Participatory art and geography: Politics,publics,and space

Abstract

This paper posits participatory art as a distinct but underexplored practice of interest for human geography’s contemporary work on art and aesthetics. It suggests that participatory art needs a conceptual, critical, and interdisciplinary grounding in human geography to advance the expanding relationship between participatory art practice and theory, aesthetics, and geography. Through three analytical themes – politics, publics, and space – the paper argues for an interdisciplinary approach to participatory art that draws across art theory, participatory praxis, and geography. The paper concludes around geography’s suitability to critically explore the ethical and aesthetic relations created by participatory art.

I Introduction

For Rirkrit Tiravanija’s artwork Untitled (Still) (1992) at the 303 Gallery in New York, the contents of the Gallery’s office and storeroom were emptied out into the main exhibition space, including the gallery director who then worked in public. This was, in part, a critique of the visibility of often hidden cultural labour and the spaces this inhabits. In the storeroom the artist set up a temporary kitchen including gas hobs, cutlery, chairs, and plates. He then cooked curries for gallery visitors. The aim was to establish social relations based on sociality and hospitality – providing for and welcoming the audience and enabling this to generate an atmosphere of sociality. Importantly, for Tiravanija it was not the inversion of the gallery space or the making of curry that was the centre of the artwork, rather the social relations that emerged and the way the food facilitated ‘a convivial relationship between audience and artist’ (Bishop, 2004: 56).

Human geography has seen steady interest in artworks that aim to experiment with the creation of social relations, such as Tiravanija’s above, and this paper presents a focused interpretive account which consolidates this work in dialogue with participatory art praxis and theory (Bishop, 2006; Bala, 2018; Castellano, 2021; Serafini, 2022). The paper’s key contribution lies in this interchange, and in presenting a series of analytics on participatory art – one that foregrounds the geographies of relations and participatory art praxis. In doing so and building from a critique of art theory’s typically narrow genealogy the politics of participatory art (n.b. Castellano, 2021), the paper argues that participatory art ¹ should be explored through its ethics (the specific democratic constitution of its relations) and aesthetics (the intensities of its relations).

Within the contemporary geographies of art and aesthetics, human geographers have begun to address the ways art practice offers interventions and transformations of social relations (Parr, 2006; Tolia-Kelly, 2007; Loftus, 2009; Nabulime and McEwan, 2010; Askins and Pain, 2011; Dawkins and Loftus, 2013; Ingram, 2014; Hawkins, 2013a; Diprose, 2015; McNally, 2018, 2019; Sheringham et al., 2020). This paper provides a consolidated focus on the geographies of participatory art, looking to the aesthetic social encounters and relations generated by this creative practice as a novel way to think about ‘the “work” art does in the world’ (Hawkins, 2013b: 7), conceptually and methodologically. Relatedly, beyond geography, there has been concerted work within art theory around the ‘social turn’, a contemporary, expanded canon of art practice in which social encounters become the aesthetic form and focus of evaluation, with robust debate around the type of politics, ethics, and aesthetics this creates (Bourriaud, 2002; Rancière, 2004; Badiou, 2005; Kester, 2011; Bishop, 2012; Castellano, 2021). This social turn has been motivated by renewed recognition in social theory and philosophy of the political importance of the arts and aesthetic experience (Rancière, 2004), and the resurgence of social commitments in art theory and practice (Bourriaud, 2002; Kester, 2004, 2011; Sholette et al., 2018; Bala, 2018; Castellano, 2021; Serafini, 2022).

Building from provocations in art’s ‘social turn’, the paper presents a set of analytics – politics, publics, and space – and uses them to develop an expanded synopsis of participatory art for human geography. These analytics are used to structure three core sections in the paper. Whilst this paper does focus on aestheticised social encounters and relations in participatory art, it is not a phenomenological exploration in the art encounter. Rather, it offers interpretive, analytic frames to explore the geographies of relations produced through participatory art practice.

Part II, The political aesthetics of participatory art (‘Politics’), initiates from interdisciplinary debates around the ‘social turn’, to critically discuss two of the central political aesthetics attributed to the constitution of the encounters and relations present in participatory artworks, the first based on generating convivial social events, and the second engaging with antagonistic relations. The section ends with a critique of this work in terms of its binary and Western-centric positioning. Part III, Forms of participatory publics (‘Publics’), addresses how participatory art is being used as a practice to engage with social justice issues. It then also addresses work from geography, art theory, and beyond which challenges the typically anthropocentric nature of theorisations on participatory art by looking at the role of the non-human in participatory publics. In Part IV, ‘Social turn’ spatialities (‘Space’), the paper puts forward the three distinct spatialities present in ‘social turn’ aesthetics. The first, interstitial space, builds from Bourriaud’s concept of the social interstice as the space opened by art practice within the ‘existing whole’ of capitalist relations. The second, interventional space, addresses how participatory art practices have been framed as holding the ‘conditions of possibility’ to intervene and recalibrate the everyday life of environments (Loftus, 2009; Dawkins and Loftus, 2013; McNally and McClymont, 2023). The final spatiality presented is commoning space, and this addresses how participatory art has been used to create shared spaces of radical democratic potential. It looks at how participatory practice has been used as what David Harvey might describe as ‘a social practice of commoning’, a practice with a focus on establishing a common ‘social relation’ for a specific group in a specific environment (2012: 73).

The aim with the ‘Politics’, ‘Publics’, and ‘Space’ analytics is not to offer deep critical appraisal, or comprehensive review, of the ‘social turn’ in contemporary art, or to offer a neat framework to approach each participatory artwork, rather it is to use them as departure points for an expanded synopsis of participatory art for human geography. It does so by using key elements of the ‘social turn’ as points of provocation, which, utilising work from geography, art theory and practice, and beyond, are then developed into a wider set of analytics for participatory art. The paper aims to develop geography’s understanding of how it creates specific political, public, and spatial relations. In this paper, therefore, related art theories and practices from the ‘social turn’, including dialogical aesthetics, relational art, and collaborative art, are also engaged with. Following this introduction, the paper splits into three main sections based on the analytics. It then concludes around geography’s suitability to critically explore the ethical and aesthetic relations created by participatory art.

II The political aesthetics of participatory art

Participatory art’s political aesthetics have been a contentious debate, one which picked up speed during the 1990s with the publishing of Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics. This first thematic section of the paper initiates with a discussion of Bourriaud’s theory of relational aesthetics, followed by a series of critiques from art theory/history. The section ends with a critique of the binary thinking in this conversation and its Western-centric nature.

Artworks such as Tiravanija’s at the opening of this paper, Bourriaud suggests, aim to create social encounters that develop a ‘specific sociability’ in the audience (2002: 16). These works are gauged and judged, he proclaims, through the identification of a relational aesthetic, a ‘theory consisting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt’ (2002: 112). This places specific emphasis (aesthetic criteria) on human relations rather than the creation of sculpture, painting, or installation. It is this shift to an aesthetic staging and judgement of social interactivity that led art theorist Claire Bishop to describe Bourriaud’s theory as ‘an art of encounter’ (2005: 35). This art of encounter, Bourriaud suggests in the book, emerged as a reaction and resistance to the individualising effects of late-capitalism on the social fabric. The aspiration of relational art practice, he continues, is to carve out ‘perceptive, experimental, [and] critical’ spaces of connectivity within an economic system that attempts to suppress collectivity and enforce individualism (2002: 12). He explains: ‘This is the precise nature of the contemporary art exhibition in the arena of representational commerce: it creates free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with those structuring everyday life, and it encourages an inter-human commerce that differs from the “communication zones” that are imposed upon us’ (2002: 16). It is these ‘communication zones’ Bourriaud speaks of that atomise the social bond, subsequently turning it into ‘a standardised artefact’ (2002: 9): ‘These days, communications are plunging human contacts into monitored areas that divide the social bond up into (quite) different products’ (2002: 8). What relational art attempts, according to Bourriaud, is to stage other convivial ways, other ‘possible universes’ or ‘microtopias’, of being (2002: 9). Bourriaud expands: ‘the role of artworks is not longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real’ (2002: 13). This position is grounded ‘with a strand of modernism that rejects the notion of aesthetic autonomy in favor of a Marxist-styled critique of social conditions’ (Miller. 2016: 167).

Art historian Claire Bishop takes issue with the ‘ethical’ and ‘comfortable’ imperative in the encounters and relations of much participatory artwork. For her, participatory artwork with ethical sentiments attempting to resolve specific social issues lacks critical political aesthetics. Instead, Bishop argues that more critical practice involves provoking disruption and disagreement – sustaining antagonistic relations rather than try to resolve them. She describes this reworking of social turn art practice as ‘relational antagonism’, work which ‘acknowledges the impossibility of a “microtopia” and instead sustains a tension among viewers, participants, and context’ (Bishop, 2004: 70). Bishop’s critique of the ‘ethical’ relations presented in much social turn art is heavily influenced by the dissensus-based political philosophy of Jacques Rancière (who has been specifically critical of relational aesthetics) and Chantal Mouffe and Ernest Laclau’s (1985) radical democratic theory of political antagonism. Bishop explains (2004: 67):

‘I dwell on this theory in order to suggest that the relations set up by relational aesthetics are not intrinsically democratic, as Bourriaud suggests, since they rest too comfortably within an ideal of subjectivity as whole and of community as immanent togetherness. There is debate and dialogue in a Tiravanija cooking piece, to be sure, but there is no inherent friction since the situation is what Bourriaud calls “microtopian”: it produces a community whose members identify with each other, because they have something in common’.

Ultimately, the proclaimed politics of relational aesthetics centres around the creation of sociality within the space of the artwork. Importantly, creating this opening for sociality is enough for Bourriaud, but for others within art theory, this openness, and the democratic relations it presumes, is the key site of critique (Foster, 2003).

For Bourriaud, relational art, and its constituent social encounters, has clear political meaning and direction. He claims it ‘is definitely developing a political project when it endeavors to move into the relational realm by turning it into an issue’ (2002: 17). Art turning its attention towards the convivial constitution of and experimentation with the social is enough for Bourriaud to find a political focus. It is the art’s status as an ‘open work’, one that makes space for relations but denounces any direction for them, that is also deemed part of its politics. However, and as Bishop (2004) argues, the specific outcome to this attention to conviviality remains hazy what participant-viewers of relational art are supposed to garner from the experience lacks any real direction or clear outcome (Bishop, 2004). Discussing this concern, Dean Kenning (2009: 437, original emphasis) expands:

‘Most crucially what this eludes is the kind and quality of the relations that have been initiated: is anyone able to participate in an event, or interact with a piece of work, or only those invited to a private view, or the person who owns the work? Are the relationships in any way meaningful, or do they feel contrived, or even coercive?’

This ‘collapse of content into structure’, as Kenning identifies, is what ‘leads Bishop to accuse Bourriaud of formalism’ (2009: 437). But it also highlights this openness associated with relational art as perpetuating a distinctive exclusionary logic, where those participating come from ‘pre-existing, middle-class art communit[ies]’ (McNally, 2019: 214). The politics, for Bourriaud, lies in art’s attempt to create better ways of living, creating what he calls ‘microtopias’ rather than a utopian blueprint (2002: 13). ‘It seems more pressing to invent possible relations with our neighbours in the present than to bet on happier tomorrows’ (2002: 45). As well as chiming with Painter’s (2012) work on urban proximity and the ethics and politics of neighbour relations, this microtopian approach, as Bishop identifies, ‘is what Bourriaud perceives to be the core political significance of relational aesthetics’ (Bishop, 2004: 54). It is this gap between the experimentation of social form, but a lack of specificity about the constitution of these relations, that Bishop takes issue with, commenting: ‘If relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why?’ (Bishop, 2004: 65, original emphasis).

For Grant Kester, art historian and theorist, creating space and conditions for convivial social interaction like in Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics is not direct or structured enough. Understanding the politics of relational or participatory art, he argues, needs to be grounded in the specific intricacies of the dialogue within the artwork’s form. Kester describes this as ‘dialogical aesthetics’ – an aesthetics of conversation. He explains that in dialogical art ‘conversation becomes an integral part of the work itself. It is reframed as an active, generative process that can help us speak and imagine beyond the limits of fixed identities, official discourse, and the perceived inevitability of partisan political conflict’ (2004: 8). In part, this is in resistance to Bourriaud’s lack of specificity when it comes to the type of encounters and relations that occur in participatory art. Kester believes in the potential of dialogical art to ‘challenge conventional perceptions…and systems of knowledge’ (2004: 3). By setting up a space for conversation around particular social issues or tensions within the framework of art practice, Kester believes this can create ‘an open space where individuals can break free from preexisting roles and obligations, reacting and interacting in new and unforeseeable ways’ (2004: 6). A key example of Kester’s thinking is work from Austrian art collective WochenKlausur, specifically a project called ‘Intervention to Aid Drug-Addicted Women’ (1994–95). This involved a three-hour boat ride around Luke Zurich where, around a table in the main cabin, a group of politicians, journalists, sex workers, and activists from Zurich gathered. WochenKlausur had brought these people together as part of an intervention in drug policy (Kester, 2004: 1). They discussed the ‘situation faced by drug addicts in Zurich who had turned to prostitution to support their habits’ and some of the women’s related homelessness (Kester, 2004: 2). Over several weeks, WochenKlausur organised a number of these ‘floating dialogues’ which involved ‘almost sixty key figures from Zurich’s political, journalistic, and activist communities’ (Kester, 2004: 2). Kester suggests that because these boat journeys were situated within an art context and away from direct media pressure ‘they were able to communicate outside the rhetorical demands of their official status’ (Kester, 2004: 2). Kester explains: ‘They were able to reach a consensus supporting a modest but concrete response to the problem: the creation of a pension, or boarding-house, where drug-addicted sex workers could have a place to sleep, a safe haven, and access to services’ (Kester, 2004: 2).

The theoretical debate around the politics of participatory art, as outlined above, is often understood as a ‘divide between the nonbelievers (aesthetes who reject social artworks as shallow and misguided) and the believers (activists who reject aesthetic questions as synonymous with the market and neoliberalism)’ (Honorato, 2020: 39; Bishop, 2006). However, there are artists and scholars challenging this reductive binary. Sonia Boyce’s participatory work ‘is neither disruptive nor ameliorative’ (Honorato, 2020: 39); it sits between these relational states in tension, challenging the binary positions taken by the likes of Bishop, Bourriaud, and Kester. Key to her practice is intersubjective encounters and relations with people and ‘negotiating different perspectives’ (Boyce, 2023: n. p.). Boyce has ‘been collaborating with others since the 1990s’, but her participatory practice is the ‘starting point’ for how she makes artwork (Boyce, 2023: n. p.). Crucially, Boyce asserts her position as artist to draw from her collaborations with participants to produce visual work with a distinctive ‘Sonia Boyce aesthetic’, ‘a singular voice that can also comfortably accommodate many positions’ (McQuay, 2010: 59). Like Love - Part One (2009), for example, was developed in collaboration with a group of young parents in Bristol, UK, and involved Boyce using extracts from conversations with the parents to create a specific ‘visual and textual’ form including drawings, prints, wallpaper, and animation (Island, 2009: n. p.). This practice presents a more complex, nuanced politics of participation, which is balanced between ‘the political value of collaboration’ and ‘the aesthetic value of representation’ (Honorato, 2020: 40).

Carlos Garrido Castellano has provided an important intervention into the Western ‘canonization of socially engaged art’ (2021: 6), arguing ‘that there exist multiple, alternative genealogies of socially engaged art’ (2021: 1). Crucially, Castellano argues that it is not just about engaging with global case studies of participatory art, nor is it ‘enough to acknowledge the existence of multiple genealogies of social practice’, rather, it is about attending to the ‘spatial dynamics’ of each creative practice: ‘The specificities of context and location are not just additional elements associated with particular creative practices; rather, they urge us to redefine the conceptual apparatus designed to measure the aesthetic and social relevance of artistic creativity’ (Castellano, 2021: 2). This approach challenges the ‘critical [Western] appreciations of socially engaged art practice’ – such as the debate between Bourriaud, Bishop, and Kester, for example – that ‘have tended to be anchored from within a universalizing conceptual framework’ (Castellano, 2021: 2).

III Forms of participatory publics

1 Aesthetic participatory publics and prefigurative politics

All practice within the participatory aesthetic umbrella framed in the paper can be understood to form ‘publics’ in particular ways, and how these publics form under aesthetic guises relates to the different ‘forms’ of participatory aesthetic practices (collaborative, relational, etc.). What ties them together, Bishop would claim, is the artistic use of ‘social situations to produce dematerialized, antimarket, politically engaged projects that carry on the modernist call to blur art and life’ (2006: 180). Given the socio-ethical impetus of participatory art, these different forms of aesthetic publics are in recent times increasingly being applied to critical social justice issues, cutting across anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and anti-patriarchal fights, often blurring the lines between art and social life, community activism, and art-activism (Sholette, 2018; Phillips, 2017). In terms of the aims of this paper, what I will highlight in this section is how these different forms of aesthetic participatory publics practise a prefigurative politics for ‘counter-futures’ (Jeffrey and Dyson, 2021: 642; Phillips, 2017).

Such ‘counter-futures’ can be found in the work of art collective Black Quantum Futurism (BQF). Set up by artist, activist, and lawyer Rasheeda Phillips, in collaboration with poet, musician, and activist Camae Ayewa, BQF focuses on a radical futurism grounded in ideas from ‘quantum physics and Black/African cultural traditions of consciousness, time, and space’, exploring ‘a new approach to living and experiencing reality by way of the manipulation of space-time in order to see into possible futures, and/or collapse space-time into a desired future in order to bring about that future’s reality’ (Phillips, 2015: 11). Community Futurisms: Time and Memory in North Philly (2016‐2017) was a year-long collaborative art project by BQF in which they explore issues many human geographers will be aware of including the impact of ‘redevelopment, gentrification, and displacement’ in the Sharswood/Blumberg area of North Philadelphia, using oral histories, memories, and explorations of alternative temporalities and futures. It included a ‘Community Futures Lab’, an ‘oral history and oral futures recording lab, and pop-up community resource library, workshop space, and gallery located in the Sharswood neighborhood’ (Phillips, 2017: 835). At the time in 2016, a $526 million redevelopment project was clearing thousands of residential housing units. The ‘Community Futures Lab’ was set up by BQF in response to this, asking people in the community impacted by the redevelopment and displacement how they can help with things such as housing resources workshops and skill-sharing panels. The core aspiration of Community Futurisms was working closely in collaboration with Sharswood/Blumberg residents and ‘actively engaging what the future can look like for a community of people who have been marginalized’ (Phillips, 2017: 834), one which enacted a radical reconfiguration of the oppressive social conditions and structures experienced by residents. This participatory, collaborative art project can be understood as a practice of prefigurative politics which ‘involve[s] activists directing effort into performing now their vision of a “better world” to come’ rather than ‘straightforwardly protesting against a dominant regime’ (Jeffrey and Dyson, 2021: 643). Such a prefigurative political practice ‘is an inherently spatial and performative genre of political activism in which people enact a vision of change – through organisation, design, architecture, practices, bodies, or something as simple as a gesture or demeanour – and promote this as indicative of an imminent or more distant “future”’ (Jeffrey and Dyson, 2021: 643).

Holding a similar prefigurative politics to BQF’s Community Futurisms, Hacemos La Ciudad (2018) was a collaborative art project by female-led artist collective Las Imaginitistas produced in close collaboration with residents of the border town Brownsville, Texas. Las Imaginitistas identify as a socially engaged art collective which works to ‘decolonize public space, liberate the public imagination, and dissolve borders, both real and imaginary’ (MacWillie et al., 2013: n. p.). Hacemos La Ciudad critically subverted traditional planning processes to collectively ‘imagine a decolonised civic landscape’, developing the community’s own equitable version of the future city (Las Imaginistas, 2023: n. p.). The project ‘culminated in the creation of a 3-part vision for a decolonial border space’ which demonstrated ‘how individuals can advance decolonial values in their daily actions’, ‘how city officials and urban planners can reimagine the development of public space’, and ‘how we can imagine shared spaces as informed by ancestral wisdoms’ (Las Imaginistas, 2023: n. p.). Again, underpinning this project was an enactment of a radical future, ‘a decolonized future for their border town and its articulation of public space’ (MacWillie et al., 2013: n. p.). Both Hacemos La Ciudad and Community Futurisms are participatory art projects which assembled publics around specific social justice issues to critically reimagine and enact desired futures that radically reconfigure existing oppressive social conditions. What the paper turns to now is work within human geography and beyond which has challenged the ontological parameters of the participatory publics formed by artists.

2 Non-human publics

Describing Untitled (Still) (1992) by artist Rirkrit Tiravanija – introduced at the start of this paper and one of the key pieces to feature in Relational Aesthetics – Claire Bishop highlights the importance of the food present in the artwork (2004: 56):

‘In the gallery he cooked curries for visitors, and the detritus, utensils, and food packets became the art exhibit whenever the artist wasn’t there. Several critics, and Tiravanija himself, have observed that this involvement of the audience is the main focus of his work: the food is but a means to allow a convivial relationship between audience and artist to develop’.

Bourriaud describes this and other relational art forms as ‘A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context’ and are judged ‘on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt’ (Bourriaud, 2002: 112-113). For artworks like Untitled (Still), the generation of aesthetic social relations is central to its form and experience. The artist stages a convivial event to stimulate a participatory human public. Objects and things are present, but they are there as an excluded presence – there to stage the public participation but not be part of it. This limits the understandings of the type of relations present and how they emerge through certain encounters. Arguing for a turn away from human-centric understandings of politics, Noortje Marres (2010: 187-8) explains that this:

‘suspends the belief that non-humans can be contained in essentially passive categories like the “topics” of political debate and the “means” and “objects” of political action; that is, it presents a break with the instrumentalist assumption that insofar as politics is concerned, non-human entities can be principally characterized in terms of their susceptibility, or lack thereof, to manipulation by human actors, [and] in their role of participants in debate’.

I would argue that the passive categorisation of non-humans that Marres is arguing against is the way in which Bourriaud conceptualises the ‘publics’ of art in the social turn, where objects are understood as socially passive. This passive understanding of objects, I would argue, limits our understanding of aesthetic social encounters. What happens, for example, when we address the curry cooked by Tiravanija for visitors not as tacit matter but as an active participant in the publics of this relational art event? This question prompts a continuation, and potentially expansion, of the concern within art theory about the specific manifestation of the relations generated by participatory art (e.g. Bishop, 2004; Kester, 2004, 2011), something that queries, in Hawkins et al.’s words ‘who…is involved with these relations, and to what ends are these relations developed’ (2015: 3). By thinking of objects as participating ² in the publics of relational and participatory art, the parameters of what constitutes ‘the social’ within these artworks are challenged. Several geographers have begun to unpack this approach.

In previous research I empirically followed the participatory artwork I am Tower of Hamlets, as I am in Tower of Hamlets, just like a lot of other people are (2011–2012) by artist Amalia Pica which involved participants hosting a sculpture in their homes and subsequently delivering it to others in their neighbourhood. Writing about this artwork, I argued that ‘a relational aesthetic can emerge between humans and objects’ (McNally, 2019: 200). Specifically, drawing from Jane Bennett’s new materialist thinking (Bennett, 2001), I suggested that ‘enchanted’ aesthetic encounters occurred between participants and sculpture, something which challenged the social publics of participatory art. Building on this work, Sheringham et al. (2020) further argue for a relational aesthetic between participants and an art object, in their case a large copper globe which travelled through London, Shrewsbury, and Delhi. Exploring an environmental, participatory artwork named WATERWASH by artist Lillian Bell, Mrill Ingram (2014) makes the persuasive case for the agency of ‘other-than-humans, or nonhumans, such as soil, water, and plants’ in the public ‘assemblage’ of that artwork. This aestheticising of non-human participation highlights the value of artists working on urban-environmental issues, to ‘create occasions for new ways of thinking’ (Ingram, 2014: 109). Hawkins et al. (2015) adopted a material-centred mode of enquiry to investigate the ‘gentle activism’ of Bird Yarns (2012), a collective knitting art project in Tobermory, Scotland, that set to ‘explore the changing migration patterns of seabirds across the Scottish Islands as a result of climate change’ (2015: 8). By foregrounding the relations between human and non-humans in the project, Hawkins et al. highlight the value of an expanded account of ‘the social’ in participatory art. In so doing, they reflect on ‘how the political fabric of this far-flung project is woven together by “objects, devices, settings, and materials” as well as by subjects, all of which acquire explicit political capacities’ (2015: 8, after Marres and Lezaun, 2011). Rather than proclaim that ‘these collective engagements enable complex appreciations of global climate change’, they suggest that such artistic practices predispose (human) participants ‘towards a material imaginary premised on an appreciation of its local and embodied effects’ (2015: 8). Thus, Hawkins et al. apply this expanded social of participatory art to ‘get at’ how particular materials in specific settings can have political capacities and affects and ultimately be understood as active participants.

IV ‘Social turn’ spatialities

With an aesthetic focus on social relations, it is perhaps unsurprising to find different forms of spatialities within art’s social turn. This final thematic section of the paper explores three social turn spatialities, drawing from theory and praxis. Interstitial space looks at Bourriaud’s Marxist inspired concept of the social interstice, a way of thinking about participatory art in relation to capitalist relations. Interventional space looks at how participatory art has potential to recalibrate our everyday spaces. The final spatiality, commoning space, explores how participatory art can create shared spaces of radical democratic potential.

1 Interstitial space

The concept of the ‘social interstice’ is important for Bourriaud’s concept of relational aesthetics and is influenced by the spatial thinking in the work of Marx. In Bourriaud’s words:

‘Over and above its mercantile nature and its semantic value, the work of art represents a social interstice. This interstice term was used by Karl Marx to describe trading communities that elude the capitalist economic context by being removed from the law of profit: barter, merchandising, autarkic types of production, etc. The interstice is a space in human relations which fits more or less harmoniously and openly into the overall system, but suggests other trading possibilities than those in effect within this system’ (2002: 6).

This interstitial thinking demonstrates how Bourriaud ‘situated the relational work of art in the liminal space between aesthetics and politics, where the possibility for new forms of interaction and engagement can begin to develop’ (Miller, 2016: 168). This, I suggest, highlights a distinct spatiality in Bourriaud’s thinking. Here, the piece of art creates an interstitial space that facilitates ‘other trading possibilities’ (other ways of relating) while remaining within the ‘overall system’ (late-capitalism). Relational art is therefore theorised as a practice which crafts new spaces of sociability within existing social conditions, rather than structurally changing these (a characteristic which is central to the critiques from the likes of Bishop and Foster, and implicitly in Rasheeda Phillip’s/Black Quantum Futurism practice and thought). Miles (2009: 425) argues that this signifies Bourriaud’s departure from ‘the avant-garde project of changing the world…for the modest intention of inhabiting the world (as it is) in a better way’, something which conjures connections to broader bodies of work on the relationships between hegemonic and alternative economies developed by the likes of Gibson-Graham (2006) and Leyshon et al. (2003).

Art theorist Anna Dezeuze expands on Bourriaud’s interstitial spaces within existing hegemonic systems, through an application of de Certeau’s distinction between ‘tactics’ and ‘strategy’ (2006). She explains (Dezeuze, 2006: 149, after De Certeau, 1990: xxxix):

‘Strategy, according to Certeau, is a means of calculation and manipulation in order to gain power over another, in situations where the distinction between one’s own space and the other’s is clear cut. In contrast, tactics describe actions which take place solely within the “other’s space” because it is impossible to isolate the two spaces from each other. The interstice occupied by relational art according to Bourriaud seems to be the very space of everyday life in which de Certeau places tactics, those everyday ruses with which some members of society “tinker” with the dominant social order for it to work in their favour’.

For Dezeuze, relational art’s interstitial space exists within the dominant order, rather than overriding it. The proposed politics of this art practice then relates to whether ‘certain tactical practice can effectively subvert the everyday life in which they are embedded’ (Dezeuze, 2006: 149, after De Certeau, 1990). Dezeuze takes this approach via de Certeau as she argues Bourriaud is too vague about the type of practices he celebrates: ‘he refuses to address the ways in which they participate, or resist, a dominant social order’ (2006: 150). What de Certeau provides that advances Bourriaud’s relational aesthetic theory, Dezeuze suggests, is closer attention to ‘the specificities of the practices with which specific art practices stand in dialogue’ rather than lean towards ‘reductive descriptions of a universal everyday’ (2006: 150). To extrapolate, the spatiality in Bourriaud’s thinking is interstitial in the sense it opens up spaces which gestures towards other ways of relating within dominant social orders but lacks direction as to how these spatial relations should specifically form or intervene (n.b. Bala, 2018).

2 Interventional space

Human geography has had a sustained, if light, engagement with the theory of relational aesthetics and the wider ‘social turn’ in art practice and theory. However, of this engagement, a focus on the connection between spatialities of urban intervention and relational aesthetics has been important. As Alex Loftus has described, drawing on historical materialist thought, creating spaces of intervention is about seeking to ‘better understand the city, whilst also changing it’ (Loftus, 2009: 329). This work on aesthetic urban intervention was influenced by earlier geographical work on ‘interventional’ art practice and interests in the avant-garde and artist group the Situationists (Pinder, 2005). David Pinder (2005), addressing work of the Situationists, argued that art practice could be understood as a distinct mode of experimentation in urban space, specifically how it can intervene into the everyday spatial orderings and structures of the city. Pinder’s work does not engage with participatory art specifically, but it echoes the intentions of the likes of relational aesthetic thought to challenge and craft alternative spaces with social and urban conditions (2005: 396). For example, Pinder has looked to artist Karen O’Rourke’s project that invited local residents in New York to share their ‘secret shortcuts [and]…wrong turns’ of the city, in order to investigate and challenge the ‘political, economic and cultural questions’ associated with the ‘apparent inevitability’ of urban life and routines (2005: 396). Pinder used this work to highlight the ‘interventionist’ potential of art, presenting an early interest of Geography interest in art ‘beyond a focus on representing political issues to infiltrate and intervene in urban situations tactically for critical ends’ (2008: 733). Thus, whilst not making specific reference to social turn art practice, Pinder’s work directed Geography’s attention towards an interventional focus on art praxis. This work was built upon directly by others who directed attention to a specific form of artistic ‘intervention’ – relational art.

Taking direct influence from Pinder, and developing this interventionist approach to art, Alex Loftus (2009) drew from Antonio Gramsci to argue for the radical democratic potential in urban artistic practice. Identifying that ‘urban interventions are often forms of cultural resistance’ (2009: 329), Loftus suggests a potential to create ‘a new reality’ and ‘a new moral life’ (2009: 326, after Gramsci, 1985). Writing about the urban intervention of an artwork entitled Ping Pong Project by collective City Mine(d), which saw artists work closely with local community members on local issues of concern, Loftus uses relational aesthetics to draw attention to the work’s focus on collaborative process between artists and community, rather than physical outcome. Subsequently, Loftus (writing with Ashley Dawkins) built on this interest in urban intervention and art practice in a more concerted manner, drawing from relational aesthetics specifically to explore the capacity of art practice to actively intervene and offer alternative spaces within the urban (Dawkins and Loftus, 2013). Using relational aesthetics alongside Jane Rendell’s (2006) critical spatial practice, Malcolm Miles’ (2004) urban interventions, and Pinder’s (2005) arts of urban exploration, they turn to relational aesthetics to formulate the concept of ‘relational urban interventions’. Drawing direction from Marx’s belief that ‘a critique of political economy depends upon a revolutionary understanding of the emancipation of the senses’, Dawkins and Loftus argue that ‘the senses…might serve as “direct theoreticians in practice”, thereby generating the conditions of possibility from which radically new urban forms might emerge’ (2013: 665). Although they discuss and accept some of the critiques of Bourriaud’s conception of relational aesthetics, Dawkins and Loftus align themselves with art theorist John Roberts who argues for ‘these new practices of sociability’ as a reconnection ‘with utopian “enclave thinking”… [or a] new “communist imaginary”’ (Roberts, 2009: 351, in Dawkins and Loftus 2013: 672). Dawkins and Loftus suggest this opens a specific spatial-political impulse in relational aesthetics – a potential for creating spaces for a ‘communism of the senses’ (2013: 672). They suggest relational aesthetics as a practice that can liberate the senses from the oppression of capitalist forces ‘through the production of a differential space’ (2013: 675). Although they position themselves alongside an affirmative critique of relational aesthetics, Dawkins and Loftus break from Bourriaud’s conceptualisation in regard to aesthetic spatialities. As they assert, ‘classically defined relational aesthetics demarcates a time-space ascertained by the artist, thereby enabling micro-communities to form’ (2013: 672). However, Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics lacks structure towards the type of communities it attempts to form, plus critical reflection on those that somewhat randomly do (this also echoes Dezeuze’s concern for Bourriaud’s lack of specificity towards art practices). Dawkins and Loftus highlight the contested and complex nature of ‘community’ and avoid a fixity to it and its relations to art space. Thus, Dawkins and Loftus’ challenge the rigid ‘time-space’ of the communities created during a relational artwork: ‘we would argue that the work of relational urban interventions encourages displacement, by demanding that participants remain un-rooted, thereby questioning the notion of community via a disrupted submersion within public space’ (2013: 672). Their site for relational urban intervention is not the time-space of the gallery, or indeed any fixed site, rather the body itself. More recently, building on this work in geography, Cecilie Sachs Olsen has critically explored the ability of socially engaged art to ‘intervene in the social and material processes of city-making’ (2019: 985). Olsen addresses how this type of art practice might ‘expand our understanding of the link between the material environment and the production of urban imaginaries and meanings’ and how it can ‘open up novel and productive ways of thinking about and engaging with urban space’ (2019: 985).

3 Commoning space

The commons, Oli Mould summaries neatly, ‘is that which we build by being together’ (2021: 4). Contemporary, critical engagements have advanced the term beyond the ‘natural’ resource capacity of specific commons toward the idea that ‘the community that builds up around and beyond that resource, the society it creates and continual act of democratising access’ (Mould, 2021: 4). The concept of ‘the commons’ has been critiqued for its predominant ‘capitalocentric framing’ and its framing as a distinct, enclosed ‘thing’ ‘with publicly owned or open access property’ (Gibson-Graham et al., 2016: 193). What has emerged from these critical engagements is the argument that commons should be thought of as a process – as ‘commoning’ (Gibson-Graham et al., 2016). This position is ‘a recognition of the “commons” as a set of social relations that are not fixed but changing’ (Turner, 2017: 800). It is, perhaps, this imperative of co-productive process in commoning practices which lends itself to participatory art which values and aestheticises the process of working together rather than fixate on outcome. Indeed, within art’s social turn there has been a theme of participatory and collaborative art projects focusing on the galvanising of specific group or community, typically place-based, and prioritises collectivity and the establishment of common social relations beyond dominant social structures and capitalist logics.

Take, for example, Gudskul: Contemporary Art Collective and Ecosystem Studies (Gudskul hereafter), a collaborative art collective and public learning space in Jakarta, Indonesia, set up by art collectives ruangrupa, Serrum, and Grafis Huru Hara. Pedagogically and curatorially Gudskul is interested in radical collectivity to focus on the sustainability, legacy, and long-term transformation of the Indonesian art scene (Jael Kwan, 2020). The collective is framed by their shared concept of the ‘lumbung’, the name of an agricultural village tradition, as well as ‘the architectural structures of the barns in which farmers store the surplus from their harvests’ (Jael Kwan, 2020: n. p.). Lumbung structures are two-storey structures, the ground floor being used as a shared common space for events such as village meetings and celebrations, and the upper floor is used for storage (Jael Kwan, 2020). Gudskul’s lumbung – a shared compound built with a variety of architectural structures including modified double-stacked shipping containers – is a central, communal space for the grass-roots arts community to gather working to build their ‘survival and futures’ (Jael Kwan, 2020: n. p.). The shared compound and structure provide studios occupied by artists and publishers, 700sqm of jointly owned land, exhibition galleries, a library, a shop, and various workspaces. Different groups of people freely gather across the different spaces, and onsite equipment is shared according to need (Jael Kwan, 2020).

Scholars such as Eynaud et al. (2018) have critically argued for participatory art’s ability to be a ‘social practice of commoning’. Building from David Harvey’s social practice of commoning thesis, they argue for a radical participatory practice where ‘an urban common is used in common and, through its use, is reproductive of the community’, rather than ‘just as a spatial resource that needs to be fairly distributed and preserved across a community’ (Eynaud et al., 2018: 622). This argument demands a dual approach of participatory practice, to ‘serve a community – and of the common – to (re)produce a community while performing them’ (Eynaud et al., 2018: 622, drawing from Fournier, 2013). We can see this present in Gudskul’s practice, a shared space for the artistic grassroots in Jakarta, whilst also productive of that community, beyond the capitalist grasp of the wider art world. This practice of commoning from the art collectives associated with Gudskul (specifically ruangrupa) also embodies a critique of Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, moving away from ‘gallery-centred “social experiments” … [of] new modes of interaction and communication’ (Castellano, 2021: 186). Instead, ‘ruangrupa goes in the opposite direction, conceiving of art as a way of networking already existing initiatives’ (Castellano, 2021: 186). This challenges the problematic ethical relations surrounding relational art ‘which granted a small group of well-renowned international artists the capacity to transform social relationships’ and reconfiguring relations through a practice of ‘ecosystemic’ commoning (Castellano, 2021: 187).

V Conclusion: The ethics and aesthetics of participatory art

This paper has presented politics, publics, and space as a set of interdisciplinary analytics for participatory art based on provocations in art’s ‘social turn’, developing an expanded synopsis for human geography. Whilst there have been plenty of progressive work with the ‘creative return’ in human geography, including analytic frameworks for geographical accounts of the contemporary art’s expanded field, there has not been a consolidated focus on participatory praxis and theory. Equally, art theory has provided numerous accounts of the political aesthetics of participatory art, but these lack grounded attention to the actual relations that emerge in such work (see Garrido Castellano, 2021 for an exception). As the art-geography relationship continues to expand into new and increasingly political applications (Marston and De Leeuw, 2013), the analytics suggested in this paper and the insight they endeavour to provide go some way to develop the necessary language needed to address the way in which participatory art creates socio-spatial relations. What I hope is that these analytics can support further nuanced critical geographical explorations into participatory artworks.

Alongside the analytic frames presented in this paper, human geography has a valuable methodological place in understanding and evaluating participatory art. Within art theory there has been specific debate about how to evaluate participatory art, and this has typically focused either on the egalitarian distribution of social relations, collaboration, and authorship, or aesthetic-orientated judgements (see Bishop, 2012). Art theorists open-minded towards the former have made a case for a turn to social science methods to – partly – evaluate the specific constitution of social relations in participatory art (Lacy, 1995; Kester, 2011). Grant Kester has made an overt validation of social science methodologies as part of participatory art practice and criticism. He explains:

‘While many projects that I examine include a physical component, the artists involved also identify various dialogical processes as integral to the content of the work. This suggests a model of reception, and a set of research methodologies, that are potentially quite different from those employed to analyze object-based art practices. The extemporaneous and participatory nature of these projects requires the historian or critic to employ techniques (field research, participant-observation, interviews, etc.) more typically associated with the social sciences’ (2011: original emphasis).

Kester suggests a deviation in ‘predispositions within contemporary art practice’ from the ‘textual’ to the ‘collaborative’ (the textual being ‘fully-formed’ art productions presented to the viewer, usually through singular authorship) (2011: 11). This collaborative approach does not displace the textual rather it ‘offer[s] a different articulation’ of the capacity of modern art, ‘the ability of aesthetic experience to transform our perceptions of difference and to open space for forms of knowledge that challenge cognitive, social, or political conventions’ (2011: 11). And with this shift towards the collaborative, Kester argues, there has been a rise of a particular discourse within art criticism based on rupture and antagonism that has ‘achieved near canonical authority in the contemporary art world’ (2011: 65). Similarly, Suzanne Lacy questions how artistic intentions for social change in participatory art should be evaluated (1995). ‘An important corollary question is how do we measure contributions to the social whole, if this is the site of the artist’s intentions?’ (1995: 33). Lacy points to the social (and political) sciences as a possible means to do this but expresses a wariness about evaluating art wholly through this lens: ‘we are reluctant to reduce our critical evaluation to one of numbers or even, for that matter, to personal testimonies’ (1995: 33). Evaluating this type of art through social science methodologies can to an extent indicate a work’s success, but this ‘do[es] not capture all the varied levels on which art operates’ (1995: 33). A ‘multifaceted’ approach should be taken, Lacy suggests, one that ‘account[s] for not only their impact on others but on the artists’ selves, not only on other artists’ practices but on the definition of art itself’ (1995: 33).

I see Kester’s and Lacy’s positions as holding a critical opening for the collaboration between participatory art practice, theory, and human geography, one that takes a critical evaluative approach which pays attention not only to the ethics of participatory relations but also to an aesthetic intensity. One of the struggles of art theory regarding participatory art has been how to attribute its aesthetic due to the lack of emphasis on object-based form (Bishop, 2012). Arun Saldanha has argued that ‘Geographical interest in art and aesthetics should not be a de-intensification of the creative act. […] [It should] appreciate the jolt that is proper to art’ (Saldanha, 2016: 39). I would argue that the aesthetic of participatory art is not how democratic the relations are, but how intense. Thus, geographical (and art theory) interest in participatory art should not be reduced to just how ethical or democratic the social relations are, but it should also appreciate the relational intensity of the aesthetic. This relational intensity can come not only from the spatialities of the work (think the commoning practices of Gudskul) but also in its formation of specific publics (think the prefigurative political practice of BQF’s Community Futurisms and its collaborative enactment of a reconfigured future without gentrification and displacement in the Sharswood/Blumberg neighbourhood).

Future human geography work should focus on this combined ethical and aesthetic approach to participatory art, closely tracing and exploring the ethical configuration of its social relations, whilst attending to that which makes art unique – an aesthetic intensity of relating. The expanded, interdisciplinary set of analytics for participatory art outlined in this paper aims to support human geographers to carefully and critically explore ethical and aesthetic relations produced by this art form. I would further argue that, for those in other disciplines, the analytics offer a unique position to explore participatory art as a socio-spatial practice that brings together the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of aestheticised social relations. The continued unpacking of the complex relations produced by participatory art must be part of future geographical research, so that the critical faculties and aesthetic force that art holds can be brought into further dialogue with our expanding understanding of the social relations created through art and aesthetics.