Shared Knowledge

The Art Between Ethnic Politics and Capital Flow
http://samiartfestival.org/participants/3

Northern Experiments (a publication)
http://www.0047.org/publications/view/8




PARTICIPATION

Colaboration and participation seem to be the trending topics of many discussions concerning production (this in the arts but also in any other disciplines). It is what theorists call the parcipatory turn (there also being an educational turn-the fever of museums and art institutions to have an educational program). The collapse of certain production and economic models has obliged us all to rethink how we do and propo- se, but of course collaborating is no new practice.Looking back we spot in the begining of the 1960s this same flourishing of collective practices, and also those were times when rethinking the models was necessary. The post-war reconstruction helped relax the national and ideological boundary concerns, which gave way to experimentation, the sexual revolution was at stake, art became projects, exhibitions became happenings and spectators became participants.This new spectator is very well spotted by french philosopher Jacques Rancière in his conference given at the International Summer Academy of Arts of Frankfurt in 2004 where he delevopes the idea of an spec- tator who is no longer a passive agent of recieving information (as it is undertood by neo-liberal powers today). He critizises the practices in which the artists or producers think about audience and do not permit this to generate their own process of intervening (this can be intelectually.) Also in The Ignorant School- master: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, published in 1981 he depicts the idea of education asa parcipatory process, which i recond highly relevant for this discussion. In this text he gives the example of pedagogue Joseph Jacotot who revolutioned the educational systems by teaching a language he did not speak. He then started guiding the scholars through the language, but not shortening the way of learning by telling them the answers. Rancière developes through this book the idea of an emacipated scholar, spectator, and citizen who can be able to produce their own criteria by judging and comparing their own culture and what is offered from any other external producer. Therefore a participation takes places, not an imposition. Coming back to the spectator and the art production, Rancière critisizes the paradox of political art being faithful to the mimetical traditional art, and to think and use this for the pedagogical model and art practices.

Covers of Jaques Rancière's texts

Looking at this more theoretical example to see how this turn shares time with an educational concern, I am interested in the studies and theories Lawrence Halprin developed in the 1960s about collaborative practices. He tried to develope a method that favoured the process over the result and the communal effort over indi- vidual authorship called the RSVP cycle. It is organized into four parts: with enough Resources (R), a clear score (S) and faculties of analysis that he termed “valuaction” (V), and idea can be performed (P).

Sketches Lawrence Halprin did to explain his RSVP cycle.

Halprin saw this steps as necessary for collaboration, but not necessarily prescriptive of it, much more of an ethic as it is of a method. He planned a community on the west coast of California about 160 kilometers north of San Francisco called the Sea Ranch. In 1962 a group of architects was assembled including Halprin himself,

who convinced them that planning should begin through ecological scoring (one of the steps of the method-planning). Houses should have roofs pitched like the mountain slope to create a consistent wind movement;houses should be shingled or wooden; and the sixteen kilometers of shore line should be free of buildings. These rules were not followed as collaboration and eventually gave way to selfish desires.
To colaborate is to work jointly for a common goal. To participate is to take part in a project without the mandate to cooperate, in this project, with given time, common goals frangmented into individual needs. Halprin though of collaboration as a way of improving design.

Sea Ranch housing and workshop

Following with this “failed” example of Halprin, i am interested on talking about Chantal Mouffe ́s perspec- tive of participation and collaborative proyects. She is a Belgian political theorist born in Charleoir in 1943 concerned about the concept of ‘the political’, in proposing a radicalization of modern democracy – what she calls ‘agonistic pluralism’. She has recently developed an interest in highlighting the radical potential of ar- tistic practices. Her text Artistic Activism and Agonistic Spaces written in 2007 is where she mostly puts this concept through. She starts introducing the idea of activism and participation being neutralized by capitalist forces which makes these loose automatically its force, claiming that artistic critique has become and important element of capitalist productivity.
“What is needed is widening the field of artistic intervention, by intervening directly in a multiplicity of social spaces in order to oppose the program of total social mobilization of capitalism.” In her ideas she talks on how polical decisions taken noawadays make us citizens make a choice between conflicting alternatives, being part of an uncontested hegemony of liberalism. She differenciates the social from the polical (being this an institutional hegemony). “The social is the realm of sedimented practices, that is, practices that conceal the originary acts of their contingent political institution and which are taken for granted, as if they were self-grounded.” I think also it is interesting how she sees art as there allways being to it a political dimension and an aesthetic dimmension in the political, “Artistic practices play a role in the constitution and maintenance of a given symbolic order or in its challenging and this is why they necessarily have a political dimension. The political, for its part, concerns the symbolic ordering of social relations, what Claude Lefort calls ‘the mise en scène’, ‘the mise en forme’ of human coexistence and this is where lies its aesthetic dimension.” Here she starts introducing the idea of consensus and agonism explaining those proyects which activate agonistic public spaces have an objetive of unvealing the repressed by dominant consensus, confronting and opposing these ideas to a consenssus of parcipatory and artistic practices, thinking about this consensus as a way which tends to obscure and obliterate, and is again and again instrumentalized and silenced.
“To grasp the political character of those varieties of artistic activism we need to see them as counter-hege- monic interventions whose objective is to occupy the public space in order to disrupt the smooth image that corporate capitalism is trying to spread, bringing to the fore its repressive character”.
This pratice of subverting the dominant hegemony brings me back to Rancière ́s idea of constructing new subjetivities, non-passive actors which can intervine from a critical perspective.
Also she introduces the idea of the priviledge position of the modernist artist:“In fact this has always been their role and it is only the modernist illusion of the privileged position of the artist that has made us believe otherwise. Once this illusion is abandoned, jointly with the revolutionary conception of politics accompanying it, we can see that critical artistic practices represent an important dimension of democratic politics. This does not mean, though, as some seem to believe, that they could alone realize the transformations needed for the establishment of a new hegemony.” This last sentence is revealing to understand this practices as one of the ways to intervine, but necesarry to be accompanied by others.
Here there is a link to one of her lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wpwwc25JRU
To finish up I wanted to talk about the recent spanish movement of 15m, which took place in the entire estate and reinvidicated the rolle of citizens in political descissions. The most repeated slogan was “que no nos representan-we are not represented by them”. The social body asked for its autonomy “we are not represented by them” In this case, art does not need to give representations but give new forms of live and relations.

Spanish saying during 15m movement

This obliged us -and obliges us all- to rethink the concepts of multiplicity and happening in realtion to the contemporary artistic practices. If no one is to be represented by anyone, because the social body asks for its autonomy, art therefore must not represent anything but construct and produce new forms of live and new relations.

To exemplify this I wanted to use an artistic practice which took place in Madrid, in relation to the Centro de Arte dos de Mayo, in which a collective called Fast Gallery did an action called Futuro Imperfeto consisting of an open call inviting people to join them in the square with home made flags. This practice used the activism strategies also performing in direct action which by going to the streets and engaging people activated senses and spaces, also and most important, activated affections. They responded to the moment spain is going through with and action that permited to reinvent symbols in an imaginitive way and participation in this representation takes place.

So conecting to Mouffe ́s ideas of multiplicity, plurality and conflict being the nature of politics, we are here shown a public sphere conected to passions. Artistic practices are necessary in an esthetical and political sense, to reinvent and movilize affections.

Intervention by spanish collective Fast Gallery in Madrid

I would like to end up quoting a brazilian socilogist called Suely Rolnik, who speaks about this subjetivity and active espectator-citizen: “Artistic practices can raise in those recieving them not only the concience of domination and explotation, its visible face, macropolitic, as activism does, but the experience of those power relations in their own body, its micropolitical power and unconcius, which inteferes in the process of subjectivity there where this collective gets caught to participate.”