![Sample our Arts journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110799/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Arts.jpg"})
Abstract
This paper argues that the most significant, contemporary synthesis of art and design is occurring at the level of participatory projects, and not in the more customary fields of collusion (product design, for example). These projects are durational, experiential, and dialogic, and therefore I argue that traditional aesthetics based on the contemplation of objects and the analysis of representations does not adequately account for what amounts to an aesthetics of co-creation. To examine this transformation this paper surveys participatory art and design projects in a number of different fields and also some of the key critical literature around the aesthetics of collaboration and dialog. Finally it argues that art in the form of participatory design offers a political alternative to both the avant-garde tactic of adversarial “shock” and the notion of presenting a voice or an opinion in a neutral public sphere; rather it can be seen to modify – design – that sphere itself.
Notes
1. Or as Klaus Krippendorff has argued, a shift from “shaping the appearance of mechanical products that industry is equipped to manufacture to conceptualizing artifacts, material or social, that have a chance of meaning something to their users, that aid larger communities, and that support a society that is in the process of reconstructing itself in unprecedented ways and at record speeds” (Citation2006: xvii).
2. In turn, much of design studies and design history has adhered to this view of the aesthetic dimension of design – the appearance of goods, for example, can be seen as expressing underlying social and economic realities and therefore can be read as units of style, codes of desire, or symbols of taste, rather than as active participants in the construction of history itself (for an overview of those histories, see Dilnot Citation1984; and for an alternative approach to them, see Yaneva Citation2009).
3. In this article I emphasize PD but ultimately the argument could be extended to all design that has taken a “social turn,” be it critical design, design thinking, design research, and other forms of design that are more immaterial in both process and outcome – for example, service design.
4. In many respects practice-based theory, if that is not an oxymoron, is a radical alternative to semiotics – no longer can anything be “read,” with phenomena no longer presenting an image, face, or signifier behind which one finds their true meaning (even if that meaning happens to be multiple in the case of connotation); above all, there is no longer any generative “structure” to be found behind culture, or the social. This is, of course, the crux of Latour’s critique of sociology (Citation2005).
5. While not exploring the art–science nexus in the same way, much of the work and projects of Lucy Orta, too, could be placed in this category of tactical, PD; here I have her “refuge wear” in mind, which combines fashion, portable architecture, and potential social intervention.
6. DiSalvo opens his book Adversarial Design (Citation2012) with Jeremijenko’s “Feral Robotic Dogs” project (2002 onwards). The robot dogs were originally released in a Bronx park and operated by locals to gather information on levels of toxicity that then could be collated for “adversarial” purposes, namely highlighting danger to the health of residents of the area to the relevant authority. Other examples of adversarial design that DiSalvo provides are primarily from computational design, which is in keeping with the history of PD. Jeremijenko’s robotic project, however, also has resonances with the history of mapping, in particular medical geography: it is a distant echo of John Snow’s nineteenth-century cholera map. That chart was adversarial in the sense that it went against all common and accepted interpretations of what was thought to be a “miasmatic” malady, an airborne disease, rather than, in fact, water-borne (Vinten-Johanson et al. Citation2003: ch. 8).
8. For example, Ruskin claimed in his Lectures on Art that “the beginning of art is in getting our country clean and our people beautiful” (2007: 56). By art, Ruskin also includes the applied and decorative arts. Aesthetic improvement has a clear sociopolitical function.
9. That being said, she does offer a brief account of what a Lacanian aesthetics might be – an ethical aesthetics based on his notion of “desire” and being faithful to that desire, as it were – and how that might relate to the political dimension of participatory art: “in any art that uses people as a medium, ethics will never retreat entirely. The task is to relate this concern more closely to aesthesis. Some key terms that emerge here are enjoyment and disruption, and the way these converge in psychoanalytical accounts of making and viewing art” (39). “Enjoyment” is a translation of jouissance. Indeed there might be an element of jouissance in participatory art, an erotics of participation, membership, and sharing. But I would argue that in emphasizing practice, goal-orientation, and finite assemblies rather than a politics of identity-formation (or effacement as the case may be), PD communities are more about delegation, service, and articulation than “fusion.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Matthew Holt
Dr Matthew Holt is Program Manager of Design and Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney’s pathway program, Insearch. He has a Ph.D. from The University of Sydney, and has published and taught extensively in the fields of design and art history. He is also a practicing graphic designer and his first volume of short stories has recently been published by Puncher & Wattmann. [email protected]