Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

A searing critique of participatory art by an iconoclastic historian. Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as “social practice”. Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawel Althamer and Paul Chan.

Details

Type

Book

Place of publication

London

Publisher

Verso

Year

2012

Number of pages

382 pages

Language

English

ISBN

9781844677962

Open stacks or available on request

Available on request

Illustrations

Yes

Bibliography

No

UDC code and author sign

701.2 Bis

Volumes

1

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