PARTICIPATION by Clare Bishop

NOTABLE POINTS IN BOOK BY CLARE BISHOP FROM TUTOR SUGGESTIONS

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INTRODUCTION - CLARE BISHOP

"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."

In this quote Bishop lines out the central framework for the theory of the book and interested me because of the mention of community, which is one of the things I would say I wish to encourage most with my street pieces, allowing strangers to share in moments of connectedness over freely available artwork in the same way Swoon's piece had become a local 'secret'.

"In calling for spectators who are active as interpreters, Rancière implies that the politics of participation 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. Unattached to a privileged artistic medium, this principle would not divide audiences into active and passive, capable and incapable, but instead would invite us all to appropriate works for ourselves and make use of these in ways that their authors might never have dreamed possible."

This inclusive ideal of art where everyone is invited to take part, make their own interpretations, and aren't patronised into inferior and superior of intellect or understanding. Accessibility is key to any street artist, as typically their latent desire is to bring their art to the public on a large, interventional scale. Placing work into the hands of the audience is a central belief of the movement, the spread of which is greatly boosted by social media sharing sites such as instagram, where spectators take their own photos of pieces and share, in this sense acting as a kind of interpreter.


THE NEGATION OF THE AUTONOMY OF ART BY THE AVANT-GARDE - PETER BURGER

"A. Sacral Art (example: the art of the High Middle Ages) serves as cult object. It is wholly integrated into the social institution ‘religion’. It is produced collectively, as a craft. The mode of reception also is institutionalized as collective.

B.Courtly Art (example: the art at the court of Louis XIV) also has a precisely defined function.  It is representational and serves the glory of the prince and the self-portrayal of courtly society. Courtly art is part of the life praxis of courtly society, just as sacral art is part of the life praxis of the faithful. Yet the detachment from the sacral tie is a first step in the emancipation of art. (‘Emancipation’ is being used here as a descriptive term, as referring to the process by which art constitutes itself as a distinct social subsystem.) The difference from sacral art becomes particularly apparent in the realm of production: the artist produces as an individual and develops a consciousness of the uniqueness of his activity. Reception, on the other hand, remains collective. But the content of the collective performance is no longer sacral, it is sociability.

C. Only to the extent that the bourgeoisie adopts concepts of value held by the aristocracy does bourgeois art have a representational function. When it is genuinely bourgeois, this art is the objectification of the self-understanding of Production and reception of the self-understanding as articulated in art are no longer tied to the praxis of life. Habermas calls this the satisfaction of residual needs, that is, of needs that have become submerged in the life praxis of bourgeois society. Not only production but reception also are now individual acts. The solitary absorption in the work is the adequate mode of appropriation of creations removed from the life praxis of the bourgeois, even though they still claim to interpret that praxis. In Aestheticism, finally, where bourgeois art reaches the stage of self-reflection, this claim is no longer made. Apartness from the praxis of life, which had always been the condition that characterized the way art functioned in bourgeois society, now becomes its content."

	Sacral Art	Courtly Art	Bourgeois Art
Purpose or function	Cult object	Representational object	Portrayal of bourgeois self understanding
Production	Collective craft	Induvidual	Induvidual
Reception	Collective (sacral)	Collective (sociable)	Induvidual

I really liked this rationalisation of the different catagories art can take and the different effects and class systems it appears in. I also found it humorous that the function of bourgeois art was listed as the portrayal of their own self understanding, which is exactly what I have felt when faced with highly conceptual pieces in the past. It seems sometimes as if the greater goals of these pieces are simply to create a highly exclusive level of understanding, accessible to only the priveliged initiates and elites, in both concept, production and price.

If I had to place my own work according to this chart I would align it mainly with Courtly Art for induvidual production and collective, sociable response, however would also pick the reception and functional properties of sacral art through it's integration into the social institution of the streets and also in another reference again to the concept of Swoon's 'secret'.

"Duchamp’s provocation not only unmasks the art market where the signature means more than the quality of the work; it radically questions the very principle of art in bourgeois society according to which the individual is considered the creator of the work of art. Duchamp’s Readymades are not works of art but manifestations… It is obvious that this kind of provocation cannot be repeated indefinitely. The provocation depends on what it turns against: here, it is the idea that the individual is the subject of artistic creation. Once the signed bottle drier has been accepted as an object that deserves a place in a museum, the provocation no longer provokes; it turns into its opposite. If an artist today signs a stove pipe and exhibits it, that artist certainly does not denounce the art market but adapts to it. Such adaptation does not eradicate the idea of individual creativity, it affirms it, and the reason is the failure of the avant-gardiste intent to sublate art. Since now the protest of the historical avant-garde against art as institution is accepted as art, the gesture of protest of the neo-avant-garde becomes inauthentic."

 I also think this section accurately summed up some of the paradoxes I find in the idea of readymades and object appropriation. Unless significant intervention has been made onto the object's natural form, I find assigning the term 'ready made' to something which is simply an pre-fabricated object to be a bit of a creative anticlimax. I do however appreciate the movement more in it's initial form though, particularly in the example of Duchamp's signature and the questions it birthed about the value of the artists signature over the quality of the work. I had not made this connection before and it made me empathise with the fact that, at that stage, this was highly radical and a massive subversion of what had, until recently been a highly traditional art scene.

"Beyond the coincidence of producer and recipient that this demand implies, there is the fact that these concepts lose their meaning: producers and recipients no longer exist. All that remains is the individual who uses poetry as an instrument for living one’s life as best one can."

After embroiling itself in paradoxes and minimalisms for another half page, the text finally settles on the most distilled form of artistry, where all that remains is the individual. I think there is something poetic to this line, wherein the deepest seated desires of any artist are to produce something they feel satisfied with, and just get on with life as best they can.