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Compare and contrast the forms of spectatorship and / or participation invited by one OBJECT based and one TIME based piece of art.

Participation in art by the audience is not a new thing, as one might think, but something that has been developing since the 1920. Over the decades, and especially since the rise in popularity of reality TV and Internet viewing, there have been moreopportunities for us to become the ‘participant’. We have to consider the spectator and the participant, and how their roles in relation to a piece of ‘art work’ are completely different.

The spectator usually exists in the makers mind as they construct the work. The spectator is not involved with the work and ‘look at it, rather than experience themselves in it.’(O’Doherty, 2003,page44)
Participatory ‘art works’ are inviting a different kind of relationship and reaction compared to the ‘art object’. The spectator is distant and has to struggle to connect with the work. The spectator,
‘…Not only stands and sits on command: he lies down and even crawls as modernism presses on him its final indignities.’ (O’Doherty, 2003,Page 39)
The spectator must only view the object that has been created by the god figure that is the artist, whereas the participant works in collaboration with the artist. The boundaries that once existed between these roles disappear, and both parties are on the same level,
‘YOU the spectator
Me the artist
Was sensorially reversed by them into conceptual flux:
YOUwillbecoME’(Ricardo Basbaum,1994,page 425 )

Participatory works try to adjust the distinction between performer and audience; their emphasis is on the partnership and the overall social experience. The spectator becomes more and is empowered through collaboration.
An ‘event’ art work is an affective way to engage people and is a method used to escape the limitations imposed by the conventions of other arts forms. The event works more effectively as an instrument to make audiences feel part of something,
‘It would reconstruct or reorganize social experience, critique that experience, and facilitate new experience’ (Stephen C.foster,1998,page5)

These ideas were taken on by the Avant-garde Dada movement in the 1920, the most important and well know precursors of participatory artwork. In Paris April 1921 it was ‘dada-season’, this took the form of a series of manifestations that sought to involve the cities public, included the storming of the winter palace and a mock trial being held of the author turned nationalist Maurice Barres. As Bishop says these events wanted to provoke participants and embrace communal creativeness, and were successful at bringing people together (2006), furthermore:
‘This apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers – that is readers or spectators into collaborators' (Benjamin.W, 1999, p.777.)

Event type works that involve participation are closer related to our everyday experiences, they do something that ‘object art’ can only represent and encompass a closer relationship to the real, as they happening in a certain time and place,
‘spectatorship is not the passivity that has to be turned into activity. It is our normal situation. We learn and teach, we act and know as spectators who link what they see with what they have seen and told, done and
dreamt. There is no privileged medium as there is no privileged starting point.’ (Ranciere, 2004, page 24)
These types of works invite us to individually appropriate art and discover aspects about ourselves that their authors may have never thought possible. They provoke situations through art and therefore empower people. Kaprow felt in particular it pointless to limit art to representation, and instead use what is already available .he penned the term ‘happenings’, the collective name of participatory art events organized, of which the most famous of these took place in 1961 to 1962.He asked why limit yourself to a gallery and to art objects when real life is what we are already connected to. Fluxus, Performance art, and Installation art were in turn influenced by his work.

Lygia Clark’s work can be summed up as a radical journey beyond the traditional relationship between artist and spectator. Through different ways she explored participation in artwork, always actively concerned with the viewer,
‘True participation is open, we will never be able to know what we give to the spectator author’ (Clark, 1968.From Bishop 2007)
She started off as a painter in the late 50s, the monochrome painting/relief’s she worked in were followed by neo-constructivist sculptures. This change in the 60s when she started constructing ephemeral or malleable objects that invited with viewer engagement, this is when her work started to take a more conceptual direction. Going on to explore in more detail sensory perception then she finally moved into actual Psychotherapy and healing, something she continued to investigate up to her death.
How we explain the different between Clarks works and other more traditional art works is by her use of objects and how she provokes viewers to interact with them. Traditional artwork presents the artist as the giver of a communication and the spectator as the receiver; Clark’s work transforms this idea. The transition that makes the spectator a participant is made possible by these objects and situation she creates. The ‘art object’ is constructed to be understood and absorbed by the visual sense. The spectator will visually decode the artwork, a representation of a physical fact or life experience that has been encoded by the artist. But this changes when the artist produces something that does not only expressivity encode their own experiences, but also provided some means for the spectator to become conscious of his/her own expressivity, in the role of participant.

The Spectator has to engage primarily with an object visually, but the participant can apply all senses. There is no distant for the viewer, they are connected and at one with the ‘art object’, Causing the roles of ‘artist’, ‘spectator’ and the use of a meditated ‘object’ to change dramatically. In Clarks work the object is no longer a representation; it has no meaning or structure outside the participant’s direction of the present
‘In these works viewer participation becomes the focus of attention. While the object remains secondary, existing only in order to promote a sensorial or relational experience’ (Osthoff, 1997,page 281))
This is predominantly relevant in Clarks Bicho (animal, beast) 1962(fig.1), these striking sculptures invite an intimate relationships between participants and object, the object becoming relevant when an individual participants starts to manipulates it ‘in the act of relations established with the body’ (Wanderley,1993, page 7 ). As a result something meaningful is created leading us to fully ‘rediscover our own poetics in ourselves.’(Clark).
Bichos were early pieces of work, consisting of small structures made from aluminium-hinged plates. Each plate could be manoeuvred so the sculpture would take on different forms. However the external appearance and shape of the object no longer has primary importance as it once did. It would only reach the fullness of its being when engage with a participant, each person interacting with it differently, ‘sometimes the work moves about like an insect, or else the idea of a strange machine for constructing space is suggested’ claimed Mario Pedrosa (Pedrosa, 1960, page 18) .The objects addresses the spectator on an active as well as a passive level. Clark fought constantly for people to be able to continue to handle and play with these exquisite sculptures even after they were passed into public and private collection. If they were just merely looked at they would have none of the personally and meaning that Clark had intended:
‘The Animal has his own and well-defined cluster of movements which react to the promptings of the spectator .He is not made of isolated static forms which can be manipulated at random as in a game: no, his parts are functionally related to each other, as if he were a living organism, and the movements of these parts are interlinked. The intertwining of the spectator’s action and the Animal’s immediate answer is what forms this new relationship, made possible precisely because the Animal moves –i.e., has a life of its own. (Clark, 1960,page 2)

Frank Popper pointed to the new forms of spectator participation as partially responsible for the disappearance of the art object. He named Moholy-Nagy and three others including Clark as pioneers of the viewer participation movement (1975). Clark took this idea further, transferring all her attention on to the spectators act, asking us to rethink the activity of the artist and their role. In a proposal of 1964, she simply invited the spectator to take a pair of scissors, twist a strip of paper and connect it to form a mobius loop and cut continuously along this endless plane. She called this work ‘Caminhando’ (Going), The works meaning was in the act of doing, and the work is a creation of the participants act. The successfulness of this artwork depends:
‘Not on the sensorial outing of the shape nor some quality of the surface, but [on] something that dilutes the notion of surface and makes the object to be lived in…. This is where the frontier is broken between body and object’ (wanderley ,1993,page 10)
The participant and object are physically and psychologically connected through experience.

The idea of the object just being a starting point for an art work rather than the final finished project is once more modified in Michael Asher work, for example In his 1974 exhibition at Claire Copley gallery (fig 2) the art object did not exist. The piece instead was focused on the transitions from spectators to participants .Rather than designing new art objects Asher typically alters the existing surroundings, by repositioning or eliminating artworks, walls for instance. Michael Asher work arises from the idea that no individual art object has a universal meaning, independent of its institutional situation. Asher, and along with other prominent conceptual artists who surfaced in the 1970s, believe that the spaces and practices of the gallery or museum - its system of displaying art works, interpreting and publicizing- condition how we comprehend the art that is exhibited there. Often his work takes on the form of ‘subtle yet deliberate intervention –additions, subtractions or alteration-in particular environments’ (Roudeau, 2008)
Asher has adopted the museum or institution as his "medium". His works call attention to the architectural, design or administrative strategies of the organizations that present art, and help to manage or shape its importance. For his piece at the Claire Copley gallery Asher removed the partition wall that divided the gallery space and the office/storage space. This area that is usually hidden to the public was exposed to the causal spectator, and placed on display. Everyday meetings and general running becomes a performance that could be viewed, ‘copley-the-gallerist’ the gallery owner is now a character. But the removal of the wall also effected the visitor movements and feelings, as equally they are displayed to the owner or whoever is in the gallery at the time, Asher observed ‘in the same way that gallery personnel seemed to become increasingly aware of their activities, viewers also became more aware of themselves as viewers’ (Asher, page 1, 2007) viewers become a fundamental part of the piece, as in Clarks work. Initial reaction to this project were varied , but it defiantly had an effect, one critic related his experience,
‘All that stuff on the walls is gone, along with every bit of privacy. Actually viewers don't intend social interaction. They come to look at art. But without knowing it, they are an integral part of the work they see. How unsettling, and uncomfortable.’(Ballatore, 1974,page16.)

Many unsuspecting participants were often unsure about whether they were at the right gallery or if the show was yet to be hung up. Viewers had to negotiate through mixed feelings and emotions: hesitation, uncertainly and irritation a turnaround to the customary viewing relations. Because of the absence of a traditional art object spectators were unable to settle in to the habitual way of viewing. The engagement of this piece comes from the social pressure of the situations that unsuspectingly viewers are confronted with. The spectator is being asked to perceive their environment as a ‘social, ideological system’. And whether the lasting response is amusement, irritation or just the decision to leave, the work as successful in creating an affective response. As in Asher’s work, the spectator’s placement within the frame was a necessary precondition of spectatorial agency and subsequent social change.
‘ “You” or the viewing subject, had become an integral part of the picture’ (Peltomaki, 2007, page 12)

Equally the works convert the spectator into the participant, and this has to happen so the viewer can fully understand and engaged with the work. Each artist addresses this in opposite ways. In the Claire Copley gallery piece Asher’s challenges the Spectator, throwing them in to the role of participant and this becomes the subject of the artwork. In this piece the spectators viewing situation they are accustomed to is bounced back from the blank wall and absent windows, causing the viewer to individually and collectively consider how they are positioned within the art institution. Asher wants to engage his spectators, but deny them easy gratification. Whereas Clarks ‘Bichos’ invite a more personal engagement, letting spectator ease into this new role of participant. The participant is asked to be more of a collaborator of the piece rather than the subject under investigation. Clarks works aim to dissolve the visual sense into awareness of the body, they ask individuals to gaze inwards, the reverse of Asher’s work. But mutually each artist has an underling belief that a ‘work of art should actively intervene in and provide a model for allowing viewers to be involved in the process of production’ (Benjamin.W, 1999, page 777)

Both works change our understanding of what ‘artist’ may mean and equally suggest similar themes. Activation: authorship: community are three concerns that seem to crop up when it comes to participation. Guy Debord the founding member of the groups Lettrist International and Situationist International (SI) used these terms in his writing about the situationists, they believed that art and politics are faced together and should be one thinking. Both Clarks and Ashers invite these three factors, they provide situation, which empower people and provide more that just a visual experience. These participatory works have many levels and stages (they are set in real time) integrated with real life. For example in Asher work the discussion after leaving the Claire Copley gallery is also very much a part of the artwork. Clark’s work allows an individual to manipulate an object to their own personal fantasy, and they have the knowledge that the article they have created will change again; resulting is a continuous collaboration between many people. Participation work invites discussion, they are an event in time, ‘the event became the basis of renewal: and redefinition of purpose’ the revolution (Foster, 1998, page 3). Through these works we become intensely conscious of every gesture we make – even the most habitual. Participants are integral to both works, the type of role varies but each is equally effective in giving more than the ‘art object’.



Bibliography
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