30.11.20 Claire Bishop and antagonism
'Without antagonism there is only the imposed consensus of authoritarian order—a total suppression of debate and discussion, which is inimical to democracy.' Bishop, 2004, p66
'Two years later, Bishop expanded her critique beyond Bourriaud’s work to take shots at the art world’s idolization of participatory art. According to Bishop, participatory art had promoted a moral rubric: art could be seen as “good” simply for adhering to a standard value system: authorial renunciation (where the artist removes themselves as primary creator of the work), activist attempts at material social change, a privileging of the collective over the individual, reliance on an experience rather than a created product and its susceptibility to the market, and the politically emancipatory qualities of participation itself. Bishop seemed to find herself swinging at major art-world figures (such as Liam Gillick) and at small community-arts based collectives, earning political and, it seems, personal ire. This was not lessened when at the launch, for example, when she labeled such work “banal, mundane, deadly.” (Henry, 2012)
In her book, Artificial Hells, Bishop’s 'shift toward her evaluative framework, one that privileges participatory art that can “elicit perverse, disturbing, and pleasurable experiences that enlarge our capacity to imagine the world and our relations anew,”' ... She shapes this autonomy of art from Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic philosophy, where art is both removed from politics but inherently political in that it a carries the promise of a new way of thinking about the world, a “metapolitics” that allows one to move beyond consensus-based ethics....
...Art, she eventually concludes, reaches an impasse: “At a certain point, art has to hand over to other institutions if social change is to be achieved: it is not enough to keep producing activist art.” This separation strikes to the core of Artificial Hells, an uneasy (and not completely unproblematic) separation between the aesthetic and the political, the activist and the artistic. When participatory art increasingly resembles corporate brainstorming sessions, where precisely does art fit?
...Bishop calls for a participatory art of resistance in Artificial Hells, but a resistance that avoids considerations of the ethical in favor of aesthetically probing power relations as they stand. Such a situation, such as artist Tania Bruguera’s hiring of police officers to enforce crowd control tactics at the Tate Modern, carry an antagonistic urgency that escapes work like Tiravanija, the poster child of participatory art, famously in one piece serving curry to gallery-goers. Bishop argues that this kind of evaluation is precisely the critical labor necessary to redeem “participation” as a tool and goal in the face of neoliberal ideology.' (Henry, 2012)
'The aggressions towards Bishop were provoked by her cutting critiques of perhaps the most lauded new field of art in the last twenty years. The supporters of “social practice,” or participatory art, contend that we are witnessing a great reshuffling of the old binaries of author/spectator and art/life, leading to democratic and de-alienating possibilities in both art and society. Bishop takes none of this for granted.... She includes events and collectives not necessarily included in the discourse of art history, choosing instead projects that address the subjects she foregrounds: “the tensions between quality and equality, singular and collective authorship, and the ongoing struggle to find artistic equivalents for political positions.”
(Wong, 2012)
Bishop. C. (2004) Antagonism and relational aesthetics Available at: http://www.teamgal.com/production/1701/SS04October.pdf (Accessed 18 December 2019)
Henry, J (2012) Straight to Hells Available at: https://thenewinquiry.com/straight-to-hells/ (Accessed: 30 November 2020)
Wong, R. (2012) Art cannot provide a way out Available at: https://hyperallergic.com/55068/claire-bishop-artificial-hells/ (Accessed: 30 November 2020)
'Two years later, Bishop expanded her critique beyond Bourriaud’s work to take shots at the art world’s idolization of participatory art. According to Bishop, participatory art had promoted a moral rubric: art could be seen as “good” simply for adhering to a standard value system: authorial renunciation (where the artist removes themselves as primary creator of the work), activist attempts at material social change, a privileging of the collective over the individual, reliance on an experience rather than a created product and its susceptibility to the market, and the politically emancipatory qualities of participation itself. Bishop seemed to find herself swinging at major art-world figures (such as Liam Gillick) and at small community-arts based collectives, earning political and, it seems, personal ire. This was not lessened when at the launch, for example, when she labeled such work “banal, mundane, deadly.” (Henry, 2012)
In her book, Artificial Hells, Bishop’s 'shift toward her evaluative framework, one that privileges participatory art that can “elicit perverse, disturbing, and pleasurable experiences that enlarge our capacity to imagine the world and our relations anew,”' ... She shapes this autonomy of art from Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic philosophy, where art is both removed from politics but inherently political in that it a carries the promise of a new way of thinking about the world, a “metapolitics” that allows one to move beyond consensus-based ethics....
...Art, she eventually concludes, reaches an impasse: “At a certain point, art has to hand over to other institutions if social change is to be achieved: it is not enough to keep producing activist art.” This separation strikes to the core of Artificial Hells, an uneasy (and not completely unproblematic) separation between the aesthetic and the political, the activist and the artistic. When participatory art increasingly resembles corporate brainstorming sessions, where precisely does art fit?
...Bishop calls for a participatory art of resistance in Artificial Hells, but a resistance that avoids considerations of the ethical in favor of aesthetically probing power relations as they stand. Such a situation, such as artist Tania Bruguera’s hiring of police officers to enforce crowd control tactics at the Tate Modern, carry an antagonistic urgency that escapes work like Tiravanija, the poster child of participatory art, famously in one piece serving curry to gallery-goers. Bishop argues that this kind of evaluation is precisely the critical labor necessary to redeem “participation” as a tool and goal in the face of neoliberal ideology.' (Henry, 2012)
'The aggressions towards Bishop were provoked by her cutting critiques of perhaps the most lauded new field of art in the last twenty years. The supporters of “social practice,” or participatory art, contend that we are witnessing a great reshuffling of the old binaries of author/spectator and art/life, leading to democratic and de-alienating possibilities in both art and society. Bishop takes none of this for granted.... She includes events and collectives not necessarily included in the discourse of art history, choosing instead projects that address the subjects she foregrounds: “the tensions between quality and equality, singular and collective authorship, and the ongoing struggle to find artistic equivalents for political positions.”
(Wong, 2012)
Bishop. C. (2004) Antagonism and relational aesthetics Available at: http://www.teamgal.com/production/1701/SS04October.pdf (Accessed 18 December 2019)
Henry, J (2012) Straight to Hells Available at: https://thenewinquiry.com/straight-to-hells/ (Accessed: 30 November 2020)
Wong, R. (2012) Art cannot provide a way out Available at: https://hyperallergic.com/55068/claire-bishop-artificial-hells/ (Accessed: 30 November 2020)