The Participator in Contemporary Art ― Art and Social Relationships

The early twenty-first century has seen contemporary art make continued use of audience participation, in which the participant becomes part of the artwork itself. In this book, Kaija Kaitavuori claims that the 'participator' is a new artistic role that does not fall under the auspices of artist or spectator and in proving such she devises a four-group typology of participation. Her classification distinguishes between different forms of engagement and identifies their specific features. The key criteria she proposes are how concepts of authorship and ownership shift in relation to collectively created work, how contracts regulating the use and production of participatory work are arranged and the extent to which participation in art can be regarded as democratic. This exciting book thus offers students and teachers the tools with which to improve their understanding of participatory art and removes the confusing terminology that has denoted so many other discussions.

Kaija Kaitavuori is a Visiting Lecturer at the Aalto University in Helsinki. She was previously a Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, a post that she held between 2012 and 2015, during her doctoral studies. Her doctoral research was supervised by Julian Stallabrass (Courtauld) and Natalie Heinich (CNRS, Paris). Prior to earning her PhD, she held senior roles at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, the Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki and the Finnish National Gallery.