Participation Anxiety

The deep-seated unease behind our unwillingness to engage.

A decade or so ago I organized a conference  about performance and participatory practices. The gathering brought together around 150 individuals — scholars, educators, curators, artists and more— who had reflected long and hard on the topic of participation. The two-day gathering included a few breakout sessions.  One of them consisted in a workshop by Geo Britto, director of Theater of the Oppressed in Rio—  a rare opportunity to do a hands-on workshop by a direct inheritor of the teachings of Augusto Boal. However, when the time came for that session, only a small handful of participants showed up (they included Tom Finkelpearl, Claire Bishop, two of my co-organizing colleagues, and I ). Out of 150 conference attendees eager to debate and theorize on participation, less than 6 were willing to actually participate.  Why would such a group, specifically committed to participatory practices, be so reluctant to walk the walk?

On another occasion, I invited a performance art scholar – editor of a performance art journal— to attend a performance of mine. Suspecting the participatory nature of the piece, she sounded scared,  asking me to assure her that I would not ask her to perform (I did offer my full assurances to her, but she still did not come).  And at yet another participatory project I did in 2008, which consisted in doing intimate, one-on-one divinatory card readings to individuals, the most willing participants were everyday people who walked into the gallery space to engage.  With each participant I would have long, deep conversations that edged on therapy, with the participant often sharing very private information about themselves.  With the curators who came to see the project, however, the dynamics were drastically different. They would generally get very nervous in the process, trying to avoid any personal or intimate discussions and instead wanting me to discuss the project in an intellectually detached, “meta” fashion: “so, when did you start working in this project?”

I also have had my share of anti-participatory impulses. At another conference —this one of art museum education—a group of conference attendees all got a tour of an exhibition at the museum that hosted the gathering. It was led by one of their junior educators. She  was clearly nervous, faced as she was by two dozen or so seasoned educators. She started employing old-fashioned, inquiry-based learning onto us during the tour —a pedagogical approach that is well-known and practiced by most museum educators. The group was clearly annoyed about being on the “visitor” end of the process, and everyone started leaving the tour, going off to see the exhibition on their own. At the end I was awkwardly left with one or two others and the poor educator, who was still trying to keep the group together and still committed to continuing the method she was trained (and surely instructed) to employ. I did not leave only because I felt bad for her, but mainly because I was too slow to abandon the group unnoticed and I would have left her basically talking to herself.

The reference to a someone who in private neglects that part of their life of which they are supposed to be specialists is common. In Spanish we have a saying: “en casa del herrero, azadón de palo” (“wooden hoe at the blacksmith’s home”).

While it may be considered not more than a merely curious detail by some, this reluctance to perform says something about the ways in which we, as art professionals, take pains to avoid becoming part of the work.

It should be acknowledged that all forms of participation have their limits. We might be outgoing individuals and might be perfectly happy to talk to a stranger in the supermarket, but we might not be so eager as to invite them to our house afterward, bringing them along with our groceries.  In the art world, we may be happy to attend an opening of an artist friend, but we might not be too happy to be part of a participatory project that requires us to invest a lot of our time or put ourselves on the spot in front of a discerning art public (as the performance art editor feared).

Part of this reluctance might come from the anxiety created by the professional environment of the art world itself. Our performative effort to generate professional credibility demands a level of control, detachment and sobriety that is generally upended when we suddenly are thrown into the role of “mere” participants. Because this requires us to temporarily cede our status, the more insecure we feel about our status the more likely we are to object to suddenly be put in a position where we are stripped of it. High-profile individuals, or those that have high self-confidence, usually have less of a problem engaging in these participatory scenarios because they know that their engaging does not alter their status or other’s perception of it— however, because they also have limits, their willingness to engage is limited in time and scope, and is generally symbolic,  in the same way in which politicians engage with their voters: they want to show openness and willingness to listen to their constituents, but they also have handlers that can cut the constituent off if they don’t want to stop talking. Then, if you do not have skin in the game of the art world status competition, you might well be willing to participate, whether for fun or for just plain exhibitionism— think of the tens of thousands of people around the world who gladly disrobe for Spencer Tunick’s photographs.

Spencer Tunick, Mexico City 1, Zócalo, Mexico City, 2007

Conversely, engaging in participatory processes —and trying to influence or direct that process— is a form of asserting status. I and few museum educator colleagues often saw a version of this dynamic at play in the galleries. For a while we had a visitor who would attend every single one of our gallery tours, always seemingly intent on showing that he knew more about art than anyone.

He would come to every tour armed to the teeth with obscure information, art history trivia and pointed, even hostile, questions, and used every single opportunity to hijack a tour, question our knowledge and throw around all sorts of rather unnecessary information. His behavior was a way to assert his own self-worth, and while many found him irritating, we also sensed that beneath all that attitude and defiance laid a deeply lonely individual, one whose only social life was to attend museum tours. We engaged with him as best as we could, and eventually found a system of open-ended questions and direct engagement that threw him off-balance.

For artists, participatory reluctance often stems from the fact that they might feel that their public image is being challenged. At a performance workshop that I once led in Bologna, where all the participants were emerging artists, they were asked to follow simple instructions (i.e., give a short lecture on a topic).  One of them explained to me that because he was an artist, he would make up his own rules and thus do whatever he wanted instead. He clearly was  unhappy with the idea that he would need to conform to a predetermined structure, but he wanted to still be part of the platform presented to him — so he chose to ruin the workshop as an act of artistic independence.

 As much as his attitude bothered me at the time, I do relate to the need for an artist to dictate the terms by which they are presented, as we live in a complex social environment where the frames used to generate meaning are fluid and hard to influence and control —which explains why some artists simply find it easier to absent themselves entirely from the social realm, or why others are so controlling of the way they appear in public and in social media.

I often think of artists like Henri Cartier-Bresson, who photographed everything and everyone around him, and yet deeply disliked being photographed himself.  I also have always been fascinated by the fact that he was so deeply private, always arguing that his private life was nobody’s business, and yet that once he shared his deepest confessions to a taxi driver in Paris since that was someone who he knew he would never see again.

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Over the last two decades, there have been various critical assaults against participatory practices. Some of them could be categorized under the view that participation can often be an arbitrarily imposing activity, an unproductive end in itself, an infantilizing endeavor, a dumbing-down of experience, meaningless edutainment, and a false promise of democracy where mediocrity is elevated and everyone is an amazing, creative artist— and like in grade school, everyone wins and gets prizes.

While I relate to some of these criticisms (and some of the anecdotes I previously presented help illustrate different aspects of them), I also find serious problems with anti-participatory stances. The first one is that, taken into close examination, most of these criticisms come from a quasi-tribal perspective of an elite class of the highly informed in art, for which the engagement with the rest of the world — meaning, with other social spheres for whom art is not the center of the universe— is either unnecessary or irrelevant. This generally results in a conservative political position where art is about insider knowledge, and if others want to attain that knowledge, they should do work on their own to do so. The second problem is that anti-participation is a dead-end position that offers no meaningful alternatives, and those who articulate those positions do not appear concerned to do so. Again, like conservative political thinking, it seeks to destroy inclusion as a goal leaving nothing in its stead. And lastly, anti-participation can sometimes be highly egocentric, in the Objectivist tradition of Ayn Rand.

In my view, and in very basic terms, partially the problem lies in the confusion between the public practice of art and the internal-professional debates around art making. While this might sound like a platitude, art is a participatory endeavor by definition, insofar as it involves society, and the more it is able to engage with it, the likelier it is to enrich the world. If there is something we must resist is to let art turn into a religious cult.

So why and how is it that we want to be so exclusive and yet see art as a public practice? This might be partially because anti-participatory positions do not preclude the monetizing of mass experience— the ultimate form of capitalist participation that is the baseline M.O. of the art world. It is in the end one way of having your cake and eat it — protecting your exclusivity while feeling generous as well, as others admire the performance of your exclusivity as consumers. It is a form of retaining control of the narrative, protect status, and avoid any risky democratic impulses. Our favorite form of participation is the one where everyone participates in the game that we have conceived.

It is similar to what the legendary —and modesty-challenged— actor John Barrymore once said: “my only regret in theater is that I could never sit out front and watch me perform.”