Out of many, one (Art Monthly Jul-Aug 12, 358) Mark Wilsher
Mark thinks that the model of participatory practice in some of the large-scale Olympic projects in the UK, is conservative and tokenistic. He questions what the audience is meant to experience through participation.
Lone Twin’s: Boat Project. People of the South East are invited to contribute wooden objects. The stories associated with each object are recorded and documented to form an archive of the area’s history. The artists then take this group of over a thousand objects to construct a seaworthy boat that travels around the coast.
So participants contribute objects that are bought together in one clear image or symbol that is provided by the artist. Anyone is invited to get involved, no special skills required or big investment in time. Similarly, Yoko Ono’s SMILE at the Serpentine invites people to upload photos of themselves smiling – to form an online film.
These projects require a defined end-point (imposed from the beginning) that unifies the contributions – a powerful visual symbol: ‘easily exchanged conceptual singularity’. But does the individual’s participation matter? In Antony Gormley’s Waste Man (2006) he provided a strong final image (a man) and asked people to donate furniture that had special meaning to them. The burning process could be considered to be transformative, as memories were released and people set free of past pain.
But the whole organising structure might be criticised on the basis of its top-down, hierarchical imposition of order. If the end result is preordained the specifics of an individual’s participation are meaningless and tokenistic, an illusion of power. No one is permitting people to have a say in how things evolve.
Does this matter? If the public get to take part and see their contributions add up to something, and the artists get to open their working practices to wider participation, what’s the problem? This model has the negative effect of obscuring more progressive alternatives; genuinely collaborative works involving the public. The emphasis on materiality is a retrograde denial of social relationships. Other models and processes of more nuanced collaboration or alternative systems don’t stand a chance among the official programme of crowd-pleasing spectacle and public showmanship
