Claire Bishop's book comes as a timely rejoinder to the popularity of so-called participatory art, which has ballooned since the early 1990s. The diverse field of practice has seen artists variously collaborating, consulting and co-authoring with, and employing, using and exploiting, non-artists in their work. Broadly, this has occurred under the laudable yet elusive banners of dis-alienation, emancipation, education and social change, and, as Bishop convincingly argues, has often set itself up somewhat naively ‘against its mythic counterpart, passive spectatorial consumption’ (p. 275).
Bishop begins the work by providing a critical and thorough outline of the key terms pertaining to participatory arts practices, before casting her net more widely to apply theoretical frameworks borrowed from political philosophy, theatre history, performance studies, cultural policy and architecture. The bulk of the book is built on these foundations, guiding us skilfully on an illuminating and lesser-known path that weaves between historical moments at which the relationships among the art object, the artist and the viewer have been, to a greater or lesser extent, reformulated. Starting out with the historic avant-garde in Europe around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, Bishop leads us via the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s to the aftermath of the fall of Communism in 1989. Through her lucid and detailed exposition of the historical antecedents to the recent rise in participatory arts practices, Bishop resoundingly reframes the current trend as a return, rather than a turn, to the social.
The enthralling journey – the product of seven years’ research – is made all the more convincing by Bishop's indiscrimination between canonical and obscure examples of participatory arts, and her maintenance of a ‘Lacanian fidelity to the singularity of each [artistic] project’ (p. 26). In each case, whether it be the well-known serate of the Italian Futurists, which sought to curate a symphony of poetry, painting and sculpture for some of the first mass audiences, or the actions of Milan Knížák and Alex Mlynárčik in the 1960s and 1970s in Prague and Bratislava, respectively, which presented a vital voice of dissent against a violent authoritarian regime, Bishop angles her piercing gaze with precision and insight, dissecting each work and expounding the historical and cultural forces that led to its creation.
Bishop ends by focusing her attention on the growing instrumentalization of participatory arts in contemporary UK settings, which has typically focused on disenfranchised or socially ‘excluded’ participants. Her critique here is typically rigorous and varied, questioning every aspect of participatory practice, from its self-determined and insular parameters of ‘success’ (which reject comparison with traditional art on the one hand and traditional social work on the other) to its dubious goals which desire, at worst, that participants simply make a ‘transition across the boundary from excluded to included, [allowing them] to access the holy grail of self-sufficient consumerism’ (p. 13). Ultimately, Bishop provides us with a rare thing: an essential counterreading of a contemporary trend that remains reasoned, eloquent and striking, resisting the urge to slip into the realm of the polemic.
