The do-it-yourself artwork Participation from Fluxus to New Media [Hardcover]

Viewers of contemporary art are often invited to involve themselves actively in artworks, by entering installations, touching objects, performing instructions or clicking on interactive websites. Why have artists sought to engage spectators in these new forms of participation? In what ways does active participation affect the viewer's experience and the status of the artwork? Spanning a range of practices including kinetic art, happenings, environments, performance, installations, relational and new media art from the 1950s to the present, this critical anthology sheds light on the history and specificity of artworks that only come to life when you - the viewer - are invited to 'do it yourself.'

Rather than a specialist topic in the history of twentieth- and twenty-first century art, the 'do-it-yourself' artwork raises broader issues concerning the role of the viewer in art, the status of the artwork and the socio-political relations between art and its contexts.

Anna Dezeuze: What the do-it-yourself artwork can do for you

PART I: PARTICIPATION IN CONTEXT

Anna Dezeuze: Open work, do-it-yourself artwork, and bricolage

Judith Rodenbeck: creative acts of consumption or, death in Venice

Arnauld Pierre: Instability: the visual/bodily perception of space in kinetic environments

Guy Brett: 3 Pioneers

PART II: PERFORMING PARTICIPATION

Catherine Wood: The rules of engagement: Displaced figuration in Robert Morris's sculpture

Frazer Ward: Marina Abramovic: Approaching zero

Amelia Jones: Space, body and the self in the work of Bruce Nauman

Janet Kraynak: Tiravanija's liability

Jennifer Gonzalez: the face and the public: Race, secrecy and digital art practice

PART III: ANALYSING PARTICIPATION

Anna Dezeuze: Play, ritual and politics: Transitional artworks in the 1960s

Christian Kravagna: Working on the community: Models of participatory practice

Miwon Kwonl³F