The award-winning, highly acclaimed Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as "social practice." In recent decades, the art gallery and the museum have become a place for participatory art, where an audience is encouraged to take part in the artwork. This has been heralded as a revolutionary practise that can promote new emancipatory social relations. What was it is really?
In this fully updated edition, Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawel Althamer and Paul Chan.
Bishop challenges the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art this practise. She not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. In response Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 9781839767753
Number of pages: 400
Weight: 446 g
Dimensions: 234 x 153 x 26 mm
Claire Bishop has articulated an important historical overview of the global emergence of participatory art ... Her controversial and thought-provoking conclusions courageously trouble our assumptions about the effectiveness of political artworks, questioning their oppositional quality, their effects on the audiences they reach, and their relation to the institutions that promote them. - Frank Jewett Mather Award, 2013
Bishop's arguments are convincingly supported and potentially very contentious...A critically challenging work of vital scholarship. - Publishers Weekly
An essential title for contemporary art history scholars and students as well as anyone who has witnessed a participatory art 'happening' and thought, 'Now that's art!' or 'That's art?' - Library Journal
Bishop seeks a standard for judging participatory works...She draws on the writings of French philosopher Jacques Rancière to argue that art must maintain a degree of autonomy and unreadability in order to resist co-option by the political and economic forces intent on imposing a false social consensus. - Eleanor Heartney, Art in America
Pellucid - Alexander Provan, New York Observer
The good intentions of contemporary artists frequently pave a road to hell. Claire Bishop follows their descent into the inferno and invites her readers to share her fascination with what she finds along the way. Artificial Hells combines vast historical knowledge with a precise analysis of individual artistic practices. So much so that at the end of her new book we have begun to fall in love with hell-under the condition that it remains artificial. - Boris Groys, author of Art Power
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