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47-494: Beltane Fire Festival is an annual participatory arts event and ritual, held on 30 April on Calton Hill in Edinburgh . The modern Beltane Fire Festival is inspired by the ancient Gaelic festival of Beltane which began on the evening before 1 May and marked the beginning of summer. The modern festival was started in 1988 by a small group of enthusiasts including the musical collective Test Dept , with academic support from

94-539: A circle and invited participants to hold the tube next to their ear. The participants could hear the sound of air entering and exiting the tube, which produced an individual sensory experience for each participant. Clark is one of the most established artists associated with the Tropicália movement. Clark explored the role of sensory perception and psychic interaction that participants would have with her artwork. An example of Clark's fascination with human interaction

141-404: A core of a dozen performers and a few hundred audience, the event has grown to several hundred performers and over ten thousand audience. Key characters within the performance are maintained, though reinterpreted by their performers, and additional participants incorporated each year. Originally, the festival was free and only lightly stewarded; however, as the event has grown in popularity, due to

188-529: A distinct form to be stymied. It is most likely that this occurred simultaneously with the development of the term relational aesthetics by Bourriaud in the late 1990s. Some other art-making techniques, such as 'community-based art' , ' interactive art ', or ' socially-engaged art ' have been (mis) labeled as participatory art, simply because the subtleties of distinction are not always clearly understood or cared about. Many forms of popular culture and media beyond visual art have grown increasingly participatory with

235-492: A multi-sensory experience in which the spectator became an active participant. Between 1979 and 1988, Clark moved toward art therapy, using her objects in interactive sessions with patients. In 1977, Clark returned to Rio de Janeiro , Brazil, and she died of a heart attack in her home in 1988. Clark's early works were influenced by the Constructivist movement and other forms of European geometric abstraction, including

282-462: A newly founded school remarkable for its open, experimental model in contrast to the more traditional beaux-arts academy format. During the 1970s, Clark explored the role of sensory perception and psychic interaction that the participants would have with her artwork. She referred to this as "ritual without myth". Clark's later, more famous works were viewed as "living experiences," a focus she had for three decades of her career. She did not separate

329-465: A pebble perched upon a small plastic bag filled with air. The pressure of viewers' hands would cause the pebble to dance. Art critic Guy Brett observed that Clark "produced many devices to dissolve the visual sense into an awareness of the body." Clark's later works focused heavily on the unconscious senses: touch, hearing and smell. In her 1966 work, Breathe With Me, Clark formed a rubber tube into

376-437: A predecessor or model for contemporary "participatory art" in that many or all of the members of the society participate in the making of "art". However, the ideological issue of use arises at this point because art made in the institutions of art is by default, already part of the art world, and therefore its perceived use is entirely different from any ritualistic or traditional practices expressed by folk or tribal groups. As

423-483: Is Baba Antropofágica. This piece was inspired by a dream that Clark had about an anonymous substance that streamed out from her mouth. This experience was not a pleasurable one for Clark. She viewed it as the vomiting of a lived experience that, in turn, was swallowed by others. During the latter part of her career, Clark focused more on art therapy and less on the actual creation of a work. When she returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1976, Clark's therapeutic focus rest upon

470-453: Is her 1967 piece O eu e o tu (The I and the You). The piece consists of two industrial rubber suits joined by an umbilical-like cord. The participants wearing the suits would be joined but unable to see one another, forming an almost psycho-sexual bond between the two. Clark said of her pieces, "What's important is the act of doing in the present; the artist is dissolved into the world." During

517-472: The health and safety considerations involved. The society has also held fundraising art and music events and has held a 'mini-Beltane' at a local AIDS Hospice, Milestone House. As a community event, each year the performance has evolved as new people bring their own influences and directions. The core narrative remains by and large the same though additional elements have been added over time for theatrical, ritual, and practical reasons. Originally an event with

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564-636: The vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square and perform or otherwise contribute to the work. Carsten Höller has created interactive installations like Test Site (2006), which invites participants to play on giant slides installed in the Tate Modern . Allan Kaprow pioneered the field of participatory art with his Happening events staged in 1960's New York City, which used physical installations and prompts to facilitate aesthetic experiences for participants. Learning to Love you More (2002–2009)

611-510: The 1950s and 60s, Clark was in therapy herself, and the propositions she was developing explored the frontier between art, therapy, and life. In 1964, Clark began her Nostalgia of the Body series with the intention of abandoning the production of art objects in order to create art that was rooted in the senses. The Nostalgia of the Body works relied on participant's individual experiences occurring directly in their bodies. These pieces addressed

658-645: The Concrete group to start the Neo-Concrete movement. They published their manifesto in 1959. Hélio Oiticica would soon join the group in the next year. The Neo-Concretists believed that art was a matter of the subject's experience in real time and space, but unlike the Minimalists in the U.S. who had some similar interests, Clark and the Neo-Concretists equated 'real space' with liveliness and

705-489: The Fall/Winter issue of Oregon Humanities magazine, writer Eric Gold describes "an artistic tradition called ' social practice ,' which refers to works of art in which the artist, audience, and their interactions with one another are the medium. While a painter uses pigment and canvas, and a sculptor wood or metal, the social practice artist often creates a scenario in which the audience is invited to participate. Although

752-556: The School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh . Since then the festival has grown, and now involves over 300 voluntary collaborators and performers with available tickets often selling out. While the festival draws on a variety of historical, mythological and literary influences, the organisers do not claim it to be anything other than a modern celebration of Beltane , evolving with its participants. The current Beltane

799-404: The artist; they will be subjugated in this way, and the work will fail to be participatory. This detail is centrally important in asserting participation as a form in itself, and effectively differentiates participation from interactive, community based art and socially engaged art. Any of these techniques can include the presence of the artist, as it will not impinge upon the outcome of the work in

846-762: The capacity of the hill, funding requirements, and Edinburgh Council requests, the festival has in recent years moved to being a ticketed event. Participatory art One of the earliest usages of the term appears in photographer Richard Ross 's review for the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art journal of the exhibition "Downtown Los Angeles Artists", organized by the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum in 1980. Describing in situ works by Jon Peterson , Maura Sheehan and Judith Simonian anonymously placed around Santa Barbara, Ross wrote, "These artists bear

893-608: The director of the Ulm School of Design in Germany during the early 1950s. The Neo-Concretists were interested in how art could be used to "express complex human realities". They soon began making artworks the spectator could interact with physically, like Clark's Bichos (Critters), 1960–1963, which are ingenious arrangements of hinged metal plates that can fold flat, or be unfolded into three dimensions and manipulated into many different configurations. Interacting with these works

940-450: The early part of Clark's career, she focused on creating small monochromatic paintings which were done in black, gray, and white. During the 1960s, her work became more conceptual and she used soft objects that could be manipulated by the art spectator. Clark later moved on to co-found the Neo-Concrete movement, which fellow Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica then joined. In the late 1950s, Clark and some of her contemporaries broke away from

987-543: The ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl wrote, the tribal group "has no specialization or professionalization; its division of labor depends almost exclusively on sex and occasionally on age, and only rarely are certain individuals proficient in any technique to a distinctive degree ... the same songs are known by all the members of the group, and there is little specialization in composition, performance or instrument making." Lygia Clark Lygia Pimentel Lins (23 October 1920 – 25 April 1988), better known as Lygia Clark ,

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1034-511: The fact that participatory art can itself be a form. It is distinguished from its sub-types by the absence of the author. This is the primary important factor in defining what is truly participatory art because when the author is not present or known, the participant gains true agency, and is fully participating. In any of the sub-forms (socially-engaged art, community-based art, etc.) participants are at best collaborators and at worst, human media. In either case, all 'participants' become subjugated by

1081-419: The festival, is managed by a democratically elected voluntary committee, and all the performers are volunteers who either join by word of mouth or by attending one of the advertised open meetings held early in the year. Senior performers and artists in the society help others through workshops with aspects of event production, prop construction, character performance techniques, team building, percussion skills and

1128-567: The founding members of Rio's Frente group of artists. In 1957, Clark participated in Rio de Janeiro 's first National Concrete Art Exhibition . Clark soon became a prime figure among the Neo-concretists, whose 1959 manifesto called for abstract art to be more subjective and less rational and idealist. In 1960 she began to make her famous Bichos (Critters), hinged objects that could take many shapes and were meant to be physically manipulated by

1175-410: The home of earlier Edinburgh Beltane celebrations, for practical reasons the location was moved to Calton Hill. Choreography, iconography and performance were moulded by the originators' research into historical accounts of Beltane and their own influences (e.g. Test Department's drumming, Trinidadian carnival, and ritual dance and performance). The Beltane Fire Society , a registered charity which runs

1222-410: The memory of trauma. When she changed her creative direction in 1971, she wrote "I discovered that the body is the house...and that the more we become aware of it the more we rediscover the body as an unfolding totality." She wanted to uncover why the power of certain objects brought about a vivid memory in her psychotherapy patients so that she could treat their psychosis. Depending upon the individual,

1269-553: The military dictatorship that took power in the fallout, a counterculture movement grew in response to the government's increasing scrutiny on the public. At this point in time, Institutional Act Number Five was enacted and artists were forced into exile or fled the country out of fear of persecution. Clark spent these years in Paris where she taught at the Sorbonne , UFR d'Arts Plastiques et Sciences de l'Art de l'Université de Paris 1,

1316-438: The mind from the body and believed that art should be experienced through all five senses. After 1963, Clark's work could no longer exist outside of a participant's experience. Her art became an interactive experience. She believed that a viewer, or "participant", served an active and important function in the art world. In most museums, works are affixed to a stand or on the wall, while Clark's works were meant to be manipulated by

1363-438: The one hand, the outcomes of each are so entirely different, and intended to be so (where the former is enmeshed in and remains in the rarefied art world, while the latter is only of true public value in its original setting) while on the other, engagement is not participation. As we see in this example, the sub-tyes of participatory art are recognizable by their names, but they are not all the same. Further complexity can be seen in

1410-399: The organic. In Clark's writings, she articulates that an artwork should not be considered "a ‘machine’ nor an ‘object,’ but rather, an almost-body" which can only be made whole through viewer participation. Clark and Oiticica fused modern European geometric abstraction art with a Brazilian cultural flavor. The Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement borrowed their artistic ideas from Max Bill who was

1457-509: The physical presence of the artist, denying them autonomy. Janet Cardiff has created various audio tours that users experience by walking site-specific routes and listening to soundscapes composed by the artist. Figment is an annual showcase of participatory art in New York City. Antony Gormley has involved the public in the creation of several works, most notably One & Other which invited hundreds of participants to occupy

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1504-605: The relationship between inside and outside, and, ultimately, between self and world. Clark was born in 1920 in Belo Horizonte , Brazil. In 1938, she married Aluízio Clark Riberio, a civil engineer, and moved to Rio de Janeiro , where she gave birth to three children between 1941 and 1945. In 1947, she studied painting with Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx and became an artist. Between 1950 and 1952, she studied with Isaac Dobrinsky , Fernand Léger and Arpad Szenes in Paris. In 1953, she became one of

1551-400: The responsibility to the community. Their art is participatory." Participatory art requires of the artist that they either not be present, or that they somehow are able to recede far enough to become equal with the participants. This is the only way that participants might be offered the agency of creation; without this detail, participants will always respond within the domain of authority of

1598-716: The results may be documented with photography, video, or otherwise, the artwork is really the interactions that emerge from the audience's engagement with the artist and the situation." Participatory or interactive art creates a dynamic collaboration between the artist, the audience and their environment. Participatory art is not just something that you stand still and quietly look at–it is something you participate in. You touch it, smell it, write on it, talk to it, dance with it, play with it, learn from it. You co-create it. There are many examples of artists making interactive, socially-engaged, or community-based projects. The problem these pose arises when they are each used interchangeably with

1645-487: The rise of the Internet and social media , which allow users to "participate" at a distance. We are led to believe this is 'participatory' but as we know, engaging with social media platforms (participating) is actually contributing free labor. This type of 'participation' has nothing to do with art, but it does reflect the core problem with naming in this area of art-making. Participation can be used as an umbrella term for

1692-607: The same way. There are various degrees of participation from nominal manipulation of an object like the wearable sculptures of Lygia Clark to the relinquishing of the artist's body to the whims of the audience in the 1974 performance Rhythm 0 by Marina Abramović . New media theorist Beryl Graham has compared the varying degrees of participation in the arts to the eight rungs of power described in Sherry Arnstein 's "Ladder of Citizen Participation"—ranging from manipulation to token consulting, to complete citizen control. In

1739-648: The sessions could be short-term or long-term, in which treatment came about through the relationship between the relationship object and how the participant interpreted its meaning. Clark's work is held in collections worldwide including MoMA (New York), Tate Modern (London), the Museum of Fine Arts (Houston); Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and Centre Pompidou (Paris). At Sotheby's in 2014, Clark's aluminium folding sculpture Bicho-Em-Si-Md (No. IV) (1960)

1786-435: The simultaneous existence of opposites within the same space: internal and external, metaphorical and literal, male and female. Her 1966 work Diálogo de mãos [Dialogue of Hands], a collaboration with Hélio Oiticica, bound together two participants' hands with a stretchy Möbius strip, and the movements of the two bodies created a cascade of stimuli and embodied response. Also in 1966, Clark created Pedra e ar [Stone and Air],

1833-405: The spectator was meant to become more aware of his or her physical body and metaphysical existence. Viewer participation was essential for the artwork to be complete (in fact, Clark and Oiticica referred to the audience as "participants" rather than viewers. Clark described the exchange between viewer and Bicho as a dialogue between two living organisms. After the 1964 Brazilian coup d'état and

1880-419: The term "participatory art". Participatory art is a form unto itself, while other types of art that interface with the public (social practice, socially-engaged art, community-based art, etc.) are its sub-types. While it may seem paradoxical, just because an artwork engages with the public, that does not make it participatory. There has been some nominal obfuscation of participatory art, causing its appreciation as

1927-404: The various types of interfacing that artworks have created with the public. For example, 100 people working directly with an artist to make art in a museum is entirely different from an artist project sited in a local community center in an impoverished area of a city. Both necessarily include engaging the public, but it is important that they not be conflated with participatory art simply because on

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1974-419: The viewer in 1964 she began developing "propositions" anyone could enact using everyday materials like paper, plastic bags, and elastic. After 1966, Clark claimed to have abandoned art. During Brazil's military dictatorship, Clark self-exiled to Paris, where in the 1970s she taught art classes at the Sorbonne . During this time, Clark also explored the idea of sensory perception through her art. Her art became

2021-463: The viewer/participant. Her belief was that art should be a multi-sensory experience, not just one enjoyed through the eyes. At one point she wrote "We are the proposers: our proposition is that of dialogue. Alone we do not exist. We are at your mercy," she then went on to say "We are the proposers: we have buried the work of art as such and we call upon you so that thought may survive through your action." One of her most recognized interactive art pieces

2068-557: The work of Max Bill , though she soon departed from the detached rationalism of much abstract art. Clark's early work reflected her interest in psychoanalysis, including the research of Sigmund Freud . She drew on the writings of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty , whose phenomenology resonated with the intertwining of subject and object she sought in her breakthrough work of the 1960s. Later in her career, her more holistic works displayed influences from experiences she had with psychotic and neurotic patients. Like many intellectuals of

2115-711: Was a Brazilian artist best known for her painting and installation work. She was often associated with the Brazilian Constructivist movements of the mid-20th century and the Tropicalia movement. Along with Brazilian artists Amilcar de Castro , Franz Weissmann , Lygia Pape and poet Ferreira Gullar , Clark co-founded the Neo-Concrete movement . From 1960 on, Clark discovered ways for viewers (who would later be referred to as "participants") to interact with her art works. Clark's work dealt with

2162-428: Was a work of Internet art by Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher that invited participants to submit responses to written prompts, and displayed an archive of the resulting works of conceptual art . Adrian Piper led a series of events titled Funk Lessons (1982–1984) that combined participatory dance-parties with conversations and lectures about African-American culture. Folk and tribal art can be considered to be

2209-600: Was started in 1988 by a small group of enthusiasts including Angus Farquhar of the musical collective Test Dept. , choreographer Lindsay John, and dancers from Laban , as well as the Gaelic ethnologist Margaret Bennett (writer) and other academics from the School of Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh. The event was intended as a celebration of traditional rituals as a local manifestation of an international spirit. Originally intended to take place on Arthur's Seat,

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