Artificial Hells

by Bishop, Claire

• ISBN13: 9781844676903
• ISBN10: 1844676900
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-07-24
• Publisher: RANDOM

Summary

For over a decade, conceptual and performance art has been dominated by participatory art. its champions, such as French curator Nicolas Bourriaud (who invented the term 'œrelational aesthetics' to describe it) and American art historian Grant Kester, believe that by encouraging an audience to join in, the artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art. The book follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of the participatory aesthetic, in both Europe and America. This itinerary takes in Futurism, Dada, situationism, Czechoslovakian Happenings, and Argentinean Conceptualism, and concludes with contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera and Jeremy Deller. Since her controversial essay in Artforum in 2006, Claire Bishop has been one of the few to expose the political and aesthetic limitations of this work. In Artificial Hells she not only scrutinizes the claims for democracy and emancipation that the artists and critics make for the work, but also questions the turn to ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such participatory and collaborative art.

Author Biography

Claire Bishop is Associate Professor in the PhD Program in Art History at CUNY Graduate Center, New York. She is the author of Installation Art: A Critical History and Editor of Participation. In 2008 she co-curated the exhibition 'Double Agent' at the ICA, London. She is a regular contributor to Artforum, October, e-flux, and other international art magazines.

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. 1
The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents	p. 11
Artificial Hells: The Historic Avant-garde	p. 41
Je participe, tu participes, il participe ...	p. 77
Social Sadism Made Explicit	p. 105
The Social Under Socialism	p. 129
Incidental People: APG and Community Arts	p. 163
Former West: Art as Project in the Early 1990s	p. 193
Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity	p. 219
Pedagogic Projects: 'How do you bring a classroom to life as if it were a work of art?'	p. 241
Conclusion	p. 275
Notes	p. 285
Acknowledgements	p. 363
Illustration Credits	p. 365
Index	p. 373
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.