Disordering the Establishment: Art, Display, and Participation in France, 1958-1981

This dissertation investigates strategies by which artists adopted participation as a form of institutional contestation through democratic popular engagement. Participation opposed the technocratic efficiency that characterized the early years of the Fifth Republic and the sociological methods that fueled it by appropriating and transforming their techniques so as to undermine apparently straight-forward communication and the authority that it bolsters. Their spatially decentralized displays critiqued art institutions at the same time that they relativized the position of artist and viewer by situating their individual comprehensions within the larger community to which they were shown to belong.
The first chapter examines the continuity between the optical and kinetic works of the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel and the marketing-style questionnaires that they distributed to participants. Both destabilized perception, sensorially and discursively, to make the viewer aware that the work forms in the "space" of experience and interpretation. The second chapter compares the in situ striped canvases of Daniel Buren and the spatial displacements of Andre Cadere's round bars of wood, which engaged the viewer through formal abstraction and dialogue-based display practices. I show how they negotiated participation with institutional critique by alternatively favoring anonymity and celebrity, thereby risking redefinition of participation as the consumption of ornamental decoration. Identity and anonymity are the focal points of chapter three, which examines Didier Bay's photograph and text-based "sociological" study, Mon quartier vu de ma fenetre. While Bay sought to reveal the private lives of the neighbors that he surveyed through the windows of their private residences, he ultimately insists that one can only know oneself, yet only through contemplation of the other. Finally, chapter four argues that the Collectif d'Art Sociologique's appropriations of mass media and sociological methodologies failed to have a transformational effect on the communities that they animated as they ignored the importance of aesthetic persuasion thereby fulfilling sociological expectation.