Key Principle
A recurring tension structures participatory art's history: "an art of formal innovation that has relevance beyond its immediate historical moment" versus "a dynamic culture that involves as many workers as possible and in so doing provides an ethically and politically correct social model" (p. 63). This plays out as the binary of "bad" singular authorship versus "good" collective authorship (p. 8), but the most powerful works maintain authored singularity within collective processes (p. 4).
Why This Matters
Every movement that refused aesthetic evaluation -- from Proletkult theatre to UK community arts -- was eventually co-opted or dissolved. Quality criteria are necessary "not as a means to reinforce elite culture and police the boundaries of art and non-art, but as a way to understand and clarify our shared values at a given historical moment" (p. 8).
Good Examples
Proletkult (1920s Russia)
- Bogdanov sought total cultural rupture: art redefined as organised labour, creativity stripped of Romantic interiority. Paradox: despite humanist desire to end alienation, he was intolerant of deviation from collectivism (p. 51).
- Trotsky's counter-position: class speaks through individuals. Art's content must evolve of its own accord. Creative freedom functions as self-education (p. 52).
- Amateur theatre proliferated despite material deprivation: 600+ village dramatic circles in Kostroma alone (p. 54). But politically mandated art degraded artistic form -- the proletariat themselves requested Gogol over revolutionary plays (p. 55).
- Persimfans (conductorless orchestra, 1922-32): Eliminated the conductor to enact collectivism. Had timing problems; performed bourgeois classics because revolutionary music did not exist. Collective composition was "ideologically desirable but artistically premature" (p. 63).
UK Community Arts (1970s-80s)
- Defined by opposition to quality/skill/virtuosity as concealing class interests; advocacy for participation and co-authorship (p. 177).
- The Blackie's Sanctuary (1969): Audience assigned different housing types producing divergent simultaneous experiences -- structural critique of inequality through lived experience (p. 183).
- Decline trajectory: countercultural origins -> grant-dependency -> professionalisation -> co-optation -> rebranding as educational programme -> fragmentation (p. 187).
- Community arts' definitional vagueness left it open to institutional capture: "a lack of public critical discourse ensured that the stakes were kept low" (p. 190).
Counterpoints
- Roland Barthes (1968) established that "authorships (of all kinds) are multiple and continually indebted to others" (p. 9). The relevant question is not who authored but "the ideas, experiences and possibilities that result" (p. 9).
- Collective art "survives only with difficulty within the canon, further sidelined by being performance- rather than object-based" (p. 66).
- Anti-aesthetic forms still have aesthetics: "their own experiential regime" must be analysed (p. 8).
Key Quotes
"Participation was more important than watchability, dramatic impact or technical skill." -- Kerzhentsev on mass spectacle, p. 63
"a lack of public critical discourse ensured that the stakes were kept low, rendering community art harmless and unthreatening to social and cultural stability" -- Claire Bishop, p. 190
"We were, in effect, inviting people to let one branch of the state send in a group of people to clear up the mess left by another branch of the state, while at the same time denying that we were working for the state" -- Owen Kelly, p. 188
Rules of Thumb
- Refusing aesthetic evaluation does not protect participatory art -- it leaves it defenceless against institutional co-optation
- Authored singularity and collective process are not opposed; the best work holds both
- When community arts defines itself by moral position rather than artistic agenda, it becomes vulnerable to rebranding by funders
- Compare participatory art to non-art social projects to test whether its claimed value is genuine or parasitic on the art frame
Related References
- The Ethical Turn and Its Discontents - Contemporary version of this same tension
- Three Revolutionary Flashpoints: 1917, 1968, 1989 - Each flashpoint replays this dilemma
- Double Finality: Guattari's Evaluative Criterion - The resolution that demands success in both fields
- The Project as Post-1989 Art Form - APG and the "project" inheriting this tension