Spencer Tunick’s crouching nudes in Mexico CityHere’s a quick reference guide that will seek to explain the trends, terms, and movements of the brave new media world of art and technology. So you can skim, digest, and be a pseudo-expert next time you’re cornered at a Speed Show exhibition in your local cybercafe. Because, hey, life is short and art long. This week: Participatory art.So, what is participatory art?
Similar to crowdsourced art, which uses the internet to outsource tasks to the hive-mind, participatory art is an offline version where the public are collaborators in the art piece. Art is taken out of the hands of the oligarchic art elite and into the democratic paws of the masses.Where did it come from?
In the 1960s, Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal created the theatrical method Theater of the Oppressed. He transformed the audience from passive, oppressed spectators into active, expressive participants (spect-actors), thereby liberating them and making them work for their evening out. Also helping to popularize this socialist artform was American painter Allan Kaprow‘s Happenings. Though the term has been soured by the image of naked hippies painting star flowers on their genitals while reciting beat poetry about sullen narwhals, in the 1950s and 60s Kaprow popularized the term with what he defined as “a game, an adventure, a number of activities engaged in by participants for the sake of playing.” Modern examples include Spencer Tunick’s nakedscapes of birthday-suited human bodies splayed across Sydney Harbor and other public places. And also Antony Gormley’s One & Other, where 2,400 members of the British public were given an hour alone atop the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, to shout inanities at the braying public below.This week you're really digging…
Marina Abramović’s 2010 MoMA retrospective The Artist is Present which saw participants waiting in line for hours to sit in a chair opposite the artist, who sat motionless every day the museum was open for three months straight. Many audience members cried at the intensity of it all, which prompted the online community to create such comical Tumblr sites in tribute as Marina Abramović Made Me Cry and Marina Abramović Made Me High, featuring portraits of audience members shedding salty tears and looked stoned, respectively.Marina Abramović stares someone out.
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It’s a controversial subject, one that has enraged The Guardian‘s resident art critic Jonathan Jones to decry: "Participatory art is a denial of talent. It panders to a cosy lie, that everyone is equally able to create worthwhile art. What chance have we of nurturing those rare wonders in our midst, the born artists, if we claim this infantile right to put on a badge that says ’artist’?". Ouch. Doubt we’ll be seeing his naked angry form in Spencer Tunick’s next shoot then.But if, unlike Mr Jones, you want to get involved, try FIGMENT, an annual participatory arts event on Governors Island in New York Harbor, USA.Describe yourself as…
A stroke of the brush.Keywords
Democratic, participatory, community, collaboration, audience, engagement.Difficulty level
Bring your own.Age range
Flash mob.Gormley discusses his equally derided and celebrated fourth plinth project.Tagline
We’re all in this together.To recap: A place where 5,000 naked men and women can come together and have a lie down.Next week: Dynamic painting
Similar to crowdsourced art, which uses the internet to outsource tasks to the hive-mind, participatory art is an offline version where the public are collaborators in the art piece. Art is taken out of the hands of the oligarchic art elite and into the democratic paws of the masses.
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In the 1960s, Brazilian theater director Augusto Boal created the theatrical method Theater of the Oppressed. He transformed the audience from passive, oppressed spectators into active, expressive participants (spect-actors), thereby liberating them and making them work for their evening out. Also helping to popularize this socialist artform was American painter Allan Kaprow‘s Happenings. Though the term has been soured by the image of naked hippies painting star flowers on their genitals while reciting beat poetry about sullen narwhals, in the 1950s and 60s Kaprow popularized the term with what he defined as “a game, an adventure, a number of activities engaged in by participants for the sake of playing.” Modern examples include Spencer Tunick’s nakedscapes of birthday-suited human bodies splayed across Sydney Harbor and other public places. And also Antony Gormley’s One & Other, where 2,400 members of the British public were given an hour alone atop the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, to shout inanities at the braying public below.This week you're really digging…
Marina Abramović’s 2010 MoMA retrospective The Artist is Present which saw participants waiting in line for hours to sit in a chair opposite the artist, who sat motionless every day the museum was open for three months straight. Many audience members cried at the intensity of it all, which prompted the online community to create such comical Tumblr sites in tribute as Marina Abramović Made Me Cry and Marina Abramović Made Me High, featuring portraits of audience members shedding salty tears and looked stoned, respectively.
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It’s a controversial subject, one that has enraged The Guardian‘s resident art critic Jonathan Jones to decry: "Participatory art is a denial of talent. It panders to a cosy lie, that everyone is equally able to create worthwhile art. What chance have we of nurturing those rare wonders in our midst, the born artists, if we claim this infantile right to put on a badge that says ’artist’?". Ouch. Doubt we’ll be seeing his naked angry form in Spencer Tunick’s next shoot then.But if, unlike Mr Jones, you want to get involved, try FIGMENT, an annual participatory arts event on Governors Island in New York Harbor, USA.Describe yourself as…
A stroke of the brush.Keywords
Democratic, participatory, community, collaboration, audience, engagement.Difficulty level
Bring your own.Age range
Flash mob.Gormley discusses his equally derided and celebrated fourth plinth project.Tagline
We’re all in this together.To recap: A place where 5,000 naked men and women can come together and have a lie down.Next week: Dynamic painting