Reflecting on Claire Bishop’s Participation and Spectacle 1: Is our practice opposed to ‘spectacle’?

Note: I will be writing a series of 3 to 4 pieces on Claire Bishop’s chapter Participation and Spectacle, published in Nato Thompson’s Living as Form (2012).

In this dense but more manageable chapter, Bishop summarised some of “Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship” (2012), then proceeded to present her conclusion from the book. I will break the chapter into several sections to discuss some of her claims and hope it can help us to think about our practice.

Readers should dig deeper into the dense research if interested. Though I disagree with more than a few of her arguments and interpretations, she does provide some good critiques of participatory practices.

Some of the implications of her work go well beyond her writing.

Is our participation opposed to ‘spectacle’?

I believe that it is more important to think about what we are working towards, because a person’s work should not chiefly be identified through opposition. That said, sometimes it helps to think about the multitude of motivations behind our work by thinking in opposition.

Are we working in opposition to spectacle? Perhaps you do not use this term, but you probably have thought about the ideas she has grouped under this term.

Bishop drew on various sources to explain ‘spectacle’:

• (for Rosalind Krauss writing on the late capitalist museum), an absence of historical positioning and a capitulation to pure presentedness
• (for James Meyer, arguing against Olafur Eliasson’s Weather Project), it denotes an overwhelming scale that dwarfs viewers and eclipses the human body as a point of reference
• (for Hal Foster writing on the Bilbao Guggenheim), it denotes the triumph of corporate branding
• (for Benjamin Buchloh denouncing Bill Viola), it refers to an uncritical use of new technology
• (And yet, for Debord…, “spectacle” is a definition of social relations under capitalism). Individual subjects experience society as atomized and fragmented because social experience is mediated by images-either the “diffuse” images of consumerism or the “concentrated” images of the leader.

Reflection

It is not difficult to spot values and considerations in the community arts and socially-engaged arts that are antithetical to the above points. Context are often provided for viewers of works from participatory processes; sizes of works are often modest and humanly relatable; emphasis on DIY processes for daily items; often projects are intended to get children and adults away from tv, computers and mobile device; participants meet and work together face to face.

Is ‘spectacle’ inherently bad? Probably not always. Yet it is worth further considerations.

Yet, it is also not difficult to see projects relying on ‘spectacle’, willingly or not. Large murals and canvases are used to create a spectacle (in addition to the working space it provides); projects receiving sponsors from major brands; projects incorporating electronic and digital components sometimes in uncritical ways.

This can be explained in the following ways:

1. The practitioner was never working against ‘spectacle’, thus Bishop’s argument is not applicable.
2. The practitioner has made the decision that the advantages to the project outweigh the disadvantages of the ‘spectacle’ employed.
3. The practitioner simply is not aware of the implications and impact of her or his work.

If we were to adopt Bishop’s reasoning of opposition, her idea of ‘spectacle’ definitely does not cover what we are working against. Discounting options 1 and 3 (please develop an awareness of the implications of your practice), we are left with option 2:

We have made certain compromises in our practice.

Have you?

Was it worth it?

Is there any way to weigh the pros and cons?

Since I believe that most anything important related to the community arts and socially engaged arts cannot be quantified, I do not think we can ever be certain the compromises are worth it. Yet we all have to make some compromises if we want to do anything of consequence.

We can try to answer this question if we know what we are working towards. Only if we know how we want to be defined can we be aware and responsible for the compromises we make.

Next Week:

From an agitational force campaigning for social justice (in the early 1970s), [community art] became a harmless branch of the welfare state (by the 1980s): the kindly folk who can be relied upon to mop up wherever the government wishes to absolve itself of responsibility

Bishop was commenting mainly UK’s community arts movement, but is this applicable to Hong Kong?