Kaija Kaitavuori

Thesis: Art of Engagement: Audience Participation and Contemporary Art

Supervised by Prof. Julian Stallabrass and Nathalie Heinich (CNRS, Paris)

The dissertation examines audience participation in contemporary art – a phenomenon that has gained considerable popularity during the last fifteen years, accompanied by the rise of a large critical literature on the subject. Although participatory practices have roots in earlier art forms, participatory art in its current variations does not readily fit any pre-existing category, such as performance, activist or community art.

‘Participatory art’ is used as a generic concept about art that engages people who are not artists actively, beyond spectatorship, in the making or using of art. The focus of the study, however, is participation in art, not participatory art per se. The artworks are analysed as social situations and processes of interaction rather than objects or images; a conceptual framework and methodological tools are sought from social sciences, drawing on the theories of small-scale interaction by George Simmel, Erving Goffman, and Harold Garfinkel, Norbert Elias’s figurational sociology and Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory.

The core material consists of eight art projects that engage people in participation. The artists are Pilvi Takala, Superflex group, Santiago Sierra, Spencer Tunick, Erwin Wurm, Michael Lin, Tellervo Kalleinen & Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, and Mauricio Dias & Walter Riedweg. Based on these case studies, a four-group typology of participation is created. The typology is used to distinguish between different forms of engagement and to analyse the specific features they entail.

The dissertation claims that the ‘participator’, or participator function akin to Foucault’s author function, is a new role in art. It is not covered by the roles of the artist or the spectator but introduced alongside them as a complementary figure. The study further suggests that understanding a participatory artwork requires a new approach: artworks are analysed as configurations or networks of human and non-human actors. In this perspective, social relationships and processes are defined as intrinsic to the work, not as part of an external framework or background. Finally, Art of Engagement: Audience Participation and Contemporary Art discusses participatory processes in terms of democracy and the extent to which participation in art can be understood as ‘democratic’ in the framework of agonistic versus direct democracy.