• Preface: What it is and how we did it
• Introduction
• Open Engagement: Making Things. Making Things Better. Making Things Worse.
• A Tracing, Socially
• Draft of a manifesto written in defense of a group of people that did not ask for my defense, using words they would not use and engaging people they ignore
• This is the End: Death and other Sensory Thresholds
• On the Discourse of Ethics in Socially Engaged Art Practice
• Are You Lonely? Make Art For Your Friends
• Interaction! Participation! Engagement! Production
• On Collaborating Within the M.O.S.T. (2003-2008)
• The Politics of Friendship, Or, Who Your Friends Should Be. An Interview with Matthew David Rana and Rick Butler
• On Multi-Tasking
• Making Things Better
• Me, Her and Us: Mapping Displacement with Anna Martine and Mary Anne Brooks at Open Engagement
• You Need To Have That Feeling That Anything's Possible
• Social Practice Art and Tech-Nihilism
• The Persistent Complicity of Heterogeneity
• Squirming
• Don't Just Invite Me To Dinner
• Open Engagement: A Toast to Access and Inclusion
• Thoughts On Social Practice Art
• Before, During, and After
• What is Public Art and Who is Your Public?
• From Every Angle
• What I remember about the video of John Paul II Marina Abramovic showed @ Reed in 2006
• What is there to dance about?
• Global Yawning Manifesto
• Interview: Musician, Movement Artist, Designer
• Clothing Musicians
• No Art But Class War
• Mirror Neurons to the Mona Lisa
• Fragments and Tangents
• Before
• Texts: What we are thinking about when we're thinking about Open Engagement
• After
• Contributors
• Appendix: The Back Channel
• Bibliography

This is the End: Death and Other Sensory Thresholds

Victor Maldonado

"Were the author truly dead, it would be impossible to differentiate between participatory and non participatory, because this can only occur through the celebrated surrender of authorship by the artist. The general delight surrounding the idea of the death of the author should not belie the fact that the author must always preordain this demise. One might also claim that the enactment of this self-abdication, this dissolution of the self into the masses, grants the author the possibility of controlling the audience--whereby the viewer forfeits his secure external position, his aesthetic distance from the artwork, and thus becomes not just a participant but also an integral part of the artwork. In this way participatory art can be understood not only as a reduction, but also as an extension, of authorial power." Boris Groys (Frieling, 23)

Groys’ eulogistic statements refer to Roland Barthes' notion of the death of the author. But as in Barthes' rumination, it's semantic camouflage deployed to elicit and delineate the limits of our language and perception. How we define authorship, in this case a spectrum extending into social practices, allows us an opportunity to deconstruct our dialectical treatment of contemporary arts practices.

Barthes’ methodology applied contemporaneously by Groys allows us to question what we say as artists, through whom and for whom we collectively speak. The social as form within today’s art market allows capitalism’s political other, taboo socialism, to produce alternatives to the specifics of product/profit driven practices.

Rather than attempt to create a paradigm shift, as is traditionally the role of expansive and experimental practices, art and social practices relies on its ability to parasitically use the images of commercial and academic art and to exist despite the lack of support systems that exist in sustainable for-profit ventures, to exist as action, exchange and transference reflecting the ends and limits of our layered societal matrices.

Art and social practices allows an adaptable and responsive analysis for understanding the nature of a reduced and extended authorial power within the context of an economy of forms both as non-artistic acts and monetized transferences.

It is the portable and adaptable image of the author as a sign of authoritative power, intellectually and evangelically, the voice(s) enunciating the word that gives both the American Dream and artistic persona their appeal; the ability to speak for yourself rather than having to be spoken for or especially spoken to is the death of a subscriptive approach to living, dictatorship, and subjugation to tyranny.

The death of the author is the birth of the reader so that today who can write is no longer the question. Anyone can speak for himself, or so goes the American mythology of freedom of speech and autonomous individuality.

Having a voice is the spirit of American democracy. That is what Groys' paradoxical notion of a reduced and extended level of participation by art audiences becomes an image of the American citizenship. So that irony and paradox extend from the constituency that endorses the policies drafted by legislators. Having a place at the table for important decisions being made is the prize and burden of participation in a Democratic society.

Extending the voice of the author also extends the weight and responsibility of the creative act. After the death of the author the question remains how to collectively draft our communal legislation?

Part of what makes Groys' enunciation of Barthes loaded wordsmithing is that it gets to the subtext of authorship: power. If knowledge is power then intellectuals are power plants. And though the word play can get sophomoric and tedious it serves well its purpose in two ways:

First by discouraging those who would dare hold an authoritative view by conveying that all power has a specific context, that environments of power are unsustainable.

And second, the so-called death of the author we lament actually creates the necessary stimulus to keep from becoming static, like standing water, in our ability to create new strategies and solutions for how we navigate and adapt to new environments and situations.

To "reduce" something can have many connotations. At face value to reduce something has an air of cutting something down, to make less of from more. Not as in the old modernist handbook of less is more but of less just being plain less. In this light, reduction is akin to a diminished state less valuable than the eternal priori, a vote that counts for nothing or a voice that falls on deaf ears.

Watered down wine barrels not withstanding, cutting the product to get more out of it sounds like something a shady drug lord from Baltimore would pull off. Like cheaper and dirty drugs, an authoritative view and absolute power are in the hands of the user on the street now.

The problem is that even junkies have a problem with a cheap product. There is an expectation in terms of value and worth. It is a classic bait and switch scheme for stretching profits and for meaning making.

But, what if all of this intellectual activity helps us not overdose on theory? What if theory and practice cut each other? What if collaborative authorship and social practices helps cut the power associated with the creative act usually focused on the artists who produce luxury items, the dealers who monetize and transact those objects of discourse to collectors and curators?

And, what if Groys' use of the "diminished" was closer to abstractions and distortions like miniaturization? What if value ceded to surplus value? When less is more, as in replicating inoculation, homeopathy, and Miesian architecture.

Part of the ploy and play of post-structural thinking is that it exposes language and communication as a game of deep symbiosis that is complex and fleeting. Our evolving spectatorship is what Groys is interested in because it represents a kind of heterotopic site for how our society values having a "say" into what's happening in front of them.

Why is Groys interested in the liminal nature of modern authorship? Who are the artists and distribution industries that pressure his thinking? And for what enlightened class of audience does he write for?