COMMUNITY-ENGAGED ART IN PRACTICE

Laurent Thévenot1

Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (Groupe de Sociologie Politique et Morale)

et Laboratoire de Sociologie Quantitative (CREST)

in: Zembilas, Tasos (ed.), 2014, Artistic practices, London, Routledge, pp. 132-150.

Arts and politics are more and more often associated in protest movements. Participants

take part in a common cause while expressing themselves personally with different styles,

including artistic ones. Among the variety of relationships between arts and politics, this

paper focuses on the one built through participatory art. In such a configuration, artists’

practices get mingled with practices of constructing commonality and expressing differences

or dissensus in a political community. Both artists and sociologists might benefit from the

clarification of this mixture.

On the one hand, politically engaged artists encourage the participation of the public and

have to cope with the ambiguity of the two meanings of a public, as an audience and as the

public of a political community. Arts theorists and practitioners might downplay the tensions

between these two meanings, for the sake of a critical stance which they assume to be shared

by both artistic and political critique. Yet some of them, along with persons who are called

on to take part in both kinds of publicness, feel puzzled and uneasy because of the confusion

between different involvements. Participative or “social” art aroused fierce criticism with

Claire Bishop’s article in Artforum on the “social turn” (Bishop 2006b), her reader collecting

a series of former experiences and statements about the public participation  (Bishop 2006a),

and her recent synthesis on “participatory art and the politics of spectatorship” in a historical

perspective (Bishop 2012).

On the other hand, sociologists and political scientists have been studying participatory

democracy at length. They usually concentrate on access to a discursive public space of

argumentation. Participatory art introduces other modes of expression, and opens up to a

variety of ways of making issues common and of differing. Current analyses of public spaces

fail to grasp this complex situation of contemporary art interventions in favor of

participation. To deal with combinations of artistic and political questioning, we need an

analytical framework which would grasp practical engagements below the level of publicity,

and ways in which human beings engage with the world down to a level of close intimacy.

1 I am grateful to Yves Mettler and Tasos Zambiras for their useful comments.

2.

Another difficulty to cope with this complexity results from the role played by social and

political theory within art. When considering contemporary artists’ training and production,

any observer would be struck by the place taken by social sciences theories and methods, and

by critical theory and philosophical writings, combined with artists’ works and comments. If

social theorists are already mobilized by artists and part of the picture, how would they be

able to analyze their own entanglement with art work? To deal with such an entanglement, a

proper analytical approach would not coincide with elements included in the present

combination of art and critical theory.

The first introductory section of this article shortly presents such an analytical approach,

and the reasons why it met artists’ work. The next two sections build on a collaborative

research with the young artist Yves Mettler who is deeply committed to relating arts and

politics. He dedicated a short sociological work to a participatory art experience of "urban

tactics in a urban interstice", in Paris (Mettler 2011). Section 2 documents various ways

participants engage with a “shared garden” project, from close familiarity to justifications for

the common good, and the resulting difficulties in living together within such a community.

Section 3 deals with the intervention of participatory art in the project, and consequences for

the construction of a new kind of emancipated community, and for the making of

commonality in the plural.

1. WAYS OF ENGAGING WITH THE WORLD / CONSTRUCTIONS OF

COMMONALITY IN THE PLURAL: A TRANSVERSAL APPROACH TO POLITICS

AND PARTICIPATORY ART IN THE MAKING

While contributing to the so-called “pragmatic turn” in French social sciences, Luc

Boltanski and I have developed a “political and moral sociology” which analyzes critical

activities and the ways the justifications intended to be worthwhile in public are formulated

and “put to the reality test” (Boltanski and Thévenot 1987, 1991, 1999, 2000, 2006). We

drew a parallel between political philosophies and the everyday sense of the just and unjust,

in order to identify a plurality of “orders of worth” which are critically confronted in disputes

because they are most legitimate for “aggrandizing” persons and things so that they qualify

for public judgments. Orders of worth cross boundaries between domains of arts, politics and

economics, the worth of inspiration being frequently involved in the qualification of

artworks.

3.

Multiple ways of engaging with the world

In a subsequent advance, I developed a sociology of ways of engaging with the world

and with others, from the most publicly common to the most personally familiar  (Thévenot

2001, 2002, 2006a, 2007, 2013). The term “engage” usually designates involvement in a

common cause, or an obligation deriving from a promise contracted with oneself and others,

or a material relation to something.2 The category of engagement which I proposed is more

comprehensive and conceptually unified, while offering the possibility to differentiate a

plurality of basic regimes of engagement leading to diverse kinds of mutuality, some being

far from the distancing required by the public space. The category departs from practice and

action in that it links together with (cf. table 1):

- a kind of good which, in spite of unequal scope, is associated with a basic assurance or

confidence in coordinating with oneself and others, and coping with uncertainty through…

- a kind of information format to capture the relevant reality which puts this assurance to

a test, this reality being arranged in a form which is convenient to…

- a kind of power, or capacity, which turns out to be capital to maintaining both personal

identity and community...

- a kind of mutual extension which supports commonality of unequal scope.

The analytical grid based on these regimes allows to grasp the conditions of learning and

strengthening such powers or capacities. It clarifies their vulnerability to the environment,

and situations when one regime of engagement oppresses another.3 Opening to a wide variety

of oppressions which might bring pressure indirectly through environment – and body as well

– the sociology of engagements enlarge the perspective of critical theory.

engaging in justification for the common good

engaging in an individual plan

engaging in familiarity

engaging in exploration(Auray 2010)

2 We chose to keep the terms engage – and engagement – in English translations. They encompass the idea of promise – and correspondence with oneself – and of gage (pledge which guarantees) resulting from dependence on the material environment (to engage gear). Moving from the more limited notion of contracted obligation, Howard Becker studied the way a commitment that is antecedent and external to current action could intervene in the latter (as a “side bet”), when actors must maintain their consistent line of activity (Becker 1960).

3 In Tasos Zembylas’ research on writers’ artistic practices (2013), we see the significance of the familiar arrangement of the writing area, of the exciting “lucky coincidence” which opens to exploration, these ways of engaging limiting the extent of engaging in a plan, and making the “creative writing process […] only plannable to a very limited extent”.

4.

Evaluative good

worth (qualifying for the common good)

accomplished will

ease, comfort, personal convenience

excitement for novelty

Information format

conventional functional usual, congenial surprising

Capacity, power

qualified, worthy autonomous, willful

attached to curious, explorer

Mutual engagement

legitimate convention of coordination

joint project,contract

close friendship,intimacy

play

Table 1. Four regimes of engagement with the world

These four regimes are commonly acknowledged, and “social” in that sense. Yet, they are

unequally ready for large scale mutuality or commonality, and for “social” practices which

sociologists favour. This last point helps us with issues raised by our case study on

participatory art. In the kind of community which the shared garden promotes, which

commonality is fostered? Does it leave room for a wide plurality of regimes, or only take into

account a limited range of them?

Diverse constructions of commonality in the plural

To deal with this last issue and bring a new pragmatic impetus to the analysis of politics,

I situated the former research on orders of worth within a more general model of

commonality in the plural. I proposed to differentiate ways of making things common and

different through two main operations:

1. Communicating is the first. The term should not be understood in the narrow

contemporary meaning of exchanging information, but include the concrete possibility to

practically connect with some common locus, as different rooms communicate to a common

corridor. How dissimilar personal attachments to the world can be transformed and brought

together in commonality and differences?

2. Composing is the second operation to be done. It aims at integrating different voices in

the composition of commonality.4 The medium which facilitates this integration varies from

one construction to the other.

4 The significance of “composing a difference”, as settling a dispute between dissimilar voices, is archaic in English but not in the French expression “compose with” (composer avec) different positions in an effort to integrate them all.

5.

grammar of plural orders of worth

grammar of individuals choosing among diverse options in a liberal public

grammar of personal affinities to multiple commonplaces

medium: public qualification for the common good (worth)

medium: publicly accessible options for individual choices

medium: personally invested commonplaces

Communicating by aggrandizing personal concern into worth as qualification for the common good

Communicating by transforming personal attachments into individual choices for options open to the public

Communicating by personal affinity to a commonplace

Composing a difference by critically denunciating and by compromising between the plurality of forms of worth

Composing a difference by individually opining and negotiation between individual choices

Composing a difference by diversely associating commonplaces

Table 2. Grammars of commonality in the plural

Sociologists and artists crossing roads

Developing a sociology which extends far below the usual sociological level of

collective and shared features – even of individual interacting strategies – and including

intimate relations to the world, I met art on my way. In literary pieces, I did not look for

scenes from daily life – as Goffman remarkably did himself – but for modes of rendering into

language a wide variety of relationships between human beings and their surrounding world.

Elaborating such accounts, writers are capable of fine-grained differentiation between ways

of engaging with the world, and they grasp the tensions raised by their trying adversity. Some

authors shift from one writing style to another when their literary picture shifts from the

formality of the public realm to the sensual expression of intimate feelings and bodily

emotions.5 In such writings are deposited stylized forms of relationships to the world that are

thereby made communicable by means of proper formatting. In their arts of picturing how

human beings engage with the world, we might learn from writers to go beyond the usual

limits of the gamut of relationships to the world to which sociologists currently give form.6

5 To read more about such an analysis based on Pasternak, Bulgakov and Platonov, see Thévenot 2006b, sec.3 (in French); Тевено 2006 (in Russian).

6 Trained in the Russian Formalist school, Lydia Ginzburg remarkably combined literary and sociological pictures of a wide array of practical ways of engaging with the world and with others (Thévenot 2012).

6.

2. ENGAGING WITH THE “SHARED GARDEN” PROJECT IN A VARIETY OF

REGIMES, FROM CLOSE FAMILIARITY TO JUSTIFICATION FOR THE COMMON

GOOD

The project takes place in a long and narrow zone (20 m x 7 m) between the tall blind

walls of apartment buildings, in a north-east Parisian district. This district is a mix of modern

social housing (“HLM”) with newly gentrified earlier habitations occupied by “Bobos” who

practice a bohemian-intellectual style of life. The latter population is much more involved in

the project – retired public servants, in particular – than the former, except when children

attend with their class to celebrations and performances. This former passageway leading to a

match factory became a wasteland which was too small to build on, an inaccessible dump.

The plot was fenced and abandoned for many years, occasionally used by drug dealers. In the

old alleyway, the packed-down earth is low in humus, extremely chalky and dry and has

never been cultivated. Participants covered it with ten centimeters of earth which they

brought.

Leaving now this short third party description, and before considering in the next section

the artistic rationale and achievement of the project of “shared garden”, what can we observe

as a spectator, or a newcomer, of participants variously engaging with the space, in practice?

The expected relation to a garden situated in a densely housed zone of a bustling

metropolis is to enjoy a little piece of nature. Ornamental or pleasure gardens (jardin

d’agrément) are arranged so that visitors take delight or aesthetic pleasure in their presence,

and thus engage in what we might call a pathic regime of presence.7 Users of the garden have

grown flowering plants for this enjoyment. For Aurore’s birthday, members planted lots of

little bulbs. At the entrance of the garden which opens to the sidewalk of the street, someone

made a hole into the asphalt with a drill, and inserted a rose within it, as a pot plant. Yet this

creative act is more than arranging a pleasure garden. It explicitly qualifies for the worth of

Inspiration and recognition as an artistic gesture if not installation.

7 The term “pathetic” might also be used in its archaic meaning of emotional involvement, without any additional notion of pity. Rachel Brahy called “engaging in presence” this relation to the world, while restricting its scope to the presence of other human being (Brahy 2012). As for other regimes, I find necessary to characterize first the person engaging with her environment. “Empathy” would assume the presence of another human being, and “sympathy” might be the right word for mutually engaging in a pathic regime.

7.

An informal patch for personal gardening: engaging in familiarity

The former mode of engaging with one’s environment is not the most prevalent in the

garden. When you enter from the street, your first impression is of messiness, not emotional

presence. It contrasts with public parks of the city which are prepared to aesthetic pleasure,

even when they are not geometrically arranged as "jardins à la française". Yet, this is no

mess for habituated users. On the opposite, each one carefully arranged his patch so that it is

at hand, in a kind of intimate relation that gardening usually implies. This "little corner of

earth" (petit coin de terre), as one gardener named it, is well adjusted to personal use once

you got you own clues. Yet, it remains inscrutable for anyone who does not share with the

gardener a close and nearly intimate mutual familiarity.

The diagnosed disorder is the result of the confrontation between two regimes of

engagement. It assumes that you are engaged in the kind of public regime which is expected

in urban public spaces that are concretely designed to facilitate the coordination between

anonymous individuals. Then, you feel oppressed by the “messiness” of personal space which

are familiarly arranged. Yet, symmetrically and less visibly, dwelling in a familiarly

inhabited space is the condition of a kind of intimate self-assurance which might be

oppressed by “well-ordered” public spaces (Breviglieri 2012).

When engaging in familiarity, aiming at mutuality to build some commonality is

extremely demanding for the distant other. It requires that the other person, far from being a

“generalized other” in the sense of George Herbert Mead, gets so closely acquainted with the

familiarized world of the first person that he grasps the familiar clues and markers she uses in

relating to her surroundings. For this mutuality, gestures pointing to such clues are more

beneficial than discursive language. In the construction of an order of Domestic worth,

discursive language transforms these personal markers into a publicly attested qualification.

One gardeners says: “My grandfather had a large garden, I helped him in it, he taught me lots

of things.” When the grandfather died, and the garden with him, a grand child and his sister

decided to take on a plot in the shared garden. Among aggrandizements of familiar engaging

with plots, sociologists studied gardeners’ honour and various modes of mutual help (Weber

1998).

An intriguing area to discover: engaging in exploration

From what I mentioned before there is not much to see of an artwork. Before we turn in

the next section to aspects of a more obviously artistic project, we shall consider a regime of

engaging with the world which is aggrandized in most artistic gestures although it may

8.

remain far below any public aesthetic valuation. On the ground of a basic curiosity that

human beings shares with other living creatures, human communities have acknowledged a

kind of engagement with the environment which, while remaining quite personal, is oriented

towards the experience of unusual and new features. We called it and defined it with the main

contribution of Nicolas Auray's highly innovative research (2010).

Without additional discipline – as is artistic discipline – or rules of the game, this

engagement can hardly be made mutual and creates a great instability of the resulting

mutuality. Even personal play usually involves some organization of this engagement.

Innovation requires a transformation to make discoveries reproducible and they thus cease to

be explorative. The good supported by this way of engaging with the world is a kind of

excitement which is particularly valued in our contemporary societies. Equipment for

constantly re-experiencing novelty considerably extended with information technology which

is frequently more explorative than informative, with technologies of the “extreme sports”

which are praised for the rise of adrenaline, or with the circulation of chemical drugs which

have an even more direct effect.

Viewed from the observer, and even from the passer-by who glances at it from the street,

the place is certainly intriguing. The fascination comes from the chaotic entanglement of

planters where miscellaneous plants are grown, of flower beds and disparate chairs in front of

a kind of stage and wooden wall calling to mind some performance to come.

A functional equipment provided with instructions to use: engaging in a plan

Most gardens – even non public ones – where people grow vegetables do not look that

messy. They might even appear well ordered and functional. This is the case when the

gardener shifts from this familiarity engagement to engaging in a plan, and prepares the

environment accordingly. It is intended to facilitate coordination with other individuals

without demanding that they share his familiar habits and personally accommodated

belongings. It also simplifies his own coordinating within his future-oriented projects and this

task in connection with another. Our approach highlights the shift from on kind of assurance

(familiar ease) to another (self-assurance in an individual project planning oneself in the

future), and from one kind of good to another.

Since the garden was designed to be largely open to the public, it does not only allows

for personal investment in familiarity, but also involves engaging in a plan and formatting

the environment accordingly. For this purpose, the gardened space is divided in 1m2 plots. An

"instruction for use" is stuck on the wall with posters informing the garden users with its

9.

functioning. Another major equipment for this regime of individual plan and the coordination

it fosters is the program and schedule ("planning" in French!) on which users register in

advance and take their turn to open the garden in conformity with the schedule, and maintain

the collective equipment.

A space which qualifies for a Domestic, Ecological or Civic common good (justifiably

engaging for the common good)

When reporting various ways of engaging with the garden, I began with proximity and

mentioned that regimes of engagement are unequally ready for coordination at a large scale.

This is precisely the issue raised by politics. Large scale legitimate modes of coordination are

needed and they rest on a regime of engaging with the world intended to support the common

good. We can observe this generalizing process (montée en généralité) whenever the

valuation has to be made public. Users of the garden get involved in this regime when they

take part to public debates. This regime of engagement is also predominant in relations with

institutions which provide grants and subsidies for the development of the garden. This

development relies on a partnership between local government structures (Délégation à la

politique de la ville et de l'intégration), local organisations, inhabitants of the area and a

professional association which run training programs in eco-construction. When justifiably

engaging for the common good, the reality test needs to prove that the garden is organized in

such a way that it “participates in making the city more ecological and democratic”,

involving two different orders of worth which are frequently combined. Various concerns

and practices qualify for the ecological or Green worth: energetic autonomy, recycling,

minimal ecological footprint, a compost laboratory. Others qualify for Civic worth, since they

aim at more solidarity and equality through self-management, duty sharing and tool

mutualizing.

Tensions and compromises between ways of engaging with the world: a pragmatic

approach to life together in the world and to politics

We pay close attention to the plurality of ways members engage with the place to see

how they can be brought together in the making of a complex garden community. The verb

share does not make explicit this complexity, although it covers a diversity of ways to make

things common by possessing them in common, by using, occupying or enjoying them

jointly, by communicating them when they are personal. Differentiating ways of engaging

with the garden shows that they are unequally prepared for commonality, and that they

10.

contribute to various kinds of commonality. The intimate users friendly commonality based

on familiarity is hard to manage in the perspective of public commonality coordinating

individual plans with public instructions and schedules. Since each regime of engagement

supports a distinct kind of good, human power and realism, they often clash when they meet,

or result in oppressions when one of them weighs heavy on the others. Arranging

compromises between them is needed for composing a community.

Since our approach stresses that human powers or capacities are ensured by engaging

with a formatted environment, it addresses the politics of an “equipped” humanity (Thévenot

2002). It pays attention to the part played by the material environment in human beings’ “art

of composition”. Mettler thus insisted on the role of Euro-pallets. Although initially qualified

for Industrial worth – Euro-pallet is a standard and its production requires licensing – and

Market worth because of the magnitude of the market for this commodity, the Euro-pallet

also qualifies for Green worth because all its wood and nails can be recycled. After its

bounded economic life, it may have a second artistic life and qualify for the worth of

Inspiration as well. Cheap and handy, it serves as an element of modular architectures and

many other creative reuse, as pathways. One of the garden members made a familiar use of

them for pathways in his own garden.

Difficulties raised by the integration of a plurality of regimes are not extraordinary in the

garden. However, its experimental impetus gives more visibility to the requirements and

pitfalls met by the making of a community which is open to differing, that is of politics in

practice. In the next section, we consider impact of participatory art in this making.

3. PARTICIPATORY ART IN THE “SHARED GARDEN” AND THE MAKING OF

COMMONALITY IN THE PLURAL

When turning to the specific intervention of participatory art in the shared garden, the

abovementioned analytical grid makes it possible to embrace the involvement of artists and

participants at all levels of their engaging with the setting, including the level of close

proximity.

The “Studio for self-managed architecture” (AAA: Atelier d'Architecture Autogérée)

promotes “self-management of disused urban spaces” which bring together “poetic” art,

“political acting” and “research”. Their publicly present themselves as “a collective platform

which conducts explorations, actions and research concerning urban mutations and cultural,

social and political emerging practices in the contemporary city.”8 Members of the Studio use

8 http://www.urbantactics.org/

11.

the term “urban tactics” which resonates with De Certeau’s research on “the practice of

everyday life” and “tactics” of resistance to standardizing and disciplinary powers (de

Certeau 1998). They do not only refer to a plurality of common goods, involved by the Green

worth of ecological actions, or the Civic worth of solidary association and reciprocity

opposing “a liberal practice”. Their aim to “create relationships between worlds” including an

“architecture” of practices, from close proximity and personal usages of inhabitants to

commitments to wide causes. They intend to “make the space of proximity less dependent on

top-down processes and more accessible to its users”. The expected “architecture of

relationships, processes and agencies of persons, desires, skills and know-hows” should

involve “all those interested (individuals, organisations, institutions), whatever is their scale”.

In another of their projects taking place in Colombes, a North East suburb of Paris, they

add new requirements to cope explicitly with the issue we address with models of

commonality in the plural. Their project was featured in the 2012 Architecture Venice

Biennale titled “Common Ground”. And yet it “interprets the topic of the Biennale in a

different ways: not only as a basis for consensual action but also as a means for enabling

grounds for dissent and differentiation within the very notion of Common”.9

As mentioned by Mettler (2011), such projects are part of the expanding domain of “art

of interventionists”. Gregory Sholette named “dark matter” the invisible mass of “makeshift,

amateur, informal, unofficial, autonomous, activist, non-institutional, and self-organized

practices” (Sholette 2011: 1). The author refers to “De Certeau’s Situationist-inspired

emphasis on flexible tactics” and his idea that the everyday tactician disappears into its own

actions, “small, spontaneous, nearly tactile actions whose aggregate effect on the dominant

system is real enough” (ibid.: 34, 147). A handbook designed as a user’s guide presents a

variety of “inspiring (artistically and politically) and fun” practices of “trespassing relevance”

with “’tactics’, the key term for discussing interventionists practices” based on the “tools” of

the “détourné” and “dérive” brought by Situationists (Thompson/Sholette 2004: 13, 16),

putting forward the regime of exploration and the proper good of “exciting, provocative,

unexpected” experiences . These projects also relate to “participatory art” and extend the

motto which, from Novalis to Joseph Beuys (Beuys 1990 [1973]) through May 68 creations,

claims that everyone is an artist and urges the audience in the creative process, as co-authors

and observers.

These attempts raise an issue which puzzles Mettler in his own artwork, and which we

shall focus on in this section: Don't the individuals from the public audience, whom artists

9 http://urbantactics.wordpress.com/2012/07/04/aaa-invited-at-the-venice-biennale-2012/

12.

urge to participate, find themselves enrolled in an aesthetic artwork rather than turned into a

more emancipated public existence in the community? How do the two meanings of the

"public" interfere?

An artist in the garden

In 2010, AAA (the “self-organized architecture workshop”) invited an artist, Anne-Lise

Dehée, to takes photographs of the daily life in the garden. In her own words, she “recorded

all the garden’s functions, the plants as much as the architectural elements”. Using her

familiarity with the garden since its creation and relying on her artistic experience, she

“added interviews with gardeners and users to the photographic inventory”. Invited to publish

the resulting work, she produced a “book-object” made of a single piece of paper including

text and photographs, and to put it online (Dehée 2010). She selected the photographs “from

a graphic point of view, stressing details, the precise gestures of a hand”. Although she chose

not to include portraits, she states that her photographs “contain a human presence” and that

they show, “along with the movements of the plants and animals […] all that makes up this

enclave in the urban sprawl”. Among a profusion of surrounding living creatures, of various

species of grown plants mentioned with their scientific name, and of material equipment as

well, the artist pictured a cast of highly diverse human characters: “Gardeners, 1 old lady,

neighbour and feminist, 3 architects, 1 shop owner, 1 urban planner, 1 member of the

Hippocampe association10, 1 Amap11-er, 5 activists, 1 woman looking after a dog, a group of

teenagers, 1 library, 1 dreamer”, etc.

From this quote, we see that Dehée shaped her written records into an inventory, along

with surrealist poets. In the book-object which Dehée produced, another artist and founding

member of AAA, Doina Petrescu, linked the list to “the creation of the garden”: “we are in

the Genesis”. She commented on the inventory form, going back to the history of writing and

Sumerian food stocks. Shifting from inventorying to inventing, she noted that listed things

are made present when recorded, “as a reminder of what matters to the garden users”, “so that

they make up and invent a new world”. We “present, carry the garden into language”, with

the same gesture as “the hand that holds out a few strawberries” in one of Dehée’s photos.

Petrescu made explicit reference to Jacques Prevert’s poem “Inventaire” – which led to the

French idiom “inventaire à la Prévert” for a ragbag list containing a miscellaneous collection

10 Hippocampe association intends “to promote cultural urban practices and acquaintance with creators and their works”, see http://www.hippocampe-associe.com/

11 AMAP - Associations pour le maintien d'une agriculture paysanne - intend “to promote organic farming […] and a direct link between farmers and consumers”, see http://www.reseau-amap.org/

13.

– and to Georges Perec “Infra-ordinaire”. Perec opposed “infra-ordinary” to “extraordinary”

and advised writers to describe “the banal, the everyday, the obvious, the common, the

ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual”, and “make an inventory of

your pockets, of your bag” (Perec 1989).

Which architectures of community, for which politics of difference and emancipation?

The format of the list puts all items on the same plane. However the artist’s intention

contrasts with the bureaucratic first purpose of the list. Artists’ lists serve to produce

incongruity, as the famous raccoon oddly added at the end of Prévert’s inventory which

breaks apart the “together” brought by the list. Then, it places value on difference, and

contests any unifying order and valuation which would be based one single system of

difference. Here, listing together suggest another mode of living together in the shared

garden. Within the deliberate incongruity of the inventory, we can identify a plurality of

engagements which we distinguished before, and make out background constructions of

commonality in the plural which specify modes of differing and expressing differences.

Various orders of worth – and worlds of relevantly qualified items – are involved in the

inventoried activities with the garden. Members of diverse associations qualify for the Civic

worth since they look for more collective solidarity through urban practices, a direct link

between farmers and consumers, or political activism. The qualification for Green worth and

its supporting common good is also visible among various items: “ecological kit”, “green

roof”, “solar panels”, “a composting area”, “the guide go compost”, “a dry toilet bucket”. A

usual mode of aggrandizing artworks in a common good, that of the worth of Inspiration, is

involved in several items of the inventory, and not only in the form it takes: settings for

exhibitions, performances or concerts, and “1 sculpture in steel painted bright red”. More

controversial for Inspiration qualification is the story of two wandering gnomes, which the

inventory recorded. One is said to have left for Japan while another “preferred to slalom

between the laid-out plots” although recently he no longer leaves by the mountains and the

valleys. Is he getting old?”. The tale recalls the “Garden Gnome Liberation Front” – Front de

Liberation des Nains de Jardin – which appeared in France some fifteen years ago. The

inventory also takes note of more traditional ties which qualify for Domestic worth: “‘My

grandfather had a large garden, I helped him in it, he taught me lots of things.’ Grandfather

died, the garden with him. Arnaud and his sister, Léa, have decided to take on a plot in the

shared garden at number 56.” To conclude on this first construction of commonality based on

orders of worth, we see that the project to “create relationships between worlds” cannot be

14.

demonstrated by the listing form which does not say much about ways to cope with the

critical tensions between different orders of worth, a key issue for the politics of commonality

based on a plurality of orders of worth.

The liberal grammar is the background construction which informs the whole project as

far as it empowers individuals and allows their greater autonomy. The empowering

orientation is here – as in other experiences (Charles 2012) – grounded in practical activities

and less in discursive negotiations between individuals who choose different options in a

liberal public. The inventory includes a hint of cultural or ethnic differentiation which might

indicate another reorientation of the liberal grammar towards multiculturalism: “1 Polish

grandmother and 1 bilingual grandchild firmly planted with amazement in front of the

tomatoes in the sunlight of an August afternoon.”12

The inventoried items – and practices which involve them – open to another grammar of

commonality in the plural, the grammar of personal affinities to multiple commonplaces.

This third construction is the most open to personal convenience, the good of ease and the

capacity of intimate attachment which we found associated with engaging in familiarity. As

required by Perec, Dehée’s inventory lists things that “seem trivial and futile” because they

are part of “the infra-ordinary”, the “habitual” of “our body” and “our space” (Perec 1989).

In her contribution to Dehée’s book-object, another artist and member of the studio AAA,

Doina Petrescu, is more explicit about this familiarity to one’s personalized environment

which she captures with the category of “care”: “There is care in the dibble that makes a hole

in the ground into [which] a plant is inserted, there is care in the string that ties a stalk to a

cane.” She refers to social sciences literature which conceives “care” as the premise for an

aptitude for love (Molinier/Laugier/Paperman 2009).13 In the same booklet made of one wide

page (Déhée 2010), she cites Stanley Cavell whom the previous authors quote, when he asks

you to leave it to the object that interests you the care to teach you how to regard it and for

instance to “let a film teach you how to consider it” (Cavell 1981:11). This quote insists on

the rather passive dependency of the human ease towards the familiarized environment, a

dependency which engaging in familiarity highlights and which the social and political

sciences category of interest does not. When Petrescu writes that “it is humanity of the

garden itself that is revealed, with the capacity for perception of those who have experienced

it”, she goes back to John Dewey’s definition of “experience” as the capacity to see the detail,

12 In contemporary France which is slowly opening to the acknowledgement of such differences, policies place value on a newly coined French substantive “la diversité”.

13 For a view from the sociology of engagement on certain limits of this literature on care, see Pattaroni 2005.

15.

the expressive gesture (1980 [1934]). Dehée added to her discursive inventory photographs of

such expressive gestures of the daily life in the garden.

Although these various authors rightly bring to the fore elements of the regime of

familiarity, they do not grasp the difficulties it raises when trying to make it mutual and to

build commonality upon it. When Perec mentions “common things” – in quotes in his text –

he means ordinary things and does not point to this difficulty. Yet, his concern for the

particular language – or “tongue” (“langue”) – needed to speak of them touches the basic

operation of communicating which we found involved when familiar attachment has to be

transformed in the making of commonality in the plural. Perec uses metaphors of extraction

to describe the process: “How are we to speak of these ‘common things’, how to track them

down rather, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they remain mired,

how to give them a meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what is, of what we

are” (Perec 1989:11).14 With such metaphors, he regards the operation from the artist’s

viewpoint, not from members of a political community who have to make issues common

and differ, and who need to transform their personal concern accordingly.

Discussing Rancière’s relation of aesthetics and politics with “the promotion of the

anonymous”

On Jacques Rancière’s account, aesthetics is central to politics, the reason why his

thought is highly relevant for our discussion. In his The Politics of Aesthetics: The

Distribution of the Sensible – “distribution” implying both inclusion and exclusion –, the

“aesthetic regime of the arts” involves, by contrast with the previous “ethical” and

“representational” regimes, “the promotion of the anonymous” (Rancière 2004). This change

is at stake in the inventory form. Referring to collage as mixing “the strangeness of the

aesthetic experience with the becoming-life of art and the becoming-art of ordinary life” and

“the polemical function of the shock of the heterogeneous” such as produced by Dadaist

canvases glued with bus tickets, clock parts and other accessories which “ridiculed the

pretensions of an art cut off from life”, Rancière relates the inventory form to another

operation – he even write “reverse operation” – on the world of things: “to re-seize their

collective historical potential that critical art dissolved into manipulable signs” (Rancière

2006:84-89). Assembling heterogeneous materials for “a positive memory”, the artist

becomes “an archivist of collective life”, as in Christian Boltanski’s installation, Les Abonnés

du téléphone, which was based on directories. Also mentioning de Certeau’s Arts de faire,

14 English translation: http://www.daytodaydata.com/georgesperec.html

16.

Rancière notes that, with the inventory, the artist also makes visible, in art’s reserved space,

“the arts of doing that exist throughout society” so that “critical art’s political/polemical

vocation tends to become a social/communitarian vocation” (id.:89-90).

Rancière states that it first took place with “the appropriation of the commonplace” [in

French: l’assomption quelconque]”: “an epoch and a society were deciphered through the

features, clothes, or gestures of an ordinary individual (Balzac); the sewer revealed a

civilization (Hugo); the daughter of a farmer and the daughter of a banker were caught in the

equal force or style as an ‘absolute manner of seeing things’ (Flaubert)” (Rancière 2004:32).

He also mentions Hugo’s Cromwell and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, for similar statements.

Most interestingly for the relation between participatory art and the social sciences, Rancière

connects this aesthetic paradigm with the scientific paradigm of critical social sciences: “the

ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true. And the ordinary becomes a trace of the

true, which belongs to the aesthetic regime of the arts, played an essential role in the

formation of the critical paradigm of the human and social sciences” (ibid.:34). For Rancière,

the critical unveiling of the hidden part of the picture, which critical social sciences are based

on, originates in what he calls “phantasmagoria of the true”, while this aesthetic is “flattened

into the positivist sociological concepts” of mentality and belief.

In Rancière’s politics of places, distributed places are maintained by “police order”. This

conception is particularly relevant to bring back into politics claims issuing from those who

are shared out (“sans-parts”: without any shared left). Yet, it fails to capture mechanisms of

oppression which cannot be thus spatialized and do not result from police-ordering. To

identify such mechanisms, we have to grasp the plurality of ways human beings relate to

situated places – in the sense of spatial environment – and engage with them in quest of

empowered places – in the sense of kinds of power or capacity which various regimes of

engagement support. Such enabling relations to places are variously affected by the

architectures of commonality in the plural, and by the mode of differing which each

construction fosters. We can find a clue of Rancière’s lack of apprehension of these

architectures in his playing with the French word “partage”. The English word “divide” used

to translate “partage” does not fully capture the ambiguity of the French “partage” [“partage

du sensible”] which means both “divide”, “distribute”, and “share” in the sense of having in

common without any sharing out. The name of the political-artistic project, “shared garden”,

is in fact the translation of “jardin partagé”.

The nice play with the two meanings of partage actually obscures the tension between

commonality and dissenting plurality which is the core issue that the constructions which we

17.

identified have to cope with. This issue is made even more tricky when the construction is

expected to open to participants engaging in familiarity, which is the case of the shared

garden. Let us consider now how the artists’ project urges participants to take part to an

emancipated community.

The theater of participation: “live reading” by “users of the shared garden”

I will now follow Mettler’s comments (Mettler 2011). They are particularly relevant

since he carried out his sociological investigation to clarify his embarrassment in the garden,

as a spectator or participant. His trouble met his concern about artists’ “responsibility”

towards spectators who are encouraged to take part in quest of emancipation.

His first worry is about presenting oneself when meeting users of the garden. Quite banal

in everyday life, the presentation of the self has been carefully studied by sociologists

following Gofmann. Yet, Mettler’s point – as ours – is distinct. He relates this presentation to

the political issue of living together. He notes that, because the project is intended to remove

barriers between a wide array of ways to engage with the place, it also “creates uncertainty

about the way to present oneself”. Speaking to a gardener and naming the garden a “device”

might make it functional and engage in a plan regime which would hamper engaging in

closer familiarity and possible friendship. The organization of the community “leaves to the

participants’ discretion the effort to meet others and present oneself”.

Artwork is intended to present the plurality of ways people engage with the place. This

presentation brought about a second worry concerning representation, a core issue in art. The

book-object was an artistic representation of various practices of participants who frequent

the shared garden. It led to a more participatory representational step of the project. Four

users of the garden engaged in a “live reading” of the book, in the garden itself. It occurred as

a presentation to newcomers, during a neighborhood event known as a “block party” ( fête de

quartier). Actors read extracts from the book on sheets of paper they hold. One of them

arranged the stage before, stretching the canvas cover – a basic flexible equipment of the

garden – over a backstage wall made of euro-pallets. Mettler mentions that, “without any

change of his dress into an actor’s costume, he seems to be only himself here. He turns

towards the garden, speaking loudly. His pose is expressive, overstated: he plays. However,

we aren't sure of knowing the character he plays. He seems to follow a theater convention

requesting to be expressive on stage. But to what does this expression relate remains unclear

for spectators.” Mettler notes that the four participants do not “master the reading of a poetic

text”. Elements of stagecraft which they introduced consist in pointing to items of the garden,

18.

which the text refers to. But spoken details are invisible for the public, and words are

frequently drowned out by the noise from the street”. Among the audience, unequal attention

is paid to what is going on. Children are distracted and turn their back to the scene, looking in

another direction. While non professional actors demonstrate their strong commitment to the

place, Mettler worries about their demeaning awareness about their awkward performance

which suffers for a lack of artistic preparation. He states that initiators of the project, who

encourage participants to express themselves in public through artistic gestures, should feel

responsible towards their performance.

Mettler states in the following way his third worry regarding artists’ responsibility. He

notes that the artistic component of the project inevitably “condemns persons who engage in

it to representation”. He wonders “to which extent does the artist contribute to capacitate our

empower participants becoming artists themselves to a degree, and emancipating from the

[artistic] frame of intervention”. The artist’s responsibility issues from participants’ “double

action”. Participants act on their environment with “a power which might be emancipatory.

[…] But other people look at them, as we do, and participants are put in actors’ position,

representing actions. They take part to a small show, as demonstrated by other garden users

who takes photographs of them. They are aware of the fact they compose an image.” Mettler

confronts “the opportunity to become someone acting, to ‘see one’s place’ in a community”,

to a risk. This risk, “much less explicit, is to become an image” which circulates on internet

and is “detached from participants”. In artistic projects “which place value on participation, it

should be important to clarify whether people who take part make images (of themselves and

the world) or take part by being part of the image.”

CONCLUSION

Don't the individuals from the public audience, whom artists engage in participating, find

themselves enrolled in an aesthetic art work, rather than turned into a more emancipated

public existence in the community ? We reported how Mettler worried about the ambiguity of

“participation”.15 Assumed to take part more creatively to the community, participant might

instrumentally become part of the artist’s work. If cultural intermediaries are a major

component of the ‘genre’ of contemporary art, since they bridge the gap between the artist’s

transgression and the spectator’s expectations (Heinich 2012: 700), we studied in this paper a

new configuration in which spectators leave the audience to become such intermediaries. The

15 Striking convergences could be made with the analysis of the imperative of participation in other contexts – see Charles 2012.

19.

situation is still more complex when participants – and artists as well – engage in the making

of a political community which is expected to be rejuvenated by artistic practices.

In this configuration linking participatory art to politics, theater plays an important role.

The joint analysis of theatrical, political and social representation enlightened some of the

ambiguities of the participatory art project in practice. Without sticking to the relation

between representatives and people represented (constituency), the distinction between

constructions of commonality in the plural allows to go a step further in analysing the

transformation which is required to take part to commonality and to differ in common. A

theatrical dramatization might allow people who stay mute, when engaged with their familiar

place (or patch in the garden), to expose in public the object of their attachment through the

detour of “common places” which theater offers participants to invest in. Such a change of

formats corresponds to the operation of communicating which varies from one grammar of

commonality to the other. “Action-theater” (théâtre-action), which contemporary European

welfare policies promote, provide poor people (euphemistically called “disadvantaged” or

“underprivileged”) who currently lack access to voice, means to communicate their intimate

experiences, harms and wrongs, on a public space (Brahy 2012, part. II, chap. 4-5). Skillful

professional actors take care of the needed transposition obtained by playing with such

common places.

While this grammar of personal affinities to common places takes in familiar ways of

engaging with the world in the construction of commonality and differences through common

places, it does not support the way to engage in publicly argued criticisms and justifications

and to confront different conceptions of the common good, which the grammar of plural

orders of worth makes possible. Activists circulated a leaflet, in the street in front of the

garden, which addresses in such a harsh public confrontation of orders of worth the politics

of space and its threat to the district (Mettler 2011). Conceptions and practices relating

theater and politics are divided over similar distinctions. In a systematic analysis of these

divisions in France between 1989 and 2007, Bérénice Hamidi-Kim identified four “cities” of

political theatre: a “post-political theater” developing an aesthetics of ruins and apocalypse;

an “ecumenical political theatre” referring to classical art and to a “popular theatre” of public

service; a “theatre of political struggle” based on a renewed dialogue with revolutionary

theories and social movements; and finally “a new foundation of the theatrical and political

community” which aims at compensating the collapse of social and political ties and of the

desire to “live together” (Hamidi-Kim 2013, 2011).

20.

We are presently witnessing growing political experiences in search of renewed

communities – and modes of differing – which would be more hospitable to personal

attachments to the world16. Arts contribute to this renewal, not only in the kind of

participatory art we considered in this article but also in present social movements, and the

Occupy movement in particular. Such experiences challenge existing tools of political or

social sciences, and of aesthetics as well. Renewed transversal approaches to practices which

embrace enlarged conceptions of power, and which allow distinctions with regard to support

for commonality and dissent bring light on certain ambiguities – or even hidden oppressions

– which the imperative of participation might involve, even in artistic practices.

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