1. History

The history of participatory art practices can be followed from the early efforts of the historical avant-garde to challenge and critically question the artistic hierarchies upholding the nineteenth century conceptualization of art as an autonomous institution invested with pure aesthetic value via the dissolution of boundaries between art and life and exploring ways to unify art and life.

“Painters have shown us the objects and the people placed before us. We shall henceforward put the spectator in the center of the painting. ... We would at any price re-enter into life.” Umberto Boccioni[1]

“It is time that art entered into life in an organized fashion,” Alexander Rodchenko[2]

“Art, just like science and technology, is a method of organizing our shared life in general." Theo van Doesburg, El Lissitzky and Hans Richter[3]

Peter Burger limits the avant-garde's intentions toward unifying art and life by virtue of the readymade, chance, and montage, but these are far from the only techniques that can be seen as negating the purpose, mode of production, and mode of reception of art as an autonomous institution. The idea of putting "the spectator in the center of the painting" as well as those "multiple ways in which the futurists sought to interpellate and galvanize the masses, focusing particularly on their performative interpretation of late–nineteenth-century French and Italian crowd theory" (Christine Poggi),[4] were also methods or forms of merging art and life. Readymade and participatory practices seem to be two sides of the same coin: if the readymade brings life into art through appropriated and repurposed objects, then agitating and activating the spectator/crowd brings life itself into the art realm. Encouraging audience interaction led the way for participatory art, from Dada, Situationism and Allan Kaprow’s or Jean-Jacques Lebel’s happenings to the present.

2. Present: if walls could tell

Participatory art practices reconfiguring the political in aesthetic form and “reframing a sense of community and mending the social bond and time that binds together practices, forms of visibility, and patterns of intelligibility” (Jacques Rancière),[5] create spaces of encounter, dialogue, negation, confrontation, antagonism, and form some kind of community, mostly of a temporal nature. However, participatory art could create space for the communal "where success means to be recognized for working toward communal well-being and not for celebrated individual achievement, where art is produced not for the market but for the exploration and release of human creativity, where the goal of invention is not primarily to succeed in the market" (Walter D. Mignolo),[6] fostering a communal praxis of living.

The empty, neutral white 'walls' of the Čačak edition of Misha Kuball's project if walls could tell were transformed by the intervention of the citizens of the Serbian city into a multi-layered reflection and statement on the complex socio-political and ideological turmoil that characterized Serbia during a period of almost seven months of protests. The participants did not establish a new community distinct from existing ones, which were already divided by differing political viewpoints and responses to the tragic collapse of the canopy at the recently renovated railway station facility in Novi Sad (November 2024). Therefore, the visually dense walls of Kuball's installation became part of a broader network of indexes that circulate through (counter-)public spheres modeled by participatory culture. The project in this particular case serves not so much as an argument for the power of art in engaging with and responding to significant moments of social change and unrest. On the contrary, it is closer to emphasizing the importance of collective efforts and the shared experience of direct participation, negotiation, creativity, and expression within a politically and ideologically divided community.

Jasmina Čubrilo (PhD, Serbia) is an art historian based in Belgrade. She works as a Professor of Modern Art History in the Department of Art History of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade. Her main research topics are concepts and phenomena in modern, postmodern, and contemporary art, with a focus on the avant-gardes, neo-avant-gardes, post-avant-gardes and new media art. In addition to articles, essays, scholarly chapters and research papers published in national and international publications (Handbook of International Futurism, ed. Gunter Berghaus, DeGryter, 2018; Making Art History in Europe After 1945, eds. de Haro García, Mayayo & Carrillo, Routledge, 2020; Hot Art, Cold War – Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990, eds. Hopkins & Boyd Whyte, Routledge, 2021; Centropa, Ethno-anthropological problems, Art&Media Journal, Journal of Modern Art History Department), she is also the author of several books, including the following titles: Belgrade Art Scene - the Nineties, Belgrade 1998; Zora Petrović, Belgrade 2011; Jelica Radovanović i Dejan Anđelković: symptom.dj, Belgrade 2011; Bojan Bem: Media Repositioning of the Image, Belgrade 2016; On Scale: Monumentalizing the Miniature, Belgrade 2019; Jovan Kratohvil: A Study of a Model of Yugoslav Modernism, Belgrade 2021.