Artificial Hells Quotes

“To protect against this threat of art’s self-
extinction, Guattari suggests that each work of art must have a ‘double finality’: ‘[Firstly] to insert itself into a social network which will either appropriate or reject it, and [secondly] to celebrate, once again, the Universe of art as such, precisely because it is always in danger of collapsing.’ Guattari’s language of a double finality speaks to the double ontology of cross-disciplinary projects we are so frequently presented with today, pre- eminently among them art-as-pedagogy. Like all long-term participatory projects, this art must tread the fine line of a dual horizon – faced towards the social field but also towards art itself, addressing both its immediate participants and subsequent audiences. It needs to be successful within both art and the social field, but ideally also testing and revising the criteria we apply to both domains. Without this double finality, such projects risk becoming ‘edu-tainment’ or ‘pedagogical aesthetics’.”
― Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

“At the same time, the phenomenological experience of confronting these performers always testifies to the extent to which people relentlessly exceed the categories under which they have been recruited. Using amateurs is essential in this regard, for it ensures that delegated performance will never assume the seamless character of professional acting, and keeps open a space of risk and ambiguity. That this amateurism nevertheless provokes a sense of moral outrage betrays the extent to which institutional perversion has been internalised as fully normal, while that of the artists comes across as unacceptable. The logic is one of fetishistic disavowal: I know that soci- ety is all-exploiting, but all the same, I want artists to be an exception to this rule. When artists make the patterns of institutional subordination that we undergo every day both visible and available for experiential pleasure, the result is a moral queasiness; and yet the possibility of this also being a source of jouissance and a ‘tool’ is precisely the point of Klossowski’s disturbing analysis. What becomes thinkable if the pleasure of reification in these works of art is precisely analogous to the pleasure we all take in our own self-exploitation?”
― Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship

“Klossowski’s writings therefore invite us to move beyond the impasse of certain intellectual positions inherited from the 1960s: on the one hand, arguments that society is all-determining as a set of institutional and disci- plinary constraints (Frankfurt School, structuralism), and on the other hand, arguments for the perpetual vitality and agency of the subject which continually subverts and undermines these restrictions (post-structural- ism, Deleuze and Guattari). Rather than collapsing these positions, Klossowski requires us to take on board a more complex network of libidi- nal drives that require perpetual restaging and renegotiation. This tension between structure and agency, particular and universal, spontaneous and scripted, voyeur and voyant, is key to the aesthetic effect and social import of the best examples of delegated performance.”
― Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship