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Where’s the Art in Participation? As our post-industrial economy judders on, the gap between rich and poor continues to widen. Wherever you look, entrepreneurs are getting richer and workers at the coalface more boracic. When I say ‘coalface’, I mean it in the widest sense. Poverty is no longer the preserve of the horny-handed; workers in the ‘cultural industries’ are just as squeezed. Anyone producing the goods on which an industry relies – no matter if they’re words, music or pictures – is invariably diddled by some capitalist pig-in-the-middle who steals all the glory and the bunce. Consultants, presenters, interpreters, facilitators, enablers, empowerers: we’ll soon have as many names for these post-industrial parasites as the Eskimos have for snow. While service industries flourish in our affluent society, the workers on whose services they depend are stuck at the bottom of the service elevator. That’s where you’ll find the majority of visual artists – except for the clever ones who’ve caught the entrepreneurial zeitgeist and got other people to do their work for them. The definition of the successful contemporary artist is the person who makes the money, not the art. As the Independent on Sunday’s Charles Darwent remarked in his review of the ICA’s current touring exhibition Double Agent featuring seven artists who use surrogates: "From the moment in 1960-odd when Sol Le Witt asked gallery assistants to do his drawings for him, other people have become as common a material in the making of art as pastel or gouache". We’re not talking here about the Hirst generation of artists too busy to take a line for a walk and thus obliged to hire qualified line-walkers to do it for them. This is, after all, a good old studio tradition stretching back to Cranach and his multiple Adams & Eves. No, we’re talking about a new breed of artist-entrepreneur who draws on the pool of unqualified free labour known as the public. This new species of artistic opportunist excels at attracting public funding earmarked for ‘access’ by DCMS dimwits desperate to believe that interactive art reaches parts of the public normal art doesn’t. ‘B.PART OF IT’, said the Baltic’s postcard inviting Geordies to ‘PARTICIPATE’ in art by stripping off for Spencer Tunick’s Newcastle-Gateshead 2005 nudathon. As a general rule, you’ll find that the more cutting-edge a gallery and the more incomprehensible its programme to the general public, the more shameless will be its interactive attempts to disguise its inaccessibility. Birmingham’s Ikon regularly sugars its programming pill with invitations to the public to pARTicipate in some nonsense or other. I’ve never seen the place other than empty, but then I’ve never attended one these events. It could be that last July’s Y8 Classical Yoga Teachings led by artist-yogis Benita and Immanuel Grosser were a sell-out: what Brummie could resist the alluring prospect of "combining the modernist ideals of the Bauhaus with the meditative principles of the East"? For all I know, Michel Groisman’s Sirva-se workshop the year before was equally oversubscribed, with people queuing round the block to "attach cups at different angles to various parts of their bodiesî and "transfer water from one cup to anotherî. Party games are all the rage, not just at Ikon. Tate Modern regularly puts the world’s biggest rumpus room at the disposal of arty party organisers. For last year’s Long Weekend the Brazilian artist Marepe laid on a fairground carousel baited with toffee apples; expect all the fun of the eco-fair this year with Fluxus veteran Alison Knowles’s promised performance of her iconic work Make a Salad, tossed from the bridge of the Turbine Hall – in response to the architecture - and served to an audience of 300 people. Jumble sales and flea markets, where gallery visitors get to take stuff home, are other popular interactive options. It won’t be long before the first art bring-and-buy sale, where the public brings the art and takes it away. But hey, it’s all good fun. Where’s the harm? The harm is in the false distinction its promoters make between their sort of ‘active’ art and the old ‘passive’ kind. Five years ago a four-eyed dork called John Rogers conducted two-minute one-on-one staring contests with visitors to Ikon (where else?) to challenge "the often passive role of the art object and the distant presence of the artistî. (From the look of his mug shot, a distant presence would be a plus.) This January Irit Rogoff, Professor of Visual Cultures at Goldsmith’s, gave a talk at the multimonickered London gallery Monika Spr¸th Philomene Magers in which she proposed that "over recent decades, different art practices have transformed our perception of what it is to be an audienceî with the happy result that "we have de facto become an extremely active mode of audience, no longer lost in contemplation of aesthetic objectsî. Rogoff (not to be confused with the Hayward’s Rugoff) has apparently been investigating "audience participation in contemporary art spacesî and questioning "whether audiences are performatively able to become part of the very nature of the exhibitionî. My answer, if she cared to question me, would be no. The conclusion of my own informal researches is that the higher the level of organised interactivity the lower the level of spontaneous brain activity. But then I’m one of those saddoes for whom being ‘lost in the contemplation of an aesthetic object’ is a desirable state of mind. It is, in fact, what I go to galleries for. And I also find, when I do, that some of said aesthetic objects push my buttons in a spookily interactive way. Since when was looking a passive occupation? If it were, Richard Desmond would be out of business. True, the interactivity triggered by porn comes naturally, so to speak, whereas for Piero’s Resurrection to push Dirty Des’s buttons new wiring might need to be installed. But the point about interactivity is that it works if you want it to, whether it’s a case of communing with Cézanne’s Bathers at the National Gallery or commingling with 1,700 even more misshapen nudes in Gateshead. All art is interactive, that’s what makes it art. Any object or event that did nothing for its audience and made no demands of them in return could not, by any definition, qualify as art. Good art provokes a response, ergo it is by definition interactive. People who’d rather ride a carousel or do yoga than look at pictures may pass as gallery-goers, but should we dignify them with the name of art audience? Even the Guardian’s Adrian Searle, who after years of exposure to dangerous levels of artbollocks is finally transmogrifying into Victor Meldrew (it had to happen), seems to have his doubts. He was reassuringly caustic about South London Gallery’s all-woman interactivity-fest Her Noise in 2005: "An exhibition like this poses no threat to anything and ‘interacting’ – by taking a walk, lying on a bed or showing what a poor karaoke guitarist one might be, is only meaningful if we choose to make it so". To interact or to look: the choice is ours. But if we’re going to look we’ll need something worth looking at, which means we’ll need an artist - not an entrepreneur - to make it. Laura Gascoigne | ||||
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Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
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