Claire Bishop, Collective and Spectacle

 

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In her recent book Artificial Hells (2012) the British art historian Claire Bishop argues that the idea of the ‘collective’ has become “one of the most pertinent themes of advanced art and exhibition-making of the last decade” (:12).  There is an increasing tendency among artists who want to engage with the public sphere either to form their own collectives in order to practically and conceptually negate the tendency to self-interest and individualization that dominates the workings of capitalist society or work with collectives (or ‘communities’) so as to empower or possibly politicize their doings. In any case according to Bishop collaborative practices are “perceived to be equally important artistic gestures of resistance” since they are all interested in rehearsing a being-together distinct from market imperatives or, in her words, in engaging in “an art of action, interfacing with reality, taking steps to repair the social bond” (2012:13). 

Here, the desire to engage with collectives according to Bishop principally arises as an artistic method for combating the alienating effects of contemporary capitalism and more precisely its spectacular nature, where the latter is understood in Debordian terms. Guy Debord (2009) saw the spectacle as “the separate pseudoworld….the social relation between people and images…. that presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification” (: 24).  Spectacle is not an object, or an accumulation of objects or the oversaturation of images, it is the form of a social relation within market society that carves a perception of ‘reality’ favourable to those in power. The interest in collectives then does not merely arise spontaneously out of a particular historical condition, but as a (partly) conscious effort on behalf of the artists to inscribe in their practice their desire for resistance to a specific social arrangement. 

The works that Bishop discusses in the book however do not always engage with the radical political implications that the critique of the spectacle entails in Debord’s thought. This is a significant point in discussing collaborative practices and strategies of participation in art. For Debord the critique of the spectacle functions as “weapon in the revolutionary supersession of capitalist society and its replacement by communism” (Jenkins, 2009:7). Furthermore, as Jenkins puts it in commenting on Debord’s The Society of Spectacle, the critique of the spectacle is meant to function as “the vehicle for the passage to communism is the working class” (Ibid.: 7), that is to say the part  of the population that are obliged to sell their labour power in order to survive. Debord, drawing from the Marxian view of society as an assemblage of antagonistic classes, did not think of the spectacle as a ‘fault’ in capitalism that had to be criticized and repaired by participatory art projects, but as form of social relation fundamentally rooted in capitalist society and inextricably linked to it. There is no safe analytical device from the perspective of the class struggle, that Debord undertakes, that justifies the claim that advertisements are spectacular, while art biennials or other official art events are not. He refers to the festivals of his age as ‘vulgarized pseudofestivals’ that are “parodies of real dialogue and gift-giving”, and which “may incite waves of excessive economic spending, but they lead to nothing but disillusionments” (Debord, 2009: 108).  Since contemporary art exhibitions are produced under the pressures of and within a global market, they can be equally regarded as spectacles that have to be potentially abandoned in favour of other forms of action.   

In this sense the critique of the spectacle in participatory art -if that is what drives the desire to the collective in the projects that Bishop discusses - performs the contradictions nested in the relation between critical art and official art institutions today.  The critique on contradictions here is not understood as a means to supersede them so as reach some sort of higher synthesis.  In contrast to the dialectical (materialist) determinism that wants contradictions to always to lead to the eventual synthesis of their overcoming, Renegard and Sowards argue that contradictory elements in a system retain a contingent and unpredictable character, and they can rather be thought of as a “way to move thinking in new directions” (Renegard; Sowards, 2009: 6). Change in this sense can arise not only through conflicts and but also through the realization of the conflicting nature of position-taking. Acknowledging the contradictory nature of such positions allows us to see the creative practice in relation to other elements of the art system through their fundamental interconnectedness (more on this on the fieldwork sections). The critique of the spectacle then that collaborative art practices perform framed within a Debordian perspective sets the condition of possibility of making apparent certain inequalities in the art system itself. 

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