Directed Reality and the Grey Zone

Key Principle

"Directed reality" (from Pawel Althamer): "the combination of clear conceptual premise and partially unpredictable realisation" (p. 33). This names the artistic problem of participatory work -- how much scripting to enforce -- as against the "ethical black-and-white of 'good' or 'bad' collaboration" (p. 33). The grey zone between full control and total chaos is where participatory art's genuine decisions occur.

Why This Matters

The ethical turn reduces participatory art to a moral question (did the artist treat collaborators well?). Directed reality relocates the question to an artistic one: what structural decisions produced what contradictions? Loss of control is not failure but meaning -- the artist's anxiety when the event exceeds its frame is "inseparable from the work's overall meaning" (p. 33).

Good Examples

• Deller, The Battle of Orgreave (2001): Re-enactment of 1984 miners' strike clash. "A tight conceptual kernel" with "formal laxity and improvisation" (p. 33). Genre collision between re-enactment societies (stylised repetition) and miners (traumatic reliving) "symbolically elevated the relatively recent events at Orgreave to the status of English history" (p. 33). The work "hovers uneasily between menacing violence and family entertainment" -- irreducibility to message is the aesthetic achievement (p. 32).
• 1960s competing models: SI demanded total revolutionary overhaul; GRAV offered deliberately orchestrated perceptual interruptions; Lebel channelled collective unconscious through transgressive ritual (pp. 101-102). Each represents a different position on the scripting spectrum.
• GRAV's self-defeating paradox: "The very idea of 'making' someone participate undermines the claim to defeating apathy, and almost incapacitates the viewer from the beginning; all he or she can do is fulfil the artists' requirements to complete the work 'correctly'" (p. 89).
• Ossification of provocation: Parisian audiences learned to consume Dada scandal as entertainment, "arriving at events with food to throw" -- provocation became convention. When the audience becomes the artist's accomplice, critical distance collapses (p. 70).

Counterpoints

• Participation as moving target: 1960s techniques (Happenings, Living Theatre) are now mainstream conventions shared with reality TV and social networking. "The meaning of artistic forms shifts in relation to the uses also made of these forms by society at large" (p. 30).
• Multiple ontology: Works like Orgreave exist across live event, film, publication, and archive installation -- each medium produces a different audience relationship (p. 32).
• Artistic plenitude: A work's capacity to sustain multiple contradictory critical judgements is evidence of success, not failure (p. 37).

Key Quotes

"It is precisely here that one sees the grey artistic work of participatory art -- deciding how much or how little scripting to enforce -- rather than in the ethical black-and-white of 'good' or 'bad' collaboration" -- Claire Bishop, p. 33

"I'm not in charge any more, really" -- Jeremy Deller, p. 33

Rules of Thumb

• The artistic question is "how much scripting?" not "was the collaboration ethical?"
• A tight conceptual kernel with improvised realisation is the directed-reality model
• When provocation becomes expected, it loses force -- shift to appropriating real social forms
• Multiple contradictory readings of a work signal artistic plenitude, not confusion

The Scripting Spectrum

Related References

• Rules of Thumb: Philosophical Heuristics for Participatory Art - Heuristics #6 and #7 derive from directed reality
• Social Sadism and Strategic Reification - Argentine artists push scripting toward coercion
• Three Revolutionary Flashpoints: 1917, 1968, 1989 - Each era's competing models of control vs. chaos