The title and theme of the exhibition refer to a prophetic passage written nearly forty years ago by Jean Baudrillard, predicting that late capitalism would in future be organized in terms of participation and play, rather than spectacle. This would lead to the formation of citizens and consumers who would not be more active or aware, but subject to a mandatory passivity:
‘The code's disjunction supplants the centralist injunction. Solicitation is substituted for the ultimatum. Mandatory passivity evolves into models constructed directly from the "active responses" of the subject, his or her implication, "ludic" participation, etc., and finally towards a total, environmental model made up of incessant spontaneous responses, joyful feedback, and irradiated contact. This is ... the great Festival of Participation, composed of myriad stimuli, miniaturized tests, infinitely divisible nodes of query and reply, magnetized by a few overarching models illuminated by the code. The culture of tactile communication is in fact burgeoning in the techno-lumino-kinetic space provided by this total, spatio-dynamic theatre.’
+Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic exchange and death, in Jean Baudrillard: selected writings, Mark Poster (ed.), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1988, p. 144
A prescient summary of our online lives, clutching our smartphones, spontaneously ‘liking’ things and constantly involved in acts of communication!
Interactivity, participation and play then cease to be artistic modalities that can be used affirmatively. In historical avant-gardes, games were anti-hegemonic activities par excellence: they were means of emancipation beloved of the Situationist International, which even stated that we should ‘live without dead time and enjoy without restraint’. Yet Baudrillard deflated this celebration of anti-hegemonic play by predicting – rightly, as it now turns out – how modern views of liberation of forms and unlimited creativity would progressively degenerate into a participative, profitable festival in which everyone was expected to perform, anticipating any desire for communication.
A world that provides such pre-established, endless spaces for thinking and acting has no need for naïve, infantilizing approaches to art. One possible response may be the interactive, participatory, punitive installations produced by the Ride1 collective (Stig Sjölund, Ronny Hansson and Jonas Kjellgren). In Splash (2011) we find visitors with their heads pushed into a toilet bowl in mid-flush at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet. How are we to see this – as some ‘joyful’ way of awaking from the Festival of Participation, or quite simply as filth?
How are we to analyse and stage such situations? How is art to express the social numbing described by Baudrillard? How are we to break the spell of ‘mandatory passivity’? Is a return to contemplation the antidote to tactile capitalism – or do we have to find more radical responses?
-