Derek Murray Specializes in Contemporary art, theory and criticism, global art discourse and visual culture studies. He is an Assistant Professor of Critical Theory in the Art Department.
I became interested in participatory art through my exposure to the performance-based collaborations by artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena. I was studying painting and critical theory at Art Center College of Design when I was first introduced to this peculiar brand of artwork. I was drawn to a particular work, the 1993 performance entitled, The Couple In The Cage: A Guatinai Odyssey. In this traveling piece, Fusco and Gomez-Pena exhibited themselves as caged Amerindians from a fictitious island. The art viewing public thought the artists were actually “savages,” which gave the work a greater significance. I was struck by the performance because it illustrated the depth of cultural misunderstanding and stereotypes. Watching an unaware public interact with the performance piqued my intellectual curiosity in a profound way.
In recent years, my engagement with participatory art has increased. My research interests in general are concerned with visual art that is socially conscious—particularly, works that wrestle with issues related to social discrimination and totalitarianism. I am most interested in artworks that explore how power is enacted upon the body. Participatory works are perfectly suited to unraveling the complexities of social subjectivity and the ways in which ideology informs how we see others—and ourselves.
Well, I think it’s important because it has been at the forefront of challenging certain orthodoxies and traditions that have dominated the visual arts for decades. Participation breaks from the traditional formalist ways of thinking about art. It rejects the hegemony of the white cube, the market, and the high art aspirations that have all too often purposefully sequestered the visual arts from the general public—preventing it from having any broader social significance (or political efficacy for that matter). But most importantly, participatory art creates an active viewing experience that is a reprieve from the often cold, dispassionate and quiet contemplative rituals of traditional art viewing. It’s also worth noting that participatory art has been at the vanguard of breaking down the barriers of exclusion in the visual arts. And it has always been committed to social change in a myriad of cultural, social and political contexts.
When I first encountered Zmijewski’s film Repetition, I knew that I was watching something significant. It really captured the spirit of the age. I don’t say this flippantly, because far too many contemporary artworks are disengaged from the current realities of human experience—particularly as they pertain to social struggles, political conflicts and forms of violence and degradation. Repetition was evocative of a range of important issues of global concern (the Iraq war, Guantanamo, prisoner abuse, Abu Ghraib, the Palestinian/Israeli crisis, etc.) I believe that Zmijewski’s artworks are among the most cogent and courageous meditations on the psychical complexities of fascism and state violence currently being produced.
Combining performance and video, he utilizes bodily dysfunction and abjection as allegories for despotism. Among his protagonists are the sick, mentally ill, the handicapped and the imprisoned—subjects whose alienation is itself an expression of violence, though their societal repression leads to various other articulations of torture and brutality. The way he merges these concerns was a breath of fresh air, considering how wilfully vacuous most contemporary art is today—a trend that I like to call “the aesthetics of disavowal.” Most of Zmijewski’s art incorporates participation in one manner or another, which I believe is essential for activist and socially engaged artworks to function at their best. Rather than burden, or over-direct his projects, he often takes on the role of the passive observer. The staging is of his design, but he does not always script the outcome—allowing the events to unfold like a grand social experiment of sorts.
In many respects I agree with Bishop that relational aesthetics is a utopian theory, but then again, it sets out to be just that. Part of the critique of Bourriaud’s concept is that it advocates for a kind of pseudo-political play, that masquerades as activist resistance. In part, this is true. I’m over-simplifying of course, but Bourriaud’s project aims (at least in my reading) to differentiate art of the 1990s from the activist traditions of the 1960s. He does this by noting that 90s conceptualism foregrounds the realm of human interactions and the social context in which it inhabits. In a sense, he argues that within this new paradigm, the work of art itself is in perpetual flux.
Bishop takes issue with Bourriaud on several fronts, but she asserts that this “laboratory” model is too susceptible to commoditization. I take issue with this part of her critique, precisely because it’s lazy. Whenever someone seeks to diminish a genre of art making, they do so by proclaiming its complete corruption by market forces and consumer spectacle. Bourriaud is guilty of this as well to certain degree. Ultimately, however all art forms are eventually absorbed by the market—so this critique is largely empty.
The important point is that relational aesthetics advocates for an artistic experience where meaning is constructed through collaboration—which is meant to mark a break from the traditional modernist artist/individual model. Relational art is contingent upon location and spectator (or audience) and the randomness of their encounters. The point is to evade the clutches of capitalist absorption and consumer spectacle that has dominated the art world for ages. Bishop doesn’t buy into this and she probably shouldn’t, but I also question her adherence to the traditional canons. I think that the preservation of a particular legacy of artistic production (1960s—70s conceptualism and performance) is what is at stake in this debate.
However, there is another dimension that boils under the surface of this discussion. October (both the journal and collective of scholars) is fiercely critical of the international biennial phenomenon—a movement that has sought to do away with the Eurocentric model and hopes to usher in a new global paradigm. The art world’s shift away from eurocentrism (and the traditional Western canons) has been a thorn in the side of traditionalist defenders like October. The global shift is polyvocal and concerned with pluralism and the interconnectedness brought about by globalization. As a result, there is a greater focus on the history of non-Western modernities and contemporary art emerging from beyond Occidental high culture. Relational aesthetics is a part of this shift toward a global community of interrelations and random encounter. I’m not suggesting, however, that the global turn is not without its flaws, because it certainly is. My point is to help contextualize what is behind the words—what goes unsaid.
Rirkrit Tiravanija’s artwork is said to exemplify the globalist/polyvocal (or democratic) turn in the arts. His work has been deemed important because it’s a radical intervention into the traditional way that art functions intellectually, conceptually, aesthetically and experientially. Bishop suggests that his work is politically facile because it removes conflict. But I disagree with this assessment. Conflict in Tiravanija’s artwork issues from its rejection of the aesthetics and valuing structures of Western art—which is a political act. Bishop’s major argument is that relational aesthetics is not original, but is merely a retread of earlier canonical artworks. That may be true as well, but that alone does not invalidate his work as it functions within in its present day context.
Grant Kester’s “Dialogical Aesthetics” is a meaningful departure from Bourriaud, in the sense that he builds upon the relational model to further empower the participants (as an anti-capitalist, anti-hegemonic gesture).
I like Kester’s model of dialogue and exchange because it’s more cognizant of the ways in which power relationships are at play. This is of particular importance when artists are asked to be representatives for disenfranchised communities. You may want to read the writing of Miwon Kwon (One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity) and Hal Foster (The Return of the Real).
Like I said above, much of this tension is really about a potential diminishing of the intellectual, critical, and historical importance of the Western tradition—in the wake of a rapacious anti-Eurocentrism that is intent on redefining the very notion of what art is (and re-conceptualizing its social function). Many hope that this movement will completely alter the way we view artistic production and its historiography—its valuing and devaluing.
The important thing to remember about this debate is that each side (the global contingent and the defenders of Eurocentrism) is claiming that the artistic forms they’re advocating for are the most authentically political; the most pure in their radicalism; and the most removed from the clutches of multinational capitalism. Nevertheless, the old colonial mentalities are loosing their efficacy. Western modernity is no longer being seen as the defining moment of development and progress that elevated occidental civilization above the mythological primitivism and darkness believed to ominously shadow the rest of the world. And needless to say, these debates are merely efforts to set the present and future terms upon which visual art is to be valued and devalued, exhibited, and historicized in the wake of globalization—however one wants to define it.
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