Forms of Participation in Art

The problem of how aesthetic experience relates to the dimension of intersubjectivity is not new. What is new is the way this problem is being formulated. In contemporary aesthetic discourse it is not, as in Kant, a matter of some generality that would be implicit to every aesthetic judgment because it is based on a manner of experience that, in its very structure, can principally be assumed for all thinking beings. Nor, however, is it a matter of participating in some truth of universal validity. Like the first Kantian perspective, the second, the perspective of what has been called truth aesthetics, also abandons all concrete subjectivity. So, for Adorno, the ideal artist is one who emphasizes a moment in the work that allows it to step outside of its connection to the individuality of the artist (its expression). By committing to the project of relieving art’s autonomy from its relation to all concrete subjectivity, and thus also including his or her own, the “artist” is meant to become “the deputy of the total subject.”¹ Out of art, writes Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory, “it is a We that speaks and not an I—indeed all the more so the less the artwork adapts externally to a We and its idiom.”² From this perspective, participating in art means that the viewer, listener, spectator, or reader is meant to overcome his or her empirical situatedness in relation to the work and to participate in something universal.³ And as far as this participation is understood as participating in a “pure We,” the relation to the work gains a utopian dimension as well. To have an aesthetic experience, for Adorno, means participating in the “adumbration of reconciliation.”⁴

Contemporary art, on the other hand—indeed, increasingly since the 1960s—explicitly turns against the overburdening of art with the project of anticipating a pure subject for a utopian “total society.”⁵ Rather, to many artists today, this project appears just as corrupted as the hopes that were placed in the presumably universal language of abstraction. No matter what the bone of contention, whether it be the marginalization of women in the art of high modernism, the aloofness of this art in relation to proletarian culture and subcultures, or the largely white and Western character of the art world that it belongs to (which certainly is manifest in exotic references to its others)—in too many respects such universalism has turned out to be particularism. It is this insight that must be taken into account in reformulating the question of the relationship between aesthetic experience and the dimension of inter-subjectivity. For this dimension can no longer be imagined as pure or abstract. Rather, it has to be referred back to concrete culturally and socially marked subjectivities.

A variety of theoretical responses have been formulated to the question of how aesthetic experience can be reimagined within the dimension of intersubjectivity with particular focus on the relation between modes of participation in (open) work and modes of participation in social and political life. Many contributions to the discussion grouped under the title “participatory art” are even found in open argument with one another—chiefly falling into two camps. One side, mainly associated since the late 1990s with the French curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud, maintains that art should create concrete communities, thus generating immediate political achievements. Both in writing and in shows—especially at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris which Bourriaud co-directed from 1999 to 2006—Bourriaud has developed an art-political program he calls “relational aesthetics.” However, this program has been debated a lot since its programmatic formulation in 1998, both in terms of its political implications and the role it attributes to art. In the first part of this essay I will reconstruct the respective objections in order to lead over to a totally different understanding of participating in art, which I will discuss in more detail in the second part. For the other side of the art-theoretical discourse on participation sees the ethical-political potential of art not...