Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship by Claire Bishop (review)

As Claire Bishop’s masterful Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship makes abundantly clear, social performance is perhaps the critical political art form of the current moment. Through its exhaustively researched pages investigating the nature and history of aesthetic approaches that engage the idea of the activated spectator, Bishop issues both a trenchant analysis of the idea of social art as well as a call for a revitalized critical assessment of the form. Artificial Hells provides a timely and much needed theorization and critical history of an area of performance that will surely be marked by further experimentation. It seems clear that few practitioners or students of contemporary performance can afford to miss a close reading of what Bishop offers with this volume.

The importance of the book’s subject is manifest even if only considered as a history of collective artistic authorship. Bishop suggests a timeline of those moments of political crisis throughout the 20th century during which artists are compelled to respond to profound alterations in the body politic with work that mirrors the fluidity of social dynamics. These critical junctures define the rise and fall of an organized left on the world stage: 1917 and the Bolshevik Revolution (coinciding with European movements like Dada and Futurism), the reorganization of progressive politics in the ’60s (and its bitter reflection in the military dictatorships in Latin America), and finally the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989 and, with it, much of the vigor behind the idea of Communism as a viable countervailing system to Western capitalism. What this trajectory makes clear is the close association between the impulse to reform a “passive” artistic audience and the desire to activate the populace politically. Here Bishop cannily detects one main line of problematic assumptions about participatory art, namely, the tenuous relationship between aesthetic models of democracy and actual forms of democratic civic participation. The confusion between the two—really the assumption that an artistic action can stand in for true collective political reality—is one of the book’s significant contributions to a critique of the form. As history shows, the artistic gesture all too frequently stands in for the lack of democracy in society at large.

Another of Bishop’s theses—that participatory performance is the most vital part of what remains of the avantgarde—is noteworthy for the critical light it sheds on the end point of her timeline. With the reordering of worldwide political lines of allegiance post-1989 and the “triumph” of global neoliberalism, the malaise of the activist Left marks a loss of faith in a common, collectivist political project. This, Bishop asserts, is fertile ground for a diverse series of compensatory aesthetic “projects” that are amply documented in her later chapters. Even the term “project” takes on the connotative force of a socially ameliorative design, a conscious turn to redemptive actions for an age that has lost the ability to mobilize mass political effort towards social and economic justice. What Bishop suggests, however, in the clearest possible terms, is that we abandon facile critical approval of such actions and refocus on aesthetic criteria, not merely the social goals, of such artistic work. Only by looking at how such work challenges both the social field and the language of art itself can we begin to approach the work’s nature as, quoting Guattari, “transversal,” militant, undisciplined, creative, and social. Only through this lens can we understand what the best of such experiments offer, such as those by such artists as Tania Bruguera, Paul Chan, Pawel Althamer, and Thomas Hirschhorn.

Throughout her theorization of the power of performance to blur the aesthetic and social realms, rendering coauthorship more complex and productive, Bishop relies on the work of Jacques Rancière, whose The Emancipated Spectator has become a standard reference for artists working with human subjects. Rancière’s concepts of dissensus, partage du sensible, and the aesthetic regime form a...