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The Participatory Art Museum: Approached from a Philosophical Perspective

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2016

Sarah Hegenbart
Sarah Hegenbart*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford and The Courtauld Institute of Art London
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

This chapter introduces the participatory art museum and discusses some of the challenges it raises for philosophical aesthetics. Although participatory art is now an essential part of museological programming, an aesthetic account of participatory art is still missing. The chapter argues that much could be gained from exploring participatory art, as it raises fundamental challenges to our understanding of issues in aesthetics, such as the nature of aesthetic experience, the value of art, and the role of the spectator. Moreover, participatory art fundamentally questions the status of the museum as an exhibition space for contemporary art practices.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 79: Philosophy and Museums: Essays in the Philosophy of Museums , October 2016 , pp. 319 - 339
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2016 

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References

1 The idea that museums resemble mausolea was introduced in Adorno, Theodor W., ‘Valéry Proust Museum’, in Adorno, Theodor W., Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996)Google Scholar. Terry Smith introduces Allan Kaprow's adaptation of Adorno's thought. See Smith, Terry, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012), 104Google Scholar.

2 The participant-spectator plays a much more fundamental role in the construction of the value of the artwork than the mere spectator. Whereas traditional artworks, such as a painting by Picasso, possess an inherent aesthetic value, which the spectator can perceive, participatory art does not have a value prior to the engagement of the participant-spectators who actively shape and construct its value.

3 Bishop, Claire, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 1Google Scholar.

4 Allan Kaprow might be viewed as one of the founding fathers of participatory art. Other famous early representatives are Joseph Beuys in Germany, as well as the Artist Placement Group and Stephen Willats in the UK.

5 Participatory art is not mentioned as one of the specific art forms in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics. See Levinson, Jerrold, ‘Philosophical Aesthetics: An Overview’, in Levinson, Jerrold (ed), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. More recent publications on participatory art, such as Bishop's Artificial Hells (op. cit.), similarly lack an aesthetic account of participatory art.

6 See O'Doherty, Brian, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, expanded edition (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1999), 15Google Scholar.

7 As far as I can see, nobody has so far succeeded in making sufficiently clear what the separation between art and life consists in. My suspicion is that this separation is rooted in the German romanticist movement and the idea of the autonomy of the aesthetic realm. If one thinks of traditional rituals that included art objects, one realizes that art originally used to be embedded within life. The idea of the autonomy of art led to a separation of the aesthetic realm from day-to-day life. An extreme version of this separation between art and life still takes place at Richard Wagner's Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. Switching off the lights and locking the doors clearly happens to provide an aesthetic realm in which we are separated from our day-to-day concerns in order to fully appreciate Wagnerian operas.

8 Schlingensief emphasized that Africa has a rich spiritual culture from which we can learn a great deal. He sometimes even described his Opera Village as an attempt to steal from Africa (see: http://www.schlingensief.com/projekt.php?id=festspielhaus).

9 See: http://www.machdireinbild.com.

10 The term ‘Bühnenweihfestspiel’, which Wagner coined, indicates the gap between the sacred happenings that ‘bless’ the stage and everyday life. Wagner's description of the ideal viewing environments for the total artwork involve the creation of a suspended aesthetic realm in an almost sacral manner, which prevents everyday concerns distracting the viewer from the ideal appreciation of total artwork.

11 Schlingensief's statement, quoted from his speech on the laying of the foundation stone of the Opera Village on 8 February 2010, raises the question of whether the people in the village actually understand themselves as participants in an opera.

12 See Krauss, Rosalind, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October 8 (1979), 30–44 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 There are, of course, other types of value, such as epistemic value, that an artwork can possess; I will not discuss these here.

14 See Stecker, Robert, ‘The Interaction of Ethical and Aesthetic Value’, British Journal of Aesthetics 45/2 (2005), 138–150 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kieran, Matthew, ‘Value of Art’, in Gaut, Berys & Lopes, Dominic McIver (eds), The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2005)Google Scholar.

15 See the leaflet accompanying the exhibition ‘Christoph Schlingensief. 18 Bilder pro Sekunde’ at the Haus der Kunst in Munich running from 25.05.2007 – 16.09.2007. This can be found online: http://www.schlingensief.com/arbeiten/t061/cs_zeitung_hausderkunst.pdf.

16 See Jörg van der Horst's project description of the animatograph at http://www.schlingensief.com/projekt.ph?id=t052&article=theorie. The term of the ‘animatograph’ was originally introduced in March 1896 as a neologism and marketing strategy to make Robert W. Paul's invention of the ‘theatrograph’ sound more attractive.

17 One might note here that, whilst interactionist debates locate the ethical in the content of the artwork or the response this content elicits, a participatory artwork does not possess content prior to the participation of the audience. This means that the ethical in participatory art, and the way in which it depends on the character of the audience, is qualitatively different from the ethical in traditional artworks.

18 The image of Richter's Youth Portrait can be found here: http://www.gerhard-richter.com/art/paintings/photo_paintings/detail.php?7697.

19 Bishop, Artificial Hells, op. cit., 39.

20 I align here with Juliane Rebentisch, who refers back to Arthur Danto when pointing out that installation art is ‘interested’ rather than ‘disinterested’. I think that the same applies to participatory art. Rebentisch argues against a conception of aesthetic autonomy that insulates aesthetic experiences from the social realm. See Rebentisch, Juliane, Aesthetics of Installation Art (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012), 262Google Scholar.

21 See Kester, Grant H., Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2004)Google Scholar; and Kester, Grant H., The One and The Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 See ibid.

23 See Kester, Conversation Pieces, op. cit., 110.

24 Rebentisch, Aesthetics of Installation Art, op. cit., 262.

25 Ibid., 263.

26 Annas, Julia, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 See Lopes, Dominic McIver, Sight and Sensibility: Evaluating Pictures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 148CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 See Kieran, Matthew, ‘Creativity as a Virtue of Character’, in Kaufman, Scott Barry and Paul, Elliot Samuel (eds), The Philosophy of Creativity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar.

29 Examining the cross-situationalist consistency of the virtues leads to another argument for the interaction between ethical and aesthetic virtues. This argument is contrary to the position advanced by Peter Goldie and Dominic McIver Lopes who hold that one might expect more cross-situational consistency in ethics rather than in aesthetics. See Goldie, Peter and Lopes, Dominic McIver, ‘Virtues of Art’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume LXXXII (2008), 184Google Scholar.

30 The term ‘participatory museum’ might initially sound quite paradoxical. The traditional understanding of the museum is that of an institution in which cultural goods are stored and separated from our day-to-day life by entering the aesthetic and suspended realm that the museum constitutes. Participation then only consists in gazing in awe at the exhibited objects. The participatory museum reverses this separation between object and spectator and establishes a much more engaged relationship between them.

31 Lynch, Bernadette T., ‘Collaboration, Contestation and Creative Conflict: On the Efficacy of Museum/Community Partnerships’, in Marstine, Janet (ed), The Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics: Redefining Ethics for the Twenty-First-Century Museum (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 155Google Scholar.

32 See Boal, Augusto, Theatre of the Oppressed, translated by Charles, A., McBride, Maria-Odilia Leal and Fryer, Emily (London: Pluto Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

33 The idea of the ‘spect-actor’ closely resembles that of the participant-spectator in participatory art.

34 Fischer-Lichte's theoretical concept ‘autopoiesis’ explicates how the active spectator partakes in the construction of value. This form of value construction bears close parallels to the way in which value is constructed in the participatory theatre. See Fischer-Lichte, Erika, The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics, translated by Jain, Saskya Iris (London and New York: Routledge, 2008)Google Scholar.

35 This paper is dedicated to Frederica Daniele whose belief in a widely accessible democratic form of education has deeply inspired me.