Artificial hells
Subtitle: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship
By: by Claire Bishop
Edition: 1st [edition].
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Brooklyn, NY
Language: eng
Number of pages: 382
ISBN-13: 9781844676903; 9781844677962
Subjects: Interactive art
Description: "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, Pawel 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."--Page 4 of cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The social turn: collaboration and its discontents; title: Artificial hells: the historic avant-garde; title: Je participe, tu participes, il participe; title: Social sadism made explicit; title: The social under socialism; title: Incidental people: APG and community arts; title: Former West: art as project in the early 1990s; title: Delegated performance: outsourcing authenticity; title: Pedagogic projects: 'how do you bring a classroom to life as if it were a work of art?'; title: Conclusion: spectacle and participation.