Claire Bishop – författare

The reception of art and performance is changing. Smartphones and social media have troubled the old model of individual appreciation and close looking, giving rise to new forms of mediated perception, such as sampling, skimming and scrolling. Charting recent trends in contemporary practice - research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture - leading art critic Claire Bishop challenges the assumption that fully focused attention is automatically good and distraction necessarily bad.

The award-winning, highly acclaimed Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as "social practice." In recent decades, the art gallery and the museum have become a place for participatory art, where an audience is encouraged to take part in the artwork. This has been heralded as a revolutionary practise that can promote new emancipatory social relations. What was it is really? In this fully updated edition, Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawel Althamer and Paul Chan.Bishop challenges the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art this practise. She not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. In response Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.

How artists build and shape a myriad of knowledge forms, spanning the decolonial to the transnational and the multilingualWhat types of knowledge do artists produce? How do they give that knowledge form? Featuring works by 11 artists from 9 different countries, whose birth years range from 1946 to 1992, Ways of Knowing highlights different ways artists give form to complex ideas. The catalog, documenting an exhibition at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, highlights the strategies by which some of today’s most compelling artists resist assumptions about how information should be gathered and shared, bringing their own perspectives to cultural artifacts and histories. Some focus on the ethics of research or the connections between culture, place and language, while others examine the impacts of colonialism across continents or the historical formation of gender identity, among other themes.Artists include: Iosu Aramburu, Sammy Baloji, Anna Boghiguian, Cabello/Carceller, Chang Yuchen, Petrit Halilaj, Sky Hopinka, Christine Howard Sandoval, Eduardo Navarro, Gala Porras-Kim, Rose Salane.