open

Squirming

Tiffany Lee Brown

Participatory art deserves its own set of aesthetic considerations, its own set of rules and graces and critical judgments. As social practice grows increasingly popular and trendy, artists untrained in this kind of interaction apply the rules of the visual art world to their creations, often working with a naivete that promotes a simplified notion of social change. Audiences like this, partly because they have been pre-trained in typical art world aesthetics. They know how to like something that's gosh-awful purdy. They know how to like Zen-seeming conceptual statements. They like work that tells them exactly what to do, if they must "do" anything at all. Social practice at least feels a little bit more soulful and emotionally engaged than the hyper-clever fare that usually passes for art. So they like it indeed.

But if you have been involved in the under-the-radar, murky realms of collaborative and participatory creation in the last couple decades, you may have experienced a lot of decidedly unpretty stuff. Messy statements. Bewildering statements. No statements at all. You may have experienced this in the company of artists who hail from the performative arts, from weird Internet text collaborations of long ago, from strange offshoots of subcultural movements whose hairdos you always thought were silly... they do not come from The Art World. Interaction is their stock in trade. Many times, they will consciously sacrifice the usual (often visual) aesthetic considerations because creating that kind of work, that kind of environment, typically works in predictable ways on the audience's psyche. They don't want that. They want something more interesting to emerge, even if it's ugly or emerges from an *apparently* non-hyper-aesthetic environment. To a performance artist, dancer, improvisational musician who makes socially engaged art or personal-emotional participatory art, putting you off guard or making you think you're not actually experiencing art may be more important than impressing you with a beautiful, sculptural installation. Their tools are different.

And yet their practice has been largely misunderstood. As more and more art-worldy artists take up participatory work, more attention and legitimacy are granted to the whole idea of interaction and participation in art. Yet the art-worldy artists have a tendency to water down the raw potential of participatory artwork...by making it pretty and understandable. The marginalized dancers, musicians, performance artists, and non-artworld freaks who've been doing this for years remain marginalized; the tools of their trade remain little understood by artists who have lately adopted interaction and participation, artists whose primary skill is making things with cameras or sculptures, or pairing artist's statements with bold gestures of visual work. (This is not to say that every social-relational practitioner who comes from a visual art/Art World background mangles participation. Many are brilliant.)

Does this even matter? The lack of understanding about how the interaction-participation is itself a tool and a tradition with its own secret aesthetics and concerns? I'm not sure. But I have grown more interested in making objects during the last year or so. Writing and singing and making in my own corner. Only doing participatory work when I am finishing old projects that were long ago conceived as participatory. The new ones I conceive are decidedly old fashioned. Now that the participatory space feels crowded, overrun with work that doesn't *work* for me, my mind is closing to it. Three years ago I would've slobbered all over myself to attend Open Engagement. Now that it is here in Portland, I feel little compulsion to go, and my participation here online feels more than a little ironic.

I get my participatory kicks like I used to: outside of the Art World. I put on small events and rituals in the woods; they are not advertised. I go to Burning Man, where there is little chance that the Real Artists will squelch the long history of insane, interactive, participatory mayhem dreamt up by everyday people. I talk with a friend who, like me, was hardcore into participatory work for a number of years and doesn't like the big "scene" that's blossomed around it recently. We come from completely different backgrounds, but we're still getting an icky, squicky feeling from much of the work around us, the calls to participation involved, how everything seems so pat, it's going to change the world, holding hands at Disneyland. This doesn't seem at all like what we have created and experienced in the past. We are confused. Dinosaurs? Maybe.

I read some calls for participation in other projects, and I squirm: why am I squirming? It's hard to pin down. They sound so merry. They sound so hopelessly condescending. They've passed the point of no return on earnestness, and it comes out seeming its opposite. Art has ego and arises from ego; most of the participation-initiating artist-performers I've known over the years knew this and didn't try to use participation as a way to play pretend that the artist, by deigning to invite others into the work, is somehow selflessly transcending her ego. That's what this newer, trendier work feels like to me: a vain and oddly distasteful attempt to transcend ego (or at least its outward trappings). It becomes harder and harder to discern the difference between the genuinely earnest and interesting artist who uses these tools to explore new and perhaps uncomfortable territories, and the trite social practictioner who ends up giving me the creeps. At least the tension is, in itself, an interesting thing to contemplate.

But it isn't interesting enough to drag me out of my house and down to PSU. I feel guilty. I *should* want to be there. I should want to make my work for free Open Engagement in exchange for some snacks at a food cart, while OE's ringleaders get paid to be professors and such and have their name on the festival. God knows I ask enough people to make and support art, for free, at shows and events that I put on. So what, exactly, is my fucking problem? I don't know. Still working on that, which is why I haven't published an article about this subject. I don't have all the logical pieces worked out; I don't have a leg to stand on. So instead, I will walk up Mt. Tabor and eat a picnic with my friends, and this time we won't call it art.

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(I've long been inwardly critical about that corn-syrupy sweetness and tone of condescension, but recently have found myself wondering if the moral tone social practice work takes on isn't a way to "fake it til' you make it.” What if the awkwardness of social practice requires the rewards of moralization in order to build incentive for action? It might provide its participants with a much-sought-after social promise: with your artistic generosity, lack of profit motive and goodwill toward men, you will find social acceptance, moral purity (the process of self-introspection and group discussion will further affirm the pure) and ACCESS. I wonder if as an observer at the feast of social practice, we can't take the moment to realize the impact of it's performative modeling. Like a child's drawing, each project, for all the imaginative daydreaming about a world as it could be, is creating another potential for someone to explore.

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[I do love the awkwardness, actually! But yeah, the saccharine I can live without. One thing I find intriguing: now that "social practice" is big news, people tend to approach *any* participatory-performative artwork space with assumptions about this modeling you describe. It is assumed that we are all participating in making an example of wonderful community involvement and social change; often, the artist or instigator is interested in something else entirely. I guess that might be a thread to pursue. Hm. --TLB]

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The as yet unprecedented cyber-social intimacy the internet has offered affects the artist like Bentham's panopticon, the expectation of "making an example of wonderful community involvement and social change" has been internalized, leaving an urgency toward acting "responsibly" while trying to stay abreast of what exactly that is.

I wonder if social practice work hasn't provided the world with a kind of social invention. The intrusion of concepts like context, footprint, audience, documentation and marketplace into many cultural producers' internalized dialogue can create a pervasive awareness of each the artist's constant embodiment of a "social practice." The choices and real-world consequences of action are a less than invisible elephant in the room.

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(If all artists are faced with the expectation of answering for themselves—with articulating what language they use, of being clear to whom they are speaking—and in that sense, learning to understand impact and be responsive as a peer to the audience's reaction, then where has the bar been raised for the artists that have been at the forefront of that process? What is social practice after YouTube? Wikipedia? I am working up to categorizing the general awareness of self in relation to audience, documentation of work and impact of action as being straight social technology. The exploration that's collectively occurred for the last century specific to those areas has given humans of all types new tools of perception that have allowed us to shift the way we relate to self and others.

For work that functions at multiple levels like yours Tiffany, the generalization being drawn around participatory arts can be incredibly limiting. Work that carries vital content unrelated to issues of community or social well-being is prey to moral reduction.