Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship
Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson.
Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as “social practice.” Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Paweł Althamer and Paul Chan.
Since her controversial essay in Artforum in 2006, Claire Bishop has been one of the few to challenge the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art. In Artificial Hells, she not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims made for these projects, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.
Paperback, 390 pages
ISBN: 9781844676903
July 2012
$29.95 / £19.99 / $33.50CAN
Other Editions
Ebook, 304 pages
ISBN: 9781844677962
July 2012
$12.99
Reviews
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“Claire Bishop has articulated an important historical overview of the global emergence of participatory art...Her controversial and thought-provoking conclusions courageously trouble our assumptions about the effectiveness of political artworks, questioning their oppositional quality, their effects on the audiences they reach, and their relation to the institutions that promote them.”
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“Bishop’s arguments are convincingly supported and potentially very contentious…A critically challenging work of vital scholarship.”
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“An essential title for contemporary art history scholars and students as well as anyone who has witnessed a participatory art 'happening' and thought, 'Now that's art!' or 'That's art?'”
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“Bishop seeks a standard for judging participatory works…She draws on the writings of French philosopher Jacques Rancière to argue that art must maintain a degree of autonomy and unreadability in order to resist co-option by the political and economic forces intent on imposing a false social consensus.”
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“Pellucid”
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“The good intentions of contemporary artists frequently pave a road to hell. Claire Bishop follows their descent into the inferno and invites her readers to share her fascination with what she finds along the way. Artificial Hells combines vast historical knowledge with a precise analysis of individual artistic practices. So much so that at the end of her new book we have begun to fall in love with hell – under the condition that it remains artificial.”
Blog
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New Left Review-issue 80 out now
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Claire Bishop takes on New Media in this month's Artforum
In Artforum's current 50th Anniversary issue, Claire Bishop, author of the recently published Artificial Hells, contributes a controversial and widely discussed article as part of a centerpiece series of essays on New Media. In her sharp-eyed critique, Bishop questions whether, after all this time, mainstream artists have actually embraced technology or simply utilized it to alter their production habits. "While many artists use digital technology," Bishop asks, "how many really confront the question of what it means to think, see, and filter affect through the digital? How many thematize this, or reflect deeply on how we experience, and are altered by, the digitization of our existence?"
Bishop examines a number of practices, from the nostalgic fixation on celluloid ("Today, no exhibition is complete without some form of bulky, obsolete technology") to a reliance on reactive "non-Google methodologies":
... Mainstream contemporary art simultaneously disavows and depends on the digital revolution, even—especially—when this art declines to speak overtly about the conditions of living in and through new media.
Visit Artforum to read the article in full.
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Claire Bishop interviewed in the Boston Review
Last week, Corinne Segal interviewed Claire Bishop, author of Artificial Hells, for the Boston Review. In the course of their conversation, Bishop speaks to the lack of a critical language to describe “participatory art” as it is currently manifested here and in the UK, a void she attempted to fill with her book:
Social practice’s identification with ethics and politics should lead us to ask what’s prompting its allergy to the aesthetic. I’ve already mentioned the art market as a system with which many artists do not identify; this represents a bigger problem, which is a widespread dissatisfaction with free market capitalism and the inequality and disempowerment it produces. I think social practice also says something about our relationship to technology. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that social practice arises simultaneously with the digital revolution. Face-to-face relationships are becoming important as we spend more and more time online.
Bishop also discusses her larger aim “to question the use of political art as a substitute for political engagement” and emphasizes the relationship between media attention and political impact– as, she notes, can be seen in the case of Pussy Riot.
“Ideally,” she says, “we should always read art dually, in relation to its artistic context and its political context…This isn’t relativism, but a call for historical specificity.”
Visit the Boston Review to read the article in full.
