'Participatory art' in the 1990s and 2000s: an attempt at a historiography and an analysis of method

This is a review of Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship by Claire Bishop, British historian and contemporary art critic. Bishop's book explores the genealogy of what she calls 'participatory art' of the 1990s and 2000s, a kind of art in which the main artistic medium and the material substrate are human beings themselves. Bishop proposes to view the history of world art from theatrical perspective which she applies to the works of Western European, Latin American, Eastern European and Russian art created in the periods crucial for the making of 'participatory art', i.e., the European historical avant-garde of 1917, the neo-avantgarde of 1968 and the fall of communism in 1989. Bishop insists that 'participatory art' must be evaluated first of all from an aesthetic, not ethical, point of view; she therefore suggests to use in the analysis of its works such categories as active / passive, individual / collective authorship, participants / spectators, stressing the importance of the tension arising between these notions and the role of the politics of spectatorship involvement.