Audiences, Publics, Speech. A review of Adair Rounthwaite, Asking the Audience:Participatory Art in 1980s New York

Martin Harries (bio)
University of California Irvine

A review of Rounthwaite, Adair. Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York. U of Minnesota P, 2017.

Audiences speak. This assumption is essential to the method and to the argument of Adair Rounthwaite’s Asking the Audience: Participatory Art in 1980s New York, and around that assumption the book’s considerable strengths and occasional weaknesses constellate. In her commitment to pursuing archival traces of audience responses, Rounthwaite produces a textured account of a carefully selected set of works. Her pragmatic attachment to what individuals say or have said about their experiences as part of an audience also raises questions about what it means to speak for, or to speak as, an audience. Do audiences speak?

As the book’s subtitle suggests, Rounthwaite is interested in art that foregrounds the potential for participation. “Participatory” might seem redundant when applied to art, but here the word takes a strong form. Participation is at once a description for the kind of engagement audiences commit, and a goal to which certain kinds of art aspire: participation is responding to art as doing or praxis– or, at the very least, as dialogue. Asking the Audience, then, describes both the mode of certain kinds of participatory art and the method of this book, which is to ask members of audiences to speak about what they thought about events in which they participated. Rounthwaite’s focus is compellingly narrow. Her objects are collectively curated exhibits put together in 1988 and 1989 by the Manhattan collective Group Material, and a similar exhibition from 1989 by the artist Martha Rosler. These exhibits happened at the Dia Center, and marked departures both for the artists, who unusually affiliated themselves with the wealthy institution, and for the Dia, which had been, and largely remains, dedicated to a more austere abstract and minimalist tradition, what Rounthwaite calls Dia’s “antisocial sublime aesthetic” (77). She is especially interested in the “town-hall meetings”–Rounthwaite herself uses quotation marks when first using the term–that were part of these exhibits. At these town-hall meetings, the artists invited people to talk about issues relevant to their exhibits, including education in New York City, homelessness, and AIDS. Archived recordings of these meetings are crucial to what Rounthwaite calls her “archivally substantiated understanding of audience experience” (7).

A critique of existing art history grounds her practice: “Contemporary art history is dominated by accounts in which scholars and critics align themselves with the radical goals of the artists without paying equally close attention to how those goals turn out in practice” (11). Close attention to the archival traces of “audience experience,” she contends, can illuminate “how these goals turn out.” The projects on which she focuses are notable for the sheer volume and remarkable richness of the archives that concern them, but surely she is right that more scholars could seek out and pay close attention to more extensive archives of responses to works beyond the reviews of a few privileged critics. (This criticism applies well beyond her field of art history.) For Rounthwaite, this task is also urgently specific to her objects because the kind of participatory art she studies explicitly makes the claim that audiences or viewers participate– and yet rarely do the archives of such participation receive much scholarly attention. Participatory art, she writes, “confronts the scholar with living people” (25). That these works anticipate what Nicolas Bourriaud has dubbed “relational aesthetics” to describe the practice of such artists as Thomas Hirschhorn is also important to the stakes of this argument and points beyond the moment of Group Material and Rosler. Rounthwaite, indeed, sees this moment as an important precedent for a range of art practices since the late 1980s, the period on which she focuses.

Living people confront the scholar, but in what form? Mediated in what ways? Rounthwaite’s unpublished archive includes two main sources: recordings and other written, printed, and photographic remains; and interviews conducted and emails exchanged in the years leading up to the publication of her book. Her archive, then, is substantially divided between records in several media from almost forty years ago and interviews conducted thirty-five or more years later. The contemporary records illustrate the contentious and sometimes tumultuous exchanges around these pieces. Rounthwaite’s documentation of interventions at the town-hall meetings is especially intriguing; the recordings she consulted show that participants sometimes responded in rebarbative ways. Her discussion of the artist Cenén’s contribution to the town meeting on “Homelessness: Conditions, Causes, Cures”–a contribution that included a scream–is a vivid example of the thick description that follows from her painstaking listening and attention to archival traces of powerful affect (67-70).

A central term here, “participation,” remains under-theorized. Or it may be that the term is multiply over-theorized: so many accounts of what participation might be attach themselves to the term that one is unsure in the end what the word means. Participation involves the generation of information (8, citing Hans Haacke); participation is a matter of co-presence (57) and “live input” (87); of “an affective materiality generated by the audience” and of the connections produced by affect (23); of sheer proximity (64); and so on. It is around the ideal of participation that Rounthwaite does not escape the critical trap she describes so well: assumptions that stem from the critic’s alignment with “the radical goals of the artists” she studies are taken as axiomatic. A longer passage illustrates both the skepticism that Rounthwaite brings to her analysis and the axiomatic thinking underlying it:

On the one hand, the collaboration between Group Material and elite Dia … raised legitimate questions about how the project’s socially engaged address related to its institutional frame. Group Material members, with their own investments and positions, also retained a privileged role relative to audiences. On the other hand, Group Material’s choice to set in motion a democratizing process by bringing attention to the audience’s input and live experience staged the impossibility of ever achieving experiential satisfaction relative to that goal. What exactly does a democratizing process feel like? … Not only does pedagogical-art-practice-as-open-ended-communication resist measurement in terms of concrete outcomes, but the participatory artwork collapses any distinction between the work itself and how it feels to participants. (96)

The axiom shared by artists and critic here is the belief that, for all its faults, Group Material had put a “democratizing process” in motion. But is “bringing attention to the audience’s input and live experience” itself such a process? Shared affect becomes itself a measure of potential praxis. The notion of the collapse of the distinction between the artwork and “how it feels to participants” recalls the phantasm of theatrical participation that Jacques Rancière critiques in “The Emancipated Spectator.” Rancière’s description of the desire driving much theatrical activity after Brecht and Artaud applies also to Group Material: “Even if the playwright or director does not know what she wants the spectator to do, she at least knows one thing: she knows that she must do one thing–overcome the gulf separating activity from passivity” (Rancière 12). Rancière’s intervention challenges just this opposition:

Emancipation begins when we challenge the opposition between viewing and acting: when we understand that the self-evident facts that structure the relations between saying, seeing and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection. It begins when we understand that viewing is also an action that confirms or transforms the distribution of positions. (13)

Rancière’s recuperation of viewing does not solve the problem of how to theorize the politics of embodied art forms, but his questioning of the desire for the transformation of spectatorship into action, and of the binary between passive spectatorship and salutary action that underwrites this desired transformation, might have provided a way to rethink the theory of participation here. Rounthwaite never claims that attendance at one of the town meetings was simply political action as such, and she is bracingly self-conscious about her own desires for what these works might have been (e.g., 189). An oscillation between descriptions that assume a democratizing politics and theoretical passages skeptical of these very assumptions is a mark of the critical self-reflexivity of this book; this oscillation is also, sometimes, frustrating.

Partly because of the archival richness of their documentation, the town meetings are the focus of much of Rounthwaite’s book. But one senses that she also devotes so much space to them because they seem to her the most vivid demonstration of “the democratizing impulse.” Around the town meeting especially a few terms cluster that indicate the shape of the problem: democracy, social space, community, exchange, dialogue. The artist Tim Rollins’s boyhood in a small town in Maine appears to have inspired the use of the town-meeting form (87). No doubt there is some danger in romanticizing this political form– and Rounthwaite might have thought more about the history of, and fantasies surrounding, this form of local government–but from the start, the “town meeting” staged in downtown Manhattan can only distantly resemble the town meeting in a small town. Do town meetings have “audiences” at all? What town met under the auspices of Group Material, and what decisions could it make? In what were those present participating? The works of Group Material and Rosler, Rounthwaite writes, “mark the first public emergence at Dia of an explicit articulation of the importance of audience conceived as a broad, nonspecialist public” (33). What emerges, in public, is a conception of the public: the almost tautological shape of that formulation indicates a blurring of the difference between the desire for a certain public and actually reaching or producing that public. Some pages later, the words of a grant application submitted to the NEA by Dia are somewhat jarring: “while the primary audience must necessarily be the New York art community in all their diversity, artists and the art world as they are represented across the country will be involved as much as possible” (61). Is this town the art world? What system represents “artists and the art world”? While Rounthwaite is alert to the contradictions that might underwrite such engagements with publics, she largely remains committed to an ideal of art as a “goad” to democratization: her implicit argument that these works achieve that ideal is not fully convincing. This commitment is most visible often not when she reflects theoretically, but when she describes pieces: sometimes description, a mode she champions, erases theoretical caveats and complexities, as if the works had subsumed difficulties of which she is otherwise aware.

The unexamined axiom that underlies Rounthwaite’s project as a whole is the association of other forms of aesthetic experience with non-participation; these forms are even, simply, outside of public experience. “For Group Material, outreach and dialogue were the artwork” (110). By contrast, and thinking immediately of the other kinds of work Dia sponsors, she writes: “the minimalist sublime that forms its aesthetic heart is conceptually and practically antonymous to publicness as such” (108). Richard Serra is Rounthwaite’s representative figure of this anti-public sublime aesthetic (108). There is no doubt something to this, but the history of what counts as public and what doesn’t is a complicated one. In the decade leading up to the experiments of Group Material documented in this book, Serra was, indeed, a key figure in debates about public art in New York: the controversy around the destruction of his Tilted Arc, a massive sculpture in the city’s Federal Plaza, was, to use Rounthwaite’s terms, about whether that “minimalist sublime” was indeed “conceptually and practically antonymous to publicness as such” (cf. Weyergraf-Serra and Buskirk). Surely those who dismantled the sculpture agreed that it was practically opposed to their conception of what public art should be and of what “the” public is. The “outreach and dialogue” Group Material and Rosler fostered and the kind of publics that interest Rounthwaite are of a very different order from what Serra imagined as the public of his monumental public art. All the same, it might be more useful to think of antinomies between kinds of publics–about publics and counter-publics (Warner)–rather than asserting that one aesthetic is plainly “antonymous to publicness as such” while another encourages it.

The ideal of the town meeting is inextricable from Rounthwaite’s notion of what makes a real public: “The town-hall meetings held for Democracy created a relational plane for live social interaction at the heart of the work itself” (201). The exhibit “ran from September 1988 to January 1989 and was followed by Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here . . . from January to April, 1989″ (1). There were four separate town meetings during this period; the archives of those meetings are very rich. But these vivid records of speech and dialogue also raise the question of what has become of all those experiences that left no trace in the archives, of the visitors who came to Dia when town meetings were not happening, and did not attend the meetings, or of those who attended them and did not speak. Were they excluded from “the heart of the work”? Did they not participate?

Works Cited

• Rancière, Jacques. “The Emancipated Spectator.” The Emancipated Spectator, translated by Gregory Elliott, Verso, 2009, pp. 1-23.
• Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. Zone Books, 2002.
• Weyergraf-Serra, Clara, and Martha Buskirk, editors. The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents. MIT P, 1991.