could lead to a confused documentation and criticism, why should
histories and criticism attempt to claim universal and logical interpretations as the
correct ones? Works situated in the public realm and works incorporating
participation may claim official meaning, but their dependency on numerous
individuals refutes it.
Nicolas Bourriaud does not claim a “death” of the author, but recognizes
that an audience’s interpretation of a work is why the work exists: “Producing a
form is to invent possible encounters; receiving a form is to create the conditions
for an exchange, the way you return a service in a game of tennis.”
7
A subjective
artwork and a subjective interpretation recognize their place in a long and never-
ending dialog among participants, artists, and audiences. They welcome dialog
which allows conversation to flow freely. Bourriaud also states that “Art is a state
of encounter,”
8
and an emphasis on the experiences of the participants and the
audience – one half of the encounter – would come closer to fulfilling the promise
of participation – a meaning that is dependent on its participants’ voices as much as
its artist’s.
32
1
Claire Doherty, Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation (London: Black Dog Publishing,
2004), 8.
2
Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2004), 189.
3
“Left of boom” and “right of boom” are expressions used by the U.S. military to describe the
period before an explosive device is detonated, when there is still time to prevent an attack, and the
period after an explosion, when the aftereffects are dealt with. (“Covering the War Against IEDs”
interview by Robert Siegel, All Things Considered, [October 1, 2007]).
4
Clifford Geertz, Afterword to Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Santa
Fe, New Mexico: School of American Research Press, 1996), 262.
5
Kester, 10.
6
Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art
(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 44.
7
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (France: Les presses du réel, 2002), 23.
8
Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 18.
33
CONCLUSION
And sometimes what appears to be participation is a mere detail of
it, because the artist cannot in fact measure this participation, since
each person experiences it differently. – Hélio Oiticica
1
When artists invite others into the creation of a work of art, they are,
whether intentionally or not, rejecting passivity and solitariness, denying
generalization, and encouraging active exchange and dialogue. These radical acts
pose a problem – how to thoughtfully document the experiences of participants in
ways that respect them and their importance. The exploration of a work’s
implications and the identification of a work’s meaning both become difficult when
the artwork itself accepts that meaning is located in infinite intangibles.
For a participatory artwork to be even partially understood, the participants
whom the artwork affects, and who in turn affect it, should also be included in its
history. Just as a place has multiple meanings for each visitor, so does a work of
art based on exchange. An examination of how a work’s meanings and histories
diverge and overlap among the many individuals who interact with it could open up
a work’s significance.
Arlene Raven wrote that, “In some sense, all art is public art when it leaves
the province of the artist.”
2
Once a work is finished, all viewers are able to alter its
meaning and to interpret it as they wish, but with participatory works, the public
steps in before that moment of official completion. Unlike a previous deist-like
model of art, one in which the artist created a work and then gifted it to humanity
34
for passive consumption, participatory works immediately and actively invite
people in to alter the creative process, and to create things for themselves.
Acknowledging that participants have more power and greater voice in artmaking
is a radical change, but a change which creates possibility.
Can a traditional artist and audience model be traded for one that has
infinite numbers of people who are audience members, content providers, and
artistic creators all concurrently? Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a
conventional work in that it is the product of one woman’s vision with some
alterations made by the government, was extremely controversial before its
dedication, but in the decades since has became one of the most visited sites in
Washington, D.C. Every day, the appearance of the Memorial changes slightly as
small offerings are placed below the names on the Memorial’s walls. These objects
are periodically collected by the National Park Service and stored in a huge
governmental warehouse. They include flowers, flags, letters, Zippo lighters, and
graduation tassels. In 2007, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial’s 25
th
anniversary was
marked by a re-dedication ceremony that was attended by thousands of veterans
and their families. There has also been a play written about the memorial entitled
Touch the Names which was first produced in 2000. Its text is entirely composed
from letters left at the wall.
3
Is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial a participatory work? Is the Memorial
the structure itself, or is it also the actions and objects that continually alter it? If
John Nicolas’ imagined Washington monument had been realized, what would it
35
have become by now, over 200 years later? Perhaps individuals would still be
visiting it to read others’ thoughts and to write down their own, to be a part of a
continual give and a take.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial has been transformed by its participants to
into its own new type of work. Its meaning lies not solely in its form, but in the
thousands of small and ever changing additions and subtractions to its site. To
document this Memorial, its participants must also be considered. Participatory
works, whether intentionally or unintentionally, share power among a number of
individuals. They produce and expand meaning into new avenues, including the
thoughts, memories, and actions of their participants.
The choices a documentarian makes are often far less participatory than the
artworks he or she writes about. Individual participants should be included in a
participatory artwork’s documentation in order to fulfill the promise of these
works, which so need and affect others for their own meaning. Perhaps the next
step is to expand the very act of interpretation itself to include the input of many
individuals instead of one as such histories are written.
1
Hélio Oiticica, “Letters,” in Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 2006), 111.
2
Arlene Raven, Art in the Public Interest (New York: Da Capo Press, 1989), 23.
3
Chris Jones, “Touch the Names,” Variety 379, iss. 3 (5 June 2000), 29.
36
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bishop, Claire, ed. Participation: Documents for Contemporary Art. Cambridge,
MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. France: Les presses du réel, 2002.
Doherty, Claire. Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation. London: Black Dog
Publishing, 2004.
Doss, Erika. Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in
American Communities. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995.
Feld, Steven and Keith H. Basso, eds. Senses of Place. Santa Fe, New Mexico:
School of American Research Press, 1996.
Finkelpearl, Tom. Dialogues in Public Art. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press,
2000.
Griswold, Charles L. “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall.”
In Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context, and Controversy. Washington
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.
Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995.
Jones, Chris. “Touch the Names,” Variety 379, iss. 3 (5 June 2000): 29.
Kester, Grant H. Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern
Art. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004.
Lippard, Lucy R. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered
Society. New York: The New Press, 1997.
Madanipour, Ali. Public and Private Spaces of the City. New York: Routledge,
2003.
Raven, Arlene, ed. Art in the Public Interest. New York: Da Capo Press, 1989.
Rodman, Margaret C. “Empowering Place: Multilocality and Multivocality.”
American Anthropologist, New Series 94, no. 3 (September 1992): 640-656.
37
Savage, Kirk. “The Self-made Monument: George Washington and the Fight to
Erect a National Memorial.” In Critical Issues in Public Art: Content, Context,
and Controversy. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992.
Shanken, Edward A. “Tele-Agency: Telematics, Telerobotics, and the Art of
Meaning,” Art Journal 59, iss. 2 (Summer 2000): 65-77.
Thompson, Mark. “The Vietnam Veterans Memorial,” Time 169, iss. 23 (4 June
2007): 72.
Wilson, Stephen. Information Arts: Intersections of Art, Science, and Technology
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Schock, Alice
(author)
Core Title
Interpreting participatory art
School
School of Fine Arts
Degree
Master of Public Art Studies
Degree Program
Public Art Studies
Publication Date
07/24/2010
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
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Tag
Documentation,OAI-PMH Harvest,participation,participatory art,public art
Language
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Advisor
Driggs, Janet Owen (
committee chair
), Decter, Joshua (
committee member
), Wallach, Ruth (
committee member
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