Articles & Essays Book Reviews Creative Writing
Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Volume 18 Number 2, August 2017
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Bianchini, Samuel., and Verhagen, Erik. PRACTICABLE: From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art, Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2016. 930 pages, ISBN: 9780262335584, Hardback £41.95, Paperback £27.25.
Reviewed by
The Arden School of Theatre, Manchester: UK.
Academic texts of this structure rarely fail to stimulate and motivate the interest of their readers. Practicable is no exception. It does so by capturing the diversity and eclecticism of contemporary art yet manages to achieve a clarity of focus in its attempt to answer some critical questions clearly detailed in the introduction, such as: ‘How are we to understand and analyse works that are constituted by the practical participation of their viewers?’
This book provides the only means of effectively tackling such questions by means of a broad, diverse, yet specifically focused attack on the essence of contemporary art itself. Anything less would fail miserably to undertake the demanding intellectual analysis and evaluation necessary for such an endeavour.
With over 900 pages and 57 chapters involving thought provoking ideas from university professors, researchers, and international artists interested in contemporary art practices to art critics, theorists, architects, philosophers, anthropologists, and composers, this book will have genuine appeal to a wide range of readers including teachers, students, researchers, and performance practitioners themselves.
The profoundly considered title, together with the above heterogenous content, captures the fast-moving understanding that has emerged from the 1950’s onwards about the importance of the cross-disciplinary nature of contemporary art research. The multi-disciplinary framework of this book is surpassed only by the detailed knowledge emerging from the enthralling and captivating case studies in Part 6 and the interviews with artists that is grounded in interdisciplinary thinking and action.
This book opens up the multi-faceted phenomenon of performance art to public scrutiny. What I take from this inspiring and thought-provoking text is confirmation of my own doctoral research into contemporary performance – that all such works are experiments, necessarily engaging the contributions of both performer and audience, involving transformational experiences for both, realized through aesthetic, public interaction in autopoietic contexts.