Practising Participation A conversation with Lone Twin

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Notes

¹ With respect to the notion of ‘participation’, it seems to me that much work needs to be done to extrapolate the important differences between the spectator who goes to the gallery, and the one who goes to the theatre. Theatre is always-already, to an extent, a collective endeavour, and, for that reason, tends to problematize the rhetoric of those artists and art theorists who champion the claims of participatory art. Too often, at least so it seems to me, theatre scholars have simply adopted the recent discourses of art history when it comes to understanding participation. In doing so, they have tended to forget the specific logic of the theatre event.

² In this context, it is important to stress the word ‘implies’. Bishop's 2004 essay is targeted at critiquing relational art that offers a harmonious view of social relations, as opposed to the dissensual participation that she favours. However, Bishop's selection of texts for her edited collection Participation (2006) highlights the extent to which participation applies to the solitary reader or spectator as much as to the active and collectivist model of spectatorship privileged by discourses on participation.

³ The French artist, Dominique GonzalezFoerster, for instance, is interested in creating relational works that focus public attention on the private act of reading. Consider, in this respect, her recent large-scale exhibition TH. 2058 in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern (2008–9).

⁴ Lone Twin's practice of the ‘invite’ exposes a possible blind-spot in Rancière's thinking in ‘The emancipated spectator’. It shows that ‘emancipation’ is not opposed to active participation, as he appears to suggest. On the contrary, these two modes of spectatorship can co-exist at the same time, and in the same work. This seems a useful point to make, since it draws attention to the rigorous aesthetic logic involved in creating structures that allow for the possibility of a different mode of participation in social space.

⁵ Thanks to Gary Winters and Lone Twin for making documentation available in this article.