1. What is Participatory Arts?
Definition from Participation Lab, February 2011: Participatory Art involves an artist working with at least one other person to take part in a process that the artist facilitates

2. Spectrums of Participatory Practice:
Participation Lab

3. Spectrums of Participatory Practice:
Pablo Helguera
Level of Participation
Collaborative
Creative
Directed
Nominal

4. More definitions
Community Music:
“An approach to active music-making and musical knowing outside of formal teaching and learning situations. An intentional intervention, involving skilled music leaders, who facilitate group music-making experiences in environments that do not have set curricula. Here, there is an emphasis on people, participation, context, equality of opportunity, and diversity. Musicians who work in this way seek to create relevant and accessible music-making experiences that integrate activities such as listening, improvising, musical invention, and performing.”
(Lee Higgins, 2012)
Reference figures seen in video

5. More definitions
“participatory performance is a special type of artistic practice in which there are no artist-audience distinctions, only participants and potential participants performing different roles, and the primary goal is to involve the maximum number of people in some performance role.” (Thomas Turino, 2008)
Reference figures seen in video

6. Current Theoretical Discourse
Why do we need it? ‘In refusing to analyse our work, and place that analysis into a political context, the community arts movement has placed itself in a position of absurd, and unnecessary, weakness.’ (Owen Kelly, 1984)

7. Four thinkers Nicolas Bourriaud Grant Kester Claire Bishop
Francois Matarasso

8. Relational Aesthetics, 1998
Nicolas Bourriaud
Relational Aesthetics, 1998
Art is a way of experimenting with new social relations
Kate Sweeney: the ‘product’ is not the art itself, it’s the trace left by the art

9. Community and Communication in Modern Art, 2004
Grant Kester
Conversation Pieces:
Community and Communication in Modern Art, 2004
Dialogical aesthetics: Art is a process of communicative exchange
Art that has a desire to “to catalyze understanding, to mediate exchange, and to sustain an ongoing process of empathic identification and critical analysis”

10. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, 2012
Claire Bishop
Artificial Hells:
Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, 2012
Explores the relationship between art world and politics/social policy
Participatory Art exists at the point of tension between ‘social’ and ‘art’ perspectives
How should Participatory Art be displayed?
What is the role of the artist?

11. Thinking about culture as if democracy mattered, 2013
Francois Matarasso
Parliament of Dreams:
Thinking about culture as if democracy mattered, 2013
Everyone has the right to make art.
Industrial vs Distributed cultural production