RE-EN-ACT

Critics may object to forms of participatory art that they cast artists in a pedagogical role, that artists—instead of establishing true equality between themselves and those they invite to engage in co-production—never actually step outside the “position of superiority” from which they “generously grant options for creative involvement” and so merely “invoke” an overarching “common interest” within a framework (the institutional art context) “that silences contradiction and dissension.

”But does not participation, conceived as a form of “cultural sharing” that transcends the confines of reflection on media, mean precisely this: that I have a say in my own representation? Do not the critics of participatory approaches simply cling to the established cultural hegemony that invests them with authority? Is not the only, or certainly the principal, contribution artists can offer to society that they put their apparatus at its disposal, which is to say, share it with others? And if not, are not the structures of power then located on very different planes than those of artistic production? Are not artists just as, even especially, à part when it comes to the co-determination of political, economic, and social conditions? Sprache: Deutsch