Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Performance Interventions)

exclusivity rather than inclusivity,

Who gets to do what, where, when and how in this cultural practice, and how does this affect people? What are this practice’s relationships to social engagement, communication, social justice, equality and democracy; how might it contribute to or weaken them? If it invites participation, who can participate and on what terms? What is the quality of

agree with Morgan that participation is not intrinsically politically progressive. Thus, though I seek these practices’ democratic potential and look for ways they extend equal opportunities for social engagement, I also pay attention to ways they constrain or suppress those opportunities.

Nicholas Bourriaud, Jessica Morgan, Claire Bishop and Shannon Jackson.

The type of pluralist community relational art might offer, Morgan suggests, is that evoked by philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy’s terms ‘being-with’, ‘being-in-common’ and ‘being-with-each-other’, which accommodate difference in mutuality (ibid., pp. 16 and 26; see, for example, Nancy, 2000).

These subsequent chapters often look at a greater range of art and performance beyond the participatory forms outlined above and in Chapter 1, because they ask how participation in culture is more broadly and fundamentally affected not just by artistic practices but also by policy-making, spatial organization and arts funding.

‘art tak[es] as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context’ (Bourriaud, 2002, p. 14).3 Its role is ‘to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real’ (p. 13).

Harvey argues that ‘[t]he present economic difficulties in both the US and Britain, as well as throughout Europe, are essentially being deepened for a political reason rather than out of economic necessity. That political reason is the desire to have done with capital’s responsibility to cover costs of social reproduction’ (ibid., p. 269),

The question of the significance of participation, though vital to much contemporary work, is one that should be treated with some suspicion. The mere involvement of the actions of audience members is not enough to assume a vital or direct relationship to the work of art …. How the exchange of participation takes place must be carefully framed, so