The autonomy between US.

PARTICIPATION

EDITED BY CLAIRE BISHOP

LONDON/CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS: WHITECHAPEL/MIT PRESS, 2006

207 PP./$22.95 (SB)

Claire Bishop has emerged as one of the key critics in recent discussions on community public art. One of her first major contributions was an essay called "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics." (1) In it she argues that critics should attempt to define some of the criteria with which we might judge the new community-based and collaborative art of the 1990s. New work is more difficult to assess, she argues, because it does not reach a level of reflexivity with regard to a medium or a site. Bishop contends that just because a work encourages dialogue and participation, this alone does not make it democratic. What types of relations are being produced, she asks, for whom, and why? (2)

Defending the work of Thomas Hirshhorn and Santiago Sierra against the "relational aesthetics" of Liam Gillick and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Bishop counterposes an "avant-garde rhetorics of opposition and transformation" against poststructural "strategies of complicity." (3) In the work of artists like Hirshhorn, there is a readmittance of a degree of autonomy that is based neither in the contradictions of Clement Greenberg's revolutionary art-at-a-standstill nor Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics and modernist refusal. Making use of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's theory of radical democracy, Bishop calls for the analysis of "relational antagonism" at the level of criticism and not as a prescription for aesthetic theory and practice. Relational antagonism exposes what is repressed in the idea of social harmony that is noticed in some of the more utopian moments of contemporary community art: namely, aesthetic criteria. Because of this particular psychoanalytically informed structure, readers of Bishop's work should be aware that this is not a simple matter of shifting priorities from politics to aesthetics but an effort at criticism that takes social antagonism into account.

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More recently, Bishop defined the emphasis on collaboration and participation in contemporary art as "the social turn." (4) She argues here that socially collaborative art constitutes "what avant-garde we have today: artists using social situations to produce dematerialized, antimarket, politically engaged projects that carry on the modernist call to blur art and life." (5) She contends that because the "politics of inclusion" operate in tandem with state and corporate interests, works need to be discussed as art and not only in the context of their stated ethical intentions.

The essay takes issue with Grant Kester's critique of avant-garde art that takes a critical distance from its audience and that in some cases risks offense, shock, or didacticism. Bishop states that the "discursive criteria" of socially engaged art should not be to renounce authorial control nor to withdraw from the logic of aesthetic autonomy as the precondition for art's instrumentalization. Given the arguments of his 2004 publication Conversation Pieces, Kester's response to the essay made some rather predictable statements. (6) Among these is the reiteration of his critique of the "quasi-detached perspective of the artist," a quality or set of characteristics that he should ascribe to the field of aesthetic production rather than to individuals. Kester opens his essay with the salvo: "I was surprised to learn from Claire Bishop ... that 'politically engaged' collaborative art practice constitutes today's avant-garde." (7)

What was less predictable was Kester's subsequent positioning of Bishop in the context of queer theory, using Douglas Crimp's dispute with the editors of October and Eve Sedgwick's notion of "paranoid consensus" as a means to distance his position from structuralism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism--thereby avoiding questions of relative autonomy. These criticisms are precisely what make Participation a welcome intervention in the discussion. Kester's critical strategy brings to mind the ways in which contemporary public art criticism is not being framed. He seems to suggest that Bishop is defending a "straight" view of the aesthetic against "queer" activist destabilizations. If Kester appears to pose the problem of art/politics in the terms of something like straight/queer, what Bishop is asking us to consider is closer to what feminist and queer theory defines as the sex/gender system. In this sense, art is not to politics as male is to masculine, but both operate in relation to their subjectively and dialectically intertwined logics and rationales: art/politics/desire. What runs across these mutually exclusive yet always relationally defined spheres is the concept of autonomy, which in today's counter-globalization context is more often encountered in relation to direct democracy than to cultural production.

Bishop's edited collection of documents contains theoretical essays, artists' writings, and critical and curatorial papers that date from 1959 to the present. While the book's stated goal is to "provide a historical and theoretical lineage for recent socially-collaborative art" (12), it will likely serve as her best defense in the face of recent criticism. Her introduction makes clear that, for her, participation means political commitment and critical thinking over and above physical involvement and proximity. Her selection of texts will not satisfy everyone's particular genealogy of the new community art. It is my view, however, that many readers will welcome this collection as Bishop's refusal to remain satisfied with the existing terms of discourse.

MARC JAMES LEGER is an independent scholar living in Montreal.

NOTES 1. Claire Bishop, "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics," October, No. 110 (Fall 2004) 51-79. 2. Ibid., 65. 3. Ibid., 71. 4. Claire Bishop, "The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents," Artforum, Vol. 44, No. 6 (February 2006), 178-183. 5. Ibid., 179. 6. Grant Kester, "Another Turn," Artforum, Vol. 44, No. 9 (May 2006), 22. 7. Ibid.