asbaum, post-participatory participation.pdf

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Post-Participatory ParticipationAuthor(s): Ricardo Basbaum

Reviewed work(s):Source: Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry, Issue 28 (Autumn/Winter 2011),pp. 90-101Published by: The University of Chicago Presson behalf of Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design,University of the Arts LondonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/662974.

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Artists: Ricardo Basbaum |91

Who, me?

Yes, we were already expecting you.

When I invite people to take part in someo my propositions, what am I offeringthem and what is expected rom them,rom me, or me, or them? Tis should bea basic question addressed to participatoryprocesses, which would help to indicatemore precisely how this or that projectis building the image o the artist and itsother, the so-called participant. Tere wasa time when artists did not conceive o theirpractice as a gesture towards someone else:it was enough that the art piece had beencompleted and had its internal aspects

resolved. Tere wasnt even spaceor interpretation: beore modernism,the reading o the piece pointed toa non-ambiguous narrative. Duringmodernism, however, the structure itselo artistic language guaranteed that the

artwork would unction correctly bypointing to the uture, bringing orwardadvanced critical topics. But somehow inthe mid-s a shif occurred towardsa sort o participatory condition ocontemporary society that was meantto de-centre the artistic gesture and adda new role into the art system or circuit:that o the active participator, a figure ootherness who would not only becomemore and more relevant or art processes

but would also decisively influence the shifrom critical to curatorial practices at theend o the twentieth century.

Yes, Marcel Duchamp considered thatthe reception o his work would influenceits meaning, but he was more concernedabout the impact that an anonymousand general mass o people (that is, anaudience) would have on his place inhistory. He did not write specifically onthe production or negotiation o the subject;that topic would only surace later in theart debate in general, in conversations inthe s around micropolitics and thepolitics o the subject. So while it is truethat his amous Marieportrays in act asubjectivation process (sheand the tirelessbachelors) there is a flow o desire thatenergises La Marie mise nu par sesclibataires, mme (Le Grand Verre)(Te Bride Stripped Bare by HerBachelors, Even, ) and the pageso Te Green Box() our position

looking at the glass is like sitting in a classicmovie theatre: the plot and the process arehappening somewhere else and have nodirect relation to us (as voyeurs), unlesswe (as obsessive thinkers) integrate theglass mechanism into our selves. But thatwe would only do later, as contemporaryparticipators: one o the main aspectso the participatory protocols, not yet inplace then, reers to the re-enactment othe works process by the viewer, as a

paradoxical internalisation process, whereones subjectivity is built up by the artwork which is at the same time activated byhim or her. Despite this, yes, Doctor MD1was in act one step ahead o his colleaguesand did open up a small area in his practicewhere the other became just barely visible,as a pale shade or a spectre that in theuture would become a giant impossibleto ignore.

Te significant shif, which came in

the second hal o the century, can be tracedrom at least three different sources, eacho which affected the field o the symbolic

Post-ParticipatoryParticipation

Ricardo Basbaum

Ricardo Basbaum reflects on theintroduction of the audience and

participatory practices into the realm ofcontemporary art as a form of resistanceto neoliberal strategies.

Ricardo Basbaum,[small operatic event]

Would you like to

participate in an artistic

experience?, 2010,with Joyce Gyimah,Dance Physics andBruce Nockles,press-on vinyldiagram, monochrome

wall-painting,painted, metalobject, dance, sound,reading event atThe Showroom,London.Photograph:Daniela Mattos.Courtesy the artist

1 This is how Allan Kaprow refers to Marcel Duchamp in one of his texts. See A. Kaprow, Doctor MD,in Jeff Kelley (ed.), Allan Kaprow: Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1993, pp.12729.


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and changed the pact that determinesthe art field and its roles in the sensethat not only the artist and viewer butalso the positions o the critic, historian,curator, etc. were affected and had to bereramed. On one side, structuralism andanthropology de-centred the role o theproducer and receiver o knowledge,which had been played typically by thewhite European male, and it becameapparent that much o the planet hadalready reacted against Eurocentrism bydeveloping other modernisms, and therebyin many aspects jumped directly into thediscussion o alternative centres. At thesame time, the Macy Conerences onCybernetics in New York ()established a proto-diagrammaticcomprehension o the relational andcommunicational patterns o humansociety, instituting a mediation zone wherethe body, living beings, machines andcultural arteacts would share commonlayers and lines o contact.2Accordingto the topics proposed by this conerence,sensorial experience would not returndirectly to the inner sel but would insteadsurace as external layers and lines thatcould be prospectively modelled we cansee Lygia Clarks organic line, a concept

she first articulated in , as related(although indirectly) to this development,as she discovered the border or line omediation as the result o the contact otwo different suraces: body and object orartwork. 3Finally, we can reer to UmbertoEco and his text Te Open Work ()and Hans Robert Jauss and WolgangIsers aesthetics o reception (eeptions-sthetik) in literature in the late s,which set out a concrete and definite role

or the recipient actor o a texts symbolicproduction, and argued that the authormerely indicates a process to come, as theachievement o a literary experience will

only arrive through a creative gesturerom this reader or viewer, who cancomplete the work and without whomthe piece remains just a potential promise.

O course, we could sum up otheraspects that contributed to this turningpoint, but what these share is an awarenessabout deconstructing certain dominant andor a long time unchangeable models osubjecthood, and subsequently the bringingo the very mechanics o this process tothe art field. And, at the same time, therewas also the improvement o the implemen-tation o a communicative model (andthe reaction to it) that brought to themap (or diagram) o the art field urtherpositions (or points) that related to theinteraces between art and its context(society, science, the subject, the public,the economy, etc.) defining the art circuitor system in even more explicit terms. Inact, it has today become commonplace toreer to the art circuit or system as a naturalentity, so used (we) the art practitionershave become to dealing with layers omediation: any gesture requires beingpart o a project; having a budget; callingor advertising, press, license ees; engagingwith museology, security, etc. Tat is,making art entails a permanent state o

negotiation with many nodes o the circuitnetwork so that reaching the actualartwork is only possible afer outrunningmediator afer mediator, layer afer layer;ultimately, what can be considered anartwork is a cluster o multiple explicitinterests, including, ortunately, the artistsproposals.

Some clear moments in this mid-century process can be ound amongthe many gestures that characterised

the several conceptualisms (includingorthodox Conceptual art) then currentworldwide: this was a particular and highlyinfluential moment o collective thinking,

2 For N. Katherine Hayles, the Macy Conferences on Cybernetics were radically interdisciplinary,putting together researchers from a wide variety of fields neurophysiology, electrical engineering,philosophy, semantics, literature and psychology, among others. Some of its main topics involvedhow to convince that humans and machines were brothers under the skin and to act as crossroadsfor the traffic in cybernetic models and artefacts. Hayles organised the Conferences argumentsalong three fronts: the construction of information as a theoretical entity; the constructionof [human] neural structures [] as flows of information; and the construction of artefacts thattranslated information flows into observable operations. See N.K. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman,Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999.

3 The organic line is a line that has not been drafted or carved by anyone, but which results from thecontact of two different surfaces (planes, things, objects, bodies or even concepts). According to GuyBrett, Lygia Clark liked to exemplify the organic line as the one we can see between the window andthe window frame or between tiles on the floor. She stated that it first appeared in 1954, when shewas observing the line that formed where a framed collage touched the passe-partout paper. She wrote:I set aside this research for two years because I did not know how to deal with this space set free.Quoted in G. Brett, Lygia Clark: The Borderline Between Art and Life, in Third Text, no.1, Autumn1987, p.67. See also Ricardo Basbaum, Within the Organic Line and After, published in Englishin Alexander Alberro and Sabeth Buchmann (ed.), Art after Conceptual Art, Vienna and Cambridge,MA and London: Generali Foundation and The MIT Press, 2006, pp.8799.


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which relied completely on the alreadyconquered (but still open and ull opotential) area o the presence o theparticipant other most o the proposi-tions dealt directly with discursivestandards (though achieved by definedmaterial elements), which were launchedonto the viewer as a task, a work-to-do, aproblem to solve that is, he or she wouldbe invited to engage in complex duties andoperations to make the work produce sense.Conceptualism made clear that the viewerproduced by the artistic operation isnot a simple, ordinary and neutral one:the artists realised that one o their maintasks was to work in the direction omodelling the subject who would receivetheir production. Tis imperative(i.e. theartworks demand or its other) was indeed

perceived as too important and decisiveto be lef in the hands o the market,

consumption and other directed socialprocesses. Te system o art (and in actConceptualism has always been concernedwith the drafing o systems, maps anddiagrams) has, since then, comprised thissiteo the expected other which alsohas several grades o specificity. Differentmoments o contemporary art can bereviewed in terms o the investment inwhat we might call an expected spectatorproduction process although this

is not a field or causal or linear results

(which can be quite nave in the ace othe complexity and importance o theproblem).

In the s, the Concrete andNeoconcrete movements in Brazilestablished their main conceptual linesunder the new epistemological conditionthat considered the presence o the vieweror reader as part o the poetics triggeredby the artwork. Not that there was a specialperception o the problem among Brazilianartists and intellectuals (indeed, at thesame time in France Yves Klein wasproposing Le Vide(Te Void, ), whichcontains a similar preoccupation withdissolving everything previous to thereception o the work, orcing the viewerto rebuild him or hersel in direct contactwith it),4but some particular aspects othat moment are important or todayslandscape and should be examined inurther depth. Both groups, at variouspoints, acknowledged their debt to Oswaldde Andrades Maniesto Antropagoo : there is no doubt that this strongmodern statement was a decisive stepin reconfiguring the local culture asinternational, in the sense o recognisingdifference, eeding rom it and producingthe new no longer as a subservient

other but as a ull voice charged with thepotential or invention. 5It is not incorrectto link this modernist piece o resistance(several other modern Brazilian artistsand writers rom the same epoch turnedto more conservative positions) with aparticular sensitiveness to a more close anddirect involvement o the viewer and readerin terms o the activation o the artwork:i, on one side, the poet and essayistHaroldo de Campos was recognised by

Umberto Eco as having anticipated similar


4 However, Klein was more concerned with the immaterial mediation layers than with the directtouch of the artwork on the body. The works full title is La Spcialisation de la sensibilit ltat matire

premire en sensibilit picturale stabilise, Le Vide(The Specialisation of Sensibility in the Raw MaterialState into Stabilised Pictorial Sensibility, The Void).

5 Suely Rolnik states this point precisely: The notion of anthropophagy [] proposed by the [Brazilian]modernists harks back to a practice of the indigenous Tupinambs [], a complex ritual, which couldgo on for months, years even, in which enemies made captive in battles would be killed and devoured;cannibalism is only one of its stages. Another stage involved the executor changing his name andscarring his body with the name of the enemy: The existence of the other [] was thus inscribedin the memory of the body, producing unpredictable becomings of subjectivity. Thus, in advancingthe idea of anthropophagy, the avant-garde of Brazilian modernism extrapolates from the literalityof the indigenous ceremony, in order to extract from it the ethical formula of an unavoidable existenceof an otherness in oneself that presides over the ritual and to make it migrate into the terrain ofculture. With this gesture, the active presence of this formula in a mode of cultural creation practised

in Brazil since its foundation is given visibility and affirmed as a value: the critical and irreverentdevouring of an otherness always multiple and variable. Rolnik also proposes an important update:We would define the anthropophagic cultural micropolitic as a continuous process of singularisation,resulting from the composition of particles of numberless devoured others and the diagram of theirrespective marks in the bodys memory. A poetic response with sarcastic humour to the needto confront the impositive presence of the colonising cultures []; an answer [] to [the] need tocome to grips with and render positive the process of hybridisation brought by successive waves ofimmigration, which has always configured the countrys lived experience. See S. Rolnik, Politicsof the Fluid, Hybrid and Flexible: Avoiding False Problems, SUM magazine for contemporary art,Copenhagen: The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, no.2, Summer 2008.

Different moments ofcontemporary art can bereviewed in terms of theinvestment in what we mightcall an expectedspectatorproduction process.


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theoretical ideas on the incompletenesso the artwork (which later resulted in histheories about translation), on the other,Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Hlio Oiticicapursued highly inventive and experimental

research that meant they entered the sand s with an open consideration othe participant as a necessary part othe artistic gesture. But one more pointis important to note: both movementsstill saw themselves as avant-garde actors,organising their actions and statementsas maniestos and fighting or the rightplace in history that is, deending afinal truth within the field o modern art.(Te Concrete and Neoconcrete groups

were notorious or their battles.) In thatsense, it is important to emphasise thatso-called participation entered the discus-sion as an avant-garde topic, and assuch was modelled particularly inBrazil, in this historical moment underthe influence o the pedagogy o the avant-garde: no concessions at all to the generalpublic, to common sense or to the market.Te spectator, here, is meant to be offered anintegral engagement within all the radical

aspects o the new, and as such is takenas someone who will get access, throughcontact with the artwork, to a possibilityo real emancipation and autonomy.

We have been arguing here or thepresence o the participatory as a generaland epistemological condition or the

last fify years o contemporary art. Tiscondition has been variously appropriatedby different works and events layersand roles, and by the actors and orces thatcomprise the art circuit: it is not difficult

to see, then, how the corporate art world,or instance, has been profiting rom this,publicising big spectacular art events asspecial participatory moments, or howsociety has been slowly inserting into allo us the timing o consumption as a gestureo will and desire, as described in GillesDeleuze and Flix Guattaris vehementand acute analysis o the undamentals ocapitalism, Capitalism et Schiophrenia(vol., ; vol., ). Pointing to the

demand or the other as part o an avant-garde platorm intends to shed somelight on this process as a truly constitutiveelement o the contemporary arteact obviously, the term ormal does notfit here, because it is no longer a matter oplastic composition but rather a problemo concept and sensitisation. How toconceive something (an object, an event,a film, an image, etc.) that can unctionas an artwork in terms o triggering

the production o new sensorial layers?And, moreover, which takes theseparticular dynamics as a bodily assemblage(artwork + participator) where the subjectis rebuilt and the symbolic rewritten,as a simultaneous and bidirectionalprocess? Te questions seem awkward;

Ricardo Basbaum,me-you:choreographies, gamesand exercises, 2007,performed atLisson Gallery,

London.Courtesythe artist andLisson Gallery,London


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to produce sense, the artwork should(not exclusively, o course, this is justone possible account o the problem) beaddressed by the informe, by the ideao gaming (not game theory, but an area

related to the history o games in cultureand politics) and by the political rameo a bio- or micropolitics. Respectively,such a blurring o ormal and previouslyestablished categories, as well as themaintenance o a space or open conversa-tion and the public problematisation osubjects and bodies, would make theproblem o producing art in a participatorymode productive in terms o establishinglines o resistance against instrumentalisa-

tion and other orms o manipulativeappropriation. Artists like Oiticica andClark, but also David Medalla, AntnioDias, Luis Camnitzer and Cildo Meireles,or instance, helped (in different modesand by different strategies) to build thethickness o this contact zone, allocatingresponsibility to the viewer and establishingthe double aggregate body subject +work o art as an unavoidable eatureo the contemporary.

Such avant-garde pedagogical capital,in terms o participatory practices,

proved decisive in the context o the sand s, when Brazilian society shifedrom military dictatorial control to aneoliberal market economy ollowingthe spread o integrated world capitalism.

I started to work as an artist underthese conditions, and developed mypractice as a combination o artistic andcommunication strategies in the senseo organising visual and conceptualaspects so that they were able to perceptu-ally flow easily through certain networks:signs, logos, diagrams, rerains and otherorms o graphic communication thatpresuppose direct contact with the viewer.Tere was a moment when a decision

had to be made: in , I reduced allmy work to a simple drawing, whichwas conceived o as an easily memorisableparticle, and I developed this (in theorm o objects, diagrams, installationsand drawings) as a vehicle or a sorto virus, or circulating inyourbody(thereore, pointing directly towards thereader or viewer) the adopted artisticmethodologysuggested the use ocontagion theory, together with the

repetition o visual rerains.6

Afer someinitial experiences as an artist in theatmosphere o the so-called re-democrati-sation period,7it was possible as orseveral other artists rom the period (such


Ricardo Basbaum,me-you:choreographies,games andexercises, 2008,performed at

the 7th ShanghaiBiennial. Courtesythe artist and theShanghai Biennial

6 See R. Basbaum, What Is NBP?, manifesto, 1990, available at http://www.nbp.pro.br/nbp.php(last accessed on 12 December 2010).


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as Alexandre Dacosta, Alex Hamburger,Mrcia X. and Mario Ramiro) tocomprehend that the art circuit and theneoliberal economy were developing newand complex relationship patterns, and

were doing so quickly and aggressively: thes artists who emerged globally underthe return to painting melded perectlyinto these new dynamics and were quicklypromoted as representatives o the period.Such an overload o strategic and promo-tional practices encountered resistanceamong artists with art and science research-based practices (Eduardo Kac, Ramiro)and perormative practices (Dacosta,Hamburger, Mrcia X.) as well as within

the field o the participatory. As alreadyindicated, the corporative economyorganised its management programmes inorder to engage the subject in a productiveand creative mode. 8It is not a coincidencethat the work o Oiticica and Clarkresuraced in such a context, afer decades

o an almost underground (or subterra-nean, as Oiticica preerred) and lateralexistence: when the game o art wasrunning the risk o losing itsel in a sort ospeculative bubble, where the institutional

abric could not clearly assign value toartwork apart rom that based in art-market operations, the presence o twoartists who deliberately set their work andthemselves apart rom these dynamics(Clarks and Oiticicas practices startedin the late s, still under the impacto modernism) somehow restored someconcrete value to critical art practice.Tis (urgent and necessary, o course)emergence which can be exemplified by

the first international Oiticica retrospec-tive, organised at the Witte de With in by Luciano Figueiredo, Guy Brett, ChrisDercon and Catherine David 9 figures asa symptom o the heatedness o the disputebetween the cooperative and institutionalart universes necessary or adjoining

7 The first presidential elections after the end of the dictatorship were held in Brazil in 1989.8 See Brian Holmes, The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique, available at

http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/holmes/en; and S. Rolnik, The Geopolitics of Pimping,available at http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/1106/rolnik/en (both last accessed on18 October 2010).

9 The art critic Glria Ferreira organised the first survey of the work of Clark and Oiticica in 1986,at Pao Imperial, Rio de Janeiro. The exhibition Lygia Clark e Hlio Oiticica had a very particularfield of approach, [] the participation of the spectator [] as the unfolding of the questions commonto them during the Neoconcrete period. See G. Ferreira, Terreiro do Pao: cena para Lygia Clark eHlio Oiticica, in Lygia Clark e Hlio Oiticica, Sala Especial do 9 Salo Nacional de Artes Plsticas,Rio de Janeiro: Funarte/INAP, 1986. Clark was still alive and attended the exhibition several times.The arguments she had with collectors regarding the originals of her Bichos, a series of 1960s sculpturesincluded in the exhibition, were remarkable: although she invited the public to use them, the collectorswho owned the pieces prevented any manipulation.

Ricardo Basbaum,diagrams forchoreographies, 2008,digital print56 86cm.Courtesy the artist


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critical and intellectual value with contem-porary practice as well as indicatingthe strength o the interests and actors(institutions and artists, but also banks andother international finance and communi-

cation companies) that continue to alignthemselves with the topic o participationstrategies. Clearly, it was important tostress that an artistic, critical and intellec-tual compromise should prove viable andsuitable or strategies o resistance (still tobe urther explored, o course) beore thesubject would become generally dispersedthrough the interests o the new culturaleconomy. Te rapidity o the alignmentbetween art and neoliberal practices also

indicates how ambiguous the connectionshave been between both the Concrete andNeoconcrete artists heirs10and the currentart market because it is in act almostimpossible to make work or both the

market and within the pedagogical fieldwithout clearly comprehending the compleximplications o both fields (basically,how difficult it is or the market and thepedagogical to get along without strong

conflicts). When I initiated the projectNBP (Novas Bases para a Personalidade)(New Basis for Personality, ongoing)), it was as a gesture o locatingthe work in line with transormationalstrategies,11in close contact with the otherand acting to involve and model the subject:NBPis a programme or sudden changes.What? How? When? Let it be contagious:they will be the ruit o your own desireand effort. 12Tere was a recognition,

through this particular project, o theexistence o a locus o potentiality properto the contemporary artwork and, equally,o the need to occupy it conceptuallyand sensorially13 seeking to make

10 It is not a coincidence that the estates of the three main Neoconcrete artists (Clark, Oiticica and Pape)are managed by their families, as private cultural associations. This gesture is justified by the lackof support by Brazilian museums and governmental institutions towards contemporary art in general(with very few exceptions). The private associations have to search for funds on the corporate andart markets, sometimes assuming positions that directly contradict certain gestures that the artiststhemselves defended in their lifetimes. It is not necessary to say that such conflicts and contradictionsspeak vehemently about the current economy of culture. See Projeto Hlio Oiticica, founded in 1981(http://www.heliooiticica.org.br); Associao Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark, founded in 2001

(http://www.lygiaclark.org.br); and Associao Cultural Projeto Lygia Pape, founded in 2004(http://www.lygiapape.org.br) (all last accessed on 11 July 2011).

11 For transformational strategies I refer to the different programmes and projects that aim to activelyengage the other (viewer or participant) in an intensive process vis--vis the artwork, facing aproblematic field and triggering a subjectivation process. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition(trans. Paul Patton), New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p.246.

12 R. Basbaum, What Is NBP?, op. cit.13 This aspect of contemporary artworks is developed in my text Who Sees Our Work?, Roland, no.1,

London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, May 2009. Also available at http://ica.org.uk/download.php?id=696 (last accessed on 12 December 2010).

Ricardo Basbaum,Would you like toparticipate in anartistic experience?,1994ongoing,painted steel

structure, wire mesh,painted steel object,carpet, mattresses,cushions, 8 monitors,2 DVD players,4 computers,8 closed-circuitTV cameras,2 closed-circuitsystems, walldiagram, wall textinstallation:2000 960 240cm.Installation view,Aue Pavilion,

documenta 12,Kassel, 2007.Photograph: JuliaZimmermann.Courtesy the artist


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the artwork productive and to adoptprocedures that would oreground theavant-gardes pedagogical capital asa means o resisting the speculativecapitalism o the private art market (theonly active side o the commercial Brazilianart sphere: there has not yet been a publicinitiative to support collecting outside othe private sphere).

Te sign that I adopted as a startingpoint and which I repeated in differentways in subsequent years has connectionsto Daniel Burens reductionist strategy, inthe sense o establishing an iconic structureor continuous play: the repetition whichinterests us is that o a method and nota mannerism (or trick): it is a repetitionwith differences.14But an important andsignificant methodological particularity orNBPindicates another strategic position:the NBPsign does not depart directly rompainting (as Burens does), and insteadassumes a viral and communicationalprofile, which not only makes it unctionas a vehicle or mediator but also situatesit as an emblem that simultaneouslypoints to the visual and to the discursive.15

Tis double bind triggers every and eachunolding o the NBP, which includes,rom to , a series o sculptural

objects that deal with the size o thehuman body, and, since , a series oarchitectonic sculptural structures; thisdevelopment is accompanied by diagramsand texts, and also some closed-circuit livevideo installations. Te project does not,o course, see discourse simply as anexplanatory tool or the visual as a purelyseductive and hypnotic gadget, butcareully attempts to bring both fieldstogether as mutually implicated layers,

in permanent contact with each other. Ithis condition makes the projects receptionflow (the direct contact contagion rommind to mind, body to body) slower thanin similar endeavours that organisedparticipatory or relational strategies more

pragmatically and which were moremarket-oriented or in NBPthe viewer/reader has more or less to ollow bothvisual and the verbal fields it alsoproduces an interesting action fieldwhere gestures can replicate themselvessensorially and conceptually; it is possibleto see how visual structures attachthemselves to concepts in complex ways,to experiment with producing a problemspace without a solution, where questionsare brought orward as devices or openingspaces and making connections. Tere thesubject is conronted with the production ospeech as the consequence o intensive andsensorial involvement in visual/conceptualstructures. Projects likeWould you like toparticipate in an artistic experience?(ongoing) and me-you: choreogra-phies, games and exercises(ongoing) are conceived as methods orengaging the other through the artwork,but in such a way that the subject can takepart in the proposed situations and producesomething in these situations be it speech,images, written statements, choreographicmovements, events, experiences, etc.Tat is, the subject is given space ororganising him- or hersel in terms

o both visual and verbal involvement.Group dynamics are important to howthese situations unold, particularly,in the me-you actions an ongoingseries o choreographies, games andexercises which I have been perormingwith different sets o participants,and which are carried out mostly inoutdoor public spaces, without any specificaudience where the events succeedwhen the initial unrelated participants

start to behave as one organic and affectiveentity, a sort o ragile and local swarm,orceul and volatile at the same time.16Tis aspect brings to the work some sorto sel-sufficiency that does not requirethe presence o the art-habitual audience

14 Daniel Buren, Beware, in 5 Texts, London and New York: John Weber Gallery and Jack Wendler Gallery,1973, p.17.

15 If I refer to a viral strategyfor the NBPproject, it has to do with the particular relation it establishes tothe issues of replication, contact and contagion: the work (relational situations, objects and installations)seeks for a continuous re-staging of the initial specific-shape drawing, always with differences,investing in a sort of tactile/haptic condition in which the body is always physically involved.

The proposed effects can be organised around Jacques Derrida's virology: the French philosopherbegins a philosophical enterprise that attempts to introduce the Other into the I: a redefinition ofthe subject. Eventually, this introduction becomes infection, and the Other is radically recastas the virus. Quoted in Thierry Bardini, Hypervirus: A Clinical Report, CTheory, vol.29, no.12,http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=504 (last accessed on 8 April 2011). Emphasis Bardinis.

16 For an account of the me-you actions, see my text Differences between us and them', available athttp://rbtxt.files.wordpress.com (last accessed on 11 July 2011). Originally published in Becky Shawand Gareth Woollam (ed.), Us and Them Static Pamphlet Anthology 200304, Liverpool: StaticGallery, 2005.


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Ricardo Basbaum,Would you like toparticipate in anartistic experience?,1994ongoing,painted steel object,experience,125 80 18cm.ParticipationJorge Menna Barreto

Porto Alegre, 2002.Photograph: JorgeMenna Barreto.Courtesy the artist


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(as do Allan Kaprows activities17); thegames develop within the group, and theresults are publicly visible only when thevideo is exhibited. Te reader/viewer andthe art proposal suffice to trigger a situation

and make the poetics o the work unction:here, the aggregate artwork + (collective)subject is the basic unity that is submittedto transormational dynamics (we couldadd the artist to this cluster, as I am alsoincluded in the experiences, and, in certaincases, the institutional partner). Teparticipatory condition is not proposedas mere entertainment (although un, ocourse, can be part o the process) or emptyproduction in and or itsel, but as the

moment when the subject and artwork aretaken to a liminal state, each one pushedtowards the other in the direction o amixing situation where body and artworksuperimpose and create common regions,membranes and olds. Not only is the artpiece meant to be actively enacted, butthe subject is also meant to be producedin a different way, in close contact with thework, and to reinvent him- or hersel there.

Such a condition is not easily achievedunder the art systems standard unction-ing: where in this process can the artinstitutions, the collectors and the artmarket access the work and make it

available to the so-called general public?Under the participatory wave

that shakes the economy, artists haveanticipated since the s certaineffects and have been addressing themultitude in various ways: sensorial-conceptual developments by artists becomeuseul and strategic now. Te conditiono this operation can be turned into thepedagogical i the investment involves theproduction o the subject and the artwork

at the same time, as part o the very processo the aesthetic experience (which shoulditsel be inseparable rom an awarenesso its institutional location). Seen romthe perspective o the modification o theeconomy o culture, in the last decade othe twentieth century, the pedagogical as proposed by the avant-garde, in termso the public sharing o the sensorial andconceptual aspects o artistic propositions

17 The development of the work of Allan Kaprow (19272006) is usually considered under threesequential and complementary series: environments', happenings' and activities'. The latter series,made after the 1970s, consisted in sets of daily actions and gestures, to be performed by small groupsf volunteers under the artist's written instructions or scores. The activities were never documentedfor public notice as they were actions that should be performed and later discussed only withinthe group of participants. Towards the end of his life, Kaprow encouraged others to create new versionsof his works under three principles formulated by the artist: site-specificity, impermanence and doubtin art'. See the gallery guide published to accompany Allan Kaprow: Art as Life, Los Angeles Museumof Contemporary Art, 23 March 30 June 2008, available at www.moca.org/kaprow/GalleryGuide_Kaprow.pdf (last accessed on 1 August 2011).

Ricardo Basbaum,[small operatic event]

Would you like to

participate in an artistic

experience?, 2010,with Joyce Gyimah,

Dance Physics andBruce Nockles,press-on vinyldiagram, monochromewall-painting,painted, metalobject, dance, sound,reading event atThe Showroom,London.Photograph:Daniela Mattos.Courtesy the artist


13/13


and the production o a new subject romthat conrontation is recognised as oneo the regions that can be occupied bystrategies o resistance which valuecontactas a means o bringing orwarddifference, in terms o subjectivation andtransormational dynamics (i.e. resistance).oday, this aspect has also been highlydisputed by the actors o macroeconomicgames and this is an overly presentsymptom o how significant it is now:it is important not only to pay attentionto the microsensorial18(the layers operception that are activated when incontact with the artistic proposition),but also to occupy such space with double-bound sensorial and discursive strategies.Te pedagogy o the avant-garde indicateshow to produce membranes that generatecontact and potentialise experience:becoming other with the artworkpointstowards a model or action, or modellingthe subject and being transormed by

it, outside o ormal limits. As an artist,I have ocused on this scenario or thetransormation o art and its actors coming up with proposals to contribute tothis general shif in terms o the productiono the sensorial and the discursive together.

New images or artists are being continu-ously arranged and collectively modified,emphasising more than ever the act olistening, o being attentive to any shake,touch, scratch and sign produced in closeor distant contact.

Tus, working as an artist in the yearsto come (that is, looking ahead rom theconditions o today), seems to pose someparticular and specific questions: thecontemporary art field is daily becoming

more integrated into the pragmatics othe regular cultural economy, making theart circuit change some o its practices tofind places closer to the culture industry.

I an increase in the number o regularpracticing artists can be expected,perhaps also a better and more generousdistribution o arts conceptual andpedagogical capital is in process breakingsome still present class, economic andcultural barriers, and also pointing toinevitable changes in its concepts, modeso production and reception. But no onehas the right to speculate rom within theart field; this is not a place rom which tolook at the uture the contemporary artistlives and produces problems as part o aradical present that is not easily accessible,and to work or its emergence is one o themain tasks o the contemporary. However,how do you participate in something an action or process when your body isalready there, long beore you answer yesor no? Te more interesting art practicestoday may bring us closer to this paradox:to mobilise the other as an extension oyoursel and mobilise yoursel as anextension o the other where alterity ismutually reinorced and where meandyouare continuously replaced by a larger andexternal contact area. What can wedo butlive outside o ourselves?

18 See Jos Gil, A imagem nua e as pequenas percepes: esttica e metafenomenologia, Lisbon: Relgio Dgua,1996.

Te contemporary art field isdaily becoming more integratedinto the pragmatics of theregular cultural economy,making the art circuit change

some of its practices to findplaces closer to the cultureindustry.

asbaum, post-participatory participation.pdf

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