Dalyvavimo praktikos Lietuvos šiuolaikiniame mene: analizės kriterijų ir vertinimo problema ; Participatory Practices in Lithuanian Contemporary Art: The Problem of Criteria for Analysis and Evaluation
The dissertation deals with issues of those art practices, where an artist or a curator employs people as a project material so as to realize his/her creative purpose. Projects like this commonly expand beyond the aesthetic field: instead of representing social or political reality, they actually perform it. Therefore the dissertation aims at constructing a conceptual model that would enable the analysis of the problems around participatory art, as a practice operating both in aesthetic and social fields. The model is based primarily on rethinking of the classical divide between production and action (poiēsis and praxis) and the principle premise that contemporary production is increasingly becoming akin to action (Paolo Virno, Giorgio Agamben). The dissertation suggests that participatory practices are the clearest evidence of this dialectics between production and action in contemporary art. The model constructed of diverse philosophical concepts (idle talk, tactics, everyday practices, performativity, iteration) is employed for analysis of participatory art practices in Lithuania, which shows how looking through the prism of production and action foregrounds certain problems, general to participatory art (e.g. those of documentation, relation between art event and artwork, labor and entertainment, etc.). At the same time it proves to be a handy tool that helps to highlight peculiarities of a particular project, to question certain established prejudices, and to unveil new aspects.
