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THE AUTONOMY BETWEEN US PARTICIPATION EDITED BY CLAIRE BISHOP LONDON/CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS: WHITECHAPEL/MIT PRESS, 2006 207 PP./$22.95 (SB)
Claire Bishop has emerged as one of the key critics in recent discussions on community public art. One of her first major contributions was an essay called "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics."1 In it she argues that critics should attempt to define some of the criteria with which we might judge the new community-based and collaborative art of the 1990s. New work is more difficult to assess, she argues, because it does not reach a level of reflexivity with regard to a medium or a site. Bishop contends that just because a work encourages dialogue and participation, this alone does not make it democratic. What types of relations are being produced, she asks, for whom, and why?2
Defending the work of Thomas Hirshhorn and Santiago Sierra against the "relational aesthetics" of Liam Gillick and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Bishop counterposes an "avant-garde rhetorics of opposition and transformation" against poststructural "strategies of complicity."' In the work of artists like Hirshhorn, there is a readmittance of a degree of autonomy that is based neither in the contradictions of Clement Grcenberg's revolutionary art-at-a-standstill nor Thcodor Adorno's negative dialectics and modernist refusal. Making use of Ernesto Laclau and Chantai Mouffe's theory of radical democracy, Bishop calls for the analysis of "relational antagonism" at the level of...