Process and Product in Participatory Art: Making the invisible visible

There’s a relatively frequent debate within both the Community and Participatory Arts spheres concerning what’s more important: the process of participation in arts activity, or the product – the final artwork(s) that people make.

I’m not sure why we feel the need to make this an ‘either/or’, or ‘what’s more important?’ type question. Isn’t it all the art? – both process and ‘product’?  If Participatory Arts concerns artists and participants working together to explore their narratives (see my previous blog post) isn’t what an artist does with a participant in a workshop as much ‘the art’ as the images (say) that are displayed in an exhibition of the work? As an example, is the stencilling activity undertaken by artist and participant, that led to a conversation about the death of a young man’s best friend, as much ‘the art’ as the animation of which the stencil became part?

If that’s the case, how do we show that process? How do we reveal it to others beyond the artist and participants in a way that enables people to understand and engage with it as art?

 An example of an exhibition of process displayed alongside a 'final' piece:

14 Billions (working title) by Tomas Saraceno

Credit: Camilo Brau, Copyright: Tomas Saraceno



Why does displaying process matter? Why is it important for people to see the process? I think there’s at least 3 three reasons:

·         If people can’t see the process-element of Participatory Art, they can’t engage artist and participants in critical conversation about the work, because they are only seeing part of the picture. It’s the same as trying to talk about a performance if you missed the first half, or discussing an exhibition where half the pieces are missing.

·         If people can’t discuss the work as a whole, then how we can we talk about what quality means?

·         If people can’t see the process, how can they intelligently fund/commission/sponsor Participatory Art?

For these reasons, at Helix Arts we’ve been trying to wrestle with how we capture and reveal the process of Participatory Art. We’ve had a student from Newcastle University’s Gallery Studies & Curating MA – Mika McBroom - thinking about this question for us - and she’s produced an interesting report which looks at some different ways in which process-based work is presented around the world.

We’ve also started working with CultureLab at Newcastle University, and folks from the Wunderbar Festival, to think about the question of how we can create a digital platform which captures what’s going on in the participatory process and enables all that information to be selected and presented – to artists and participants themselves, and to new audiences for this work.

The possibilities for this are intriguing. Imagine real and virtual exhibitions of participatory artwork where you see video clips from workshops, work in progress, live feeds from on-going activity, blogs from artists and participants. Imagine each artist and participant being able to curate their own version of the project because all the work produced has been tagged by person, location and date, and is able to be represented in as many different combinations as people can conceive. Imagine ‘audiences’ being able to create their own work online which responds to the work in the participatory exhibits or performances. It might even look like an interactive participatory version of this or this.

All of this is at very early stages of thinking and development, and we’d love to hear from other people and organisations with an interest in this idea. There are all sorts of complications – for example - how do you reveal process without undermining the safe space that has been created for participants to explore their personal concerns?

What do you think?