beyond the closed loop:
participation, antagonism and the limits of art criticism
john ros
march 2026
the conversation and where it gets stuck
The critical discourse around socially engaged and participatory art has, for the better part of three decades, been organized around a single, recurring problem: how do we evaluate work that refuses the terms by which art is conventionally evaluated? Claire Bishop’s two landmark essays — “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” (October, 2004) and “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents” (Artforum, 2006) — and her subsequent book Artificial Hells (2012) represent the most sustained and rigorous attempt to answer that question from within art criticism. Grant Kester’s The One and the Many (2011) represents the most substantive counter-argument. Together, these four texts constitute a genuine intellectual debate — but one that remains structurally limited by its shared dependency on the art world as the primary frame of reference. This essay begins at the edges of that dependency.
The conversation begins not with Bishop or Kester but with Nicolas Bourriaud, whose Relational Aesthetics (1998) functioned as the shared provocation to which both respond. Bourriaud argued that artists of the 1990s — Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liam Gillick, Pierre Huyghe among them — had shifted from making objects to constructing social situations: cooking meals in gallery spaces, building apartment reconstructions open to the public, designing lounge areas within museums. These “microtopias,” as he called them, promised to repair what late capitalism had flattened — real, face-to-face, provisional community. The work was political, Bourriaud argued, precisely because it was relational.
Bishop’s response was sharp and, on its own terms, persuasive. Tiravanija’s cooking works don’t produce democracy — they produce microtopia — a temporary community of people who already share something in common — namely their position as art-world insiders. The only substantial documentation of Tiravanija’s 303 Gallery show is Jerry Saltz’s Art in America review, which describes meals with art dealers, gallerists and critics. “Everyone has a common interest in art,” Bishop observes, “and the result is art-world gossip, exhibition reviews and flirtation. Such communication is fine to an extent, but it is not in and of itself emblematic of ‘democracy’.”01 The critique is correct and it matters. But Bishop’s own framework never fully escapes the art-world frame she is critiquing.
Her counter-model — drawing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s concept of antagonism — positions Thomas Hirschhorn and Santiago Sierra as more genuinely democratic artists because their work sustains tension rather than resolving it. Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument (Documenta XI, 2002) placed itself in a working-class Turkish-German neighborhood in Kassel. Sierra’s Wall Enclosing a Space (Venice Biennale, 2003) denied entry to non-Spanish passport holders, making the normally invisible exclusions of the art world suddenly structural and legible. For Bishop, these works produce “relational antagonism” — a model of encounter predicated not on social harmony but on exposing what must be repressed to maintain the appearance of it.02 The question worth raising is whether this kind of antagonism — staged for a biennial audience that arrived expecting to be unsettled — is genuine encounter or the performance of encounter. Spectacle and disruption can look identical from the outside. What distinguishes them is whether anyone not already inside the art world is changed by the experience.
agreement and disagreement with Bishop
Bishop is right that antagonism is real. But I would argue she is right for the wrong reasons. Her account derives antagonism from Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of democratic subjectivity — the Lacanian claim that identity is never complete, that the presence of the other always renders the self precarious, and that a healthy democracy requires this friction to remain open rather than suppressed. This is a philosophical account of why conflict is generative.
A simpler and more material account: antagonism exists because we don’t come from the same place. We carry different histories, different relationships to power, different experiences of whose labor gets valued and whose remains invisible. That difference is not a philosophical condition to be theorized — it is a lived reality that enters every room, every collaboration, every encounter. You don’t need Laclau and Mouffe to explain why a room full of people from different class, racial and cultural positions produces friction. The friction is already there. The question is what you do with it.
This reframing has consequences for how we read Hirschhorn and Sierra. Bishop positions them as practitioners of genuine antagonism — work that disrupts the art audience’s self-understanding by forcing encounters with difference. But if the discomfort produced by Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument is staged for a Documenta audience that came to be disrupted, if the Turkish-German residents of Nordstadt function primarily as the occasion for a biennial tourist’s unsettling encounter — is that antagonism, or is it antagonism as aesthetic product? There is a real difference between work that produces genuine encounter across difference and work that performs that encounter for a credentialed audience. The biennial circuit has become exceptionally skilled at consuming the former while calling it the latter.
This is not a dismissal of either artist — both have made genuinely powerful work. It is a question about what Bishop’s framework can and cannot see. Kester is precise about what she misses: Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument also involved an extended collaboration with Turkish-German youth from the neighborhood, who helped construct a temporary library, snack bar and television studio which they used for the duration of the exhibit. “This aspect of the project is unremarked in Bishop’s account,” Kester writes, “perhaps because it so closely resembles the retrograde ‘community-art’ tradition.”03 The exclusion is telling. The part of the work that involves durational, embedded, reciprocal labor — building something together over time — is precisely the part that doesn’t register within her framework.
This reveals something structural about how art criticism evaluates participation. The exchange that happens in a single charged encounter — the tourist confronting the street vendor in the Arsenal, the Documenta visitor stranded in Nordstadt — is legible as art. The exchange that happens over months of shared labor, negotiation and collective making is not, or at least not in the same register. Bishop’s framework is built for the former. The more interesting question is what we lose by not having adequate tools for the latter.
the ethical turn, the closed loop and art history’s private language
In “The Social Turn,” Bishop turns her critique from the art itself to the criticism — and here she makes her most important argument. Confronted with socially engaged work, critics have increasingly judged it not on aesthetic grounds but on ethical ones: was the collaboration equitable? did the artist adequately renounce authorial control? were the participants genuinely empowered? Bishop calls this the “ethical turn” in art criticism, and she is right to be suspicious of it. The emphasis on authorial renunciation, on the artist as humble servant of the community’s own expression, produces in practice a kind of competitive self-erasure that tends to evacuate the work of any critical force. As Bishop writes, there can be “no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond.”04
The language of care, community and participation can be — and regularly is — absorbed into institutional rhetoric without changing anything structural. Museums have “social practice” departments. Foundations fund “community-centered” residencies. Biennials commission “dialogic” projects. The vocabulary of the critique becomes the vocabulary of the institution. Bishop’s insistence that aesthetic judgment must remain in play is a genuine defense against this kind of absorption. Work that is only evaluated on ethical grounds is work that cannot be critically assessed at all — and that serves institutions far more than it serves communities.
But here is where Bishop’s argument reaches its limit. Her defense of aesthetic judgment ultimately relies on a version of aesthetic autonomy — borrowed from Rancière’s reading of Schiller — that requires the tension between art and what she calls “social praxis” to remain productive. It is worth pausing on that word. Praxis arrives as the academy’s apology for its own abstraction — a bridge, as it were, between theory and practice. But to speak of a bridge assumes a distance. Art has never known that distance. For artists, practice has always been thinking, doing, feeling, questioning — a living form of knowledge that cannot be reduced to a method or held in productive tension with life, because it already is life. Bishop herself gestures toward this when she writes that participatory art should avoid “extracting art from the ‘useless’ domain of the aesthetic to relocate it in praxis” — but her alternative, that the better examples “occupy an ambiguous territory between ‘art becoming mere life or art becoming mere art,'” is a sophisticated position.05 But it depends on a premise worth challenging: that art and life are separable domains at all.
That premise is itself part of the problem. Art history has developed a private language for describing this tension — autonomy, heteronomy, antagonism, the distribution of the sensible — that functions less as description and more as credential. Fluency in this language has become the price of admission to the conversation. But the ability to name a concept does not confer a more genuine relationship to it. Someone without formal training in aesthetics is not less capable of processing the experience of a work, extracting meaning from it or understanding what it does in the world. The assumption that they are is not a neutral critical judgment — it is a class position masquerading as an epistemological one. Taste, in this sense, is never innocent. What gets called aesthetic sophistication is often just familiarity with a particular set of references accumulated through a particular kind of education.
For communities and practices rooted in Black radical traditions, feminist labor politics and community-embedded creative work, making and living and caring and organizing are not separate things being held in tension. They are already the same thing. As Cedric Robinson argues in Black Marxism, the Black radical tradition is “an accretion, over generations, of collective intelligence gathered from struggle”06 — a formation that operates on fundamentally different terms than Western political or aesthetic frameworks. Black radicalism, Robinson insists, “is not a variant of Western radicalism whose proponents happen to be Black.”07 Rather, African culture itself functioned as “the shield which frustrated the efforts of Europeans to dehumanize Africans through servitude” — meaning that the maintenance and flourishing of cultural, collective life was not a means toward liberation. It was liberation.08
Tiffany Lethabo King extends this further. In The Black Shoals, she argues that Black thought, aesthetics and lived experience function as “a shoal that interrupts the course and momentum of the flow of critical theories”09 — an “in-between, ecotonal, unexpected, and shifting space” that requires “new footing, different chords of embodied rhythms, and new conceptual tools to navigate its terrain.”10 The dominant frameworks have to slow down. They have to find new footing or run aground.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles didn’t hold maintenance art in tension with maintenance labor — she insisted they were the same act and that the distinction was itself the political problem.11 Tricia Hersey’s Nap Ministry insists that rest is not a break from resistance — it is resistance, rooted in what she describes as “the long-standing Black liberation tradition of a politics of refusal, maroonage, and outlier connection.”12
Bishop’s productive tension between autonomy and heteronomy is, in part, a class and racial formation. It is the structure that allows certain people to have aesthetic experiences while others just have lives. The question worth asking is not how to maintain that tension productively. It is how to build creative structures that refuse the separation as a starting premise — and what critical tools we would need to evaluate those structures on their own terms.
Kester’s correction — and its own limits
Kester’s argument cuts to something important: what art criticism calls rigor has a history, and that history is not flattering. The values treated as self-evident — the autonomous artist, the disrupted viewer, antagonism over dialogue — trace back to much older anxieties about who deserves access to aesthetic experience. When Schiller was writing about aesthetic education in the 1790s, he was also writing about a reading public he considered too vulgar to appreciate serious art. That contempt got refined over two centuries into the critical frameworks we now treat as neutral. They are not neutral. What looks like rigor is often just that anxiety, better dressed.
Kester names the result the “intellectual baroque” — a critical or creative protocol that “takes on a life of its own, operating independently of the mechanisms of social and political change necessary to realize the ideals on which it is founded.”13 His critique of Bishop is precise: she positions Hirschhorn and Sierra as practitioners of genuine antagonism, but their work still requires the artist to control the terms of the encounter completely. The experience of difference is choreographed for consumption by a viewer who can only ever be acted upon — disrupted, destabilized, unsettled — but never genuinely implicated as a co-producer of meaning. The artist remains the sovereign agent. Everyone else is audience.
This is a significant problem. When the viewer can only receive — even when what they receive is discomfort rather than pleasure — the underlying structure of the relationship remains unchanged. The community that appears in the work is still being used, however critically, to produce an effect for someone else. The exchange runs one way. Kester’s insistence that collaborative interaction produces forms of knowledge that object-based work cannot — that something genuinely new can emerge from sustained, reciprocal engagement — is a direct challenge to that structure. It is one the dominant critical frameworks have not adequately answered.
Kester’s counter-model — dialogical, durational, genuinely collaborative practice — is closer to the kind of work that deserves serious critical attention. His case studies (Park Fiction in Hamburg, Ala Plastica in Argentina, Dialogue in India, Project Row Houses in Houston) are practices embedded in specific sites of political struggle, working with rather than on their collaborators, generating knowledge through the process of making together rather than through the encounter with a finished object. The claim that matters most here: collaborative interaction produces forms of knowledge that object-based, contemplative work cannot. Art criticism has systematically devalued this knowledge because its tools were built for a different kind of practice — and a different kind of process. One that unfolds in public, in community, over time, through relationships that resist being reduced to a single authored object. That resistance is not a weakness. But for a critical apparatus built around the legible, the singular and the collectible, it looks like one. Dismissal is easier than building new tools.
But Kester has his own closed loop. His dialogical model, for all its sophistication, tends to dematerialize practice into process. The objects, installations and things produced through collective labor tend to disappear behind the account of how the interaction unfolded. And his framework, like Bishop’s, still measures itself primarily against art-world terms, even while arguing for different values within them. The communities themselves — their own frameworks for understanding what art does, their own sense of what a practice is worth — remain largely outside the analytical frame. What counts as success is still largely determined by the critic, not the community. And success itself is treated as something legible and total — a project either worked or it didn’t. But success can be a ripple. A conversation that shifts something. A relationship that holds. A smile of recognition between two people who had never previously had language for a shared experience. These are not lesser outcomes. They are simply not the ones that generate catalog essays.
remaking the terms
Art history has a feedback loop problem, and Bishop and Kester are both caught inside it. The discipline produces the language used to evaluate practice. That language is used to commission and legitimize practice. That practice becomes the object of more art historical writing, which refines the language, which shapes the next round of practice. The communities that socially engaged work claims to work with appear throughout this loop as case studies and participants — but not as people whose own frameworks for understanding what art does might matter on their own terms.
This isn’t accidental — it’s built in. The elitism in the discourse traces back, as Kester shows, to the moment when aesthetic autonomy was developed partly to protect serious art from popular judgment. That instinct never went away. It got absorbed into successive theoretical traditions until it stopped looking like a position and started looking like common sense. And embedded within it, quietly, is a set of assumptions about taste — about who has it, what it means, and what it entitles you to say. Taste here is not a genuine measure of aesthetic experience. It is the mechanism by which the expert, the insider, the person deemed “in the know,” decides whose reading of a work counts and whose doesn’t. That decision is presented as neutral judgment. It never is. It is a form of exclusion — one that rarely announces itself as such, because it doesn’t need to. The work of dismantling that is not just about better critical frameworks. It is about asking where knowledge actually lives — and who has always been producing it.
When art is understood as a living, ongoing ritual — a process that unfolds across the rhythms of daily life, from waking to sleeping — this is not a romantic claim about the beauty of everyday experience. It is an epistemological claim: that knowledge is built through folding a sheet, rearranging a room, making coffee, tending a relationship, resting. That these are not peripheral to creative practice — they are its substance. The framework question that art history keeps returning to is itself a symptom of its own limitations. It keeps asking how to evaluate this kind of work when the more urgent question is why it took so long to recognize that this was work at all. As Irene Mata shows through her work on labor and immigrant narratives, dominant frameworks consistently miss the “very complicated relationships the immigrant subject must navigate” — and it is precisely through these relationships, these “continuous conditions” of family, labor and community, that knowledge is produced and carried.14 Knowing happens in the home, the kitchen, the workshop, the street — wherever life insists on meaning.
Ukeles writing the Manifesto for Maintenance Art in 1969 and the institutional art world largely ignoring it — because to take it seriously would mean taking seriously the labor that kept their institutions running. It wasn’t until 1973 that she got a major institutional platform, at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Only after that — once the work had proven itself — was she allowed to mop the floors of the Guggenheim. The sequence matters: the work didn’t become important because institutions recognized it. The institutions eventually caught up to work that was already important. That is a different thing entirely. Freire’s literacy circles in rural Brazil, where the act of naming your world was simultaneously education, liberation and creative practice. bell hooks’s classroom as a practice of freedom.15 Tricia Hersey’s insistence that rest is resistance — not metaphorically but materially, as a refusal of the extractive logic that governs both labor and creative production. Rick Lowe’s Project Row Houses transforming a Houston neighborhood not by bringing art to a community but by insisting that the community’s own practices of care, maintenance and collective life already were art — and deserved the resources and recognition usually reserved for objects in galleries. The Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative building political education through printmaking distributed entirely outside gallery circuits.
None of these practices needed art history to legitimate them. They were legitimate because of what they did in the world. The educated audience was never the point. The living community always was.
different measures
The third and deepest disagreement with Bishop concerns the question of what we are actually measuring. Her framework, even at its most nuanced, is organized around democracy as the primary measure of a work’s political value. Does it produce genuine democratic encounter? Does it sustain antagonism rather than suppressing it? Does it refuse the comfortable consensus of the microtopia? These are real questions. But they are not the only questions, and for community-embedded, care-centered, long-durational practice, they are not even the most important ones.
Democracy as a critical framework was developed for a particular set of problems, and it remains useful for those problems — evaluating work that claims to include while actually excluding, that performs openness while consolidating authority. But democracy also carries within it a specific idea of politics, one organized around individual rights, representative structures and managed exchange. What is worth pursuing here is something broader: communal autonomy, collective flourishing, the conditions under which communities can sustain themselves and grow on their own terms. That might look democratic. It might look socialist, collective, or something that doesn’t map cleanly onto Western liberal political philosophy at all. The question is not whether the work produces democratic encounter. It is whether the work builds the conditions for people to live — and make and think and organize — more fully.
The measures worth working toward draw from a different theoretical framework: from Silvia Federici’s insistence that reproductive labor must be made visible and valued — that “our minds, bodies and emotions have all been distorted for a specific function,” and that “capital has made and makes money out of our cooking, smiling, fucking”16; from Kathi Weeks’s vision of a life no longer subordinate to work — asking, as she puts it, “what if basic income were to be seen as income not for the common production of value, but for the common reproduction of life?”17; from David Graeber’s argument that housework, care, “the making, shaping, education, nurturance, and maintenance of those who perform labor” should be understood as “the very core and essence of human creative life”18; from Matthew Crawford’s insistence that “there was more thinking going on in the bike shop than in the think tank,” and that the partition of thinking from doing “goes against the central imperative of capitalism.”19 Together, these suggest a set of criteria organized not around disruption or democratic encounter but around care, durability, the quality of relationships over time, what gets made and maintained, and whether a practice generates conditions for people to live more fully.
There is a word for this orientation that Bishop and Kester both circle without quite landing on: care. Not care as wellness. Not care as institutional branding or therapeutic self-improvement. Not the managed, packaged version that gets absorbed into mission statements and sold back to communities as a service. Care as political category, as labor, as the unglamorous work of maintaining collective life — the kind that goes uncompensated, unrecognized and untheorized precisely because valuing it would require restructuring everything. Care as what Ukeles was doing when she shook the hands of every sanitation worker in New York City over the course of Touch Sanitation (1979–80). Care as what the Museum of Care — proposed by David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky in the last months of Graeber’s life — was trying to model: institutions that do not “celebrate production of any sort but rather provide the space and means for the creation of social relationships and the imagining of entirely new forms of social relations.”20 Care as what Freire’s circles were practicing when they insisted that learning to read your own world was not preparation for something more important — it was already the thing itself.
leaving the conversation — to build a different one
The frustration with art history is not that it fails to recognize the value of socially engaged practice. It is that the terms of recognition remain organized around criteria — aesthetic autonomy, antagonism, the educated audience, the productive tension between art and life — that were built for a different set of problems and carry within them class and racial assumptions that need to be named and challenged.
The argument here is not a request to be included in that conversation on its existing terms. It is that the terms need to be remade — and that the remaking is already underway in practices and traditions that art criticism hasn’t caught up to: in Robinson’s Black radical tradition, in Federici’s feminist political economy, in the work of Lowe and Hersey and Freire and the countless artists, organizers and educators who have been building frameworks for valuing creative labor outside the biennial circuit for decades. Art criticism’s tools were built for something else. That is art criticism’s limitation.
The most important claim is this: art is not only research. It is research that critiques and remakes the terms by which knowledge itself is defined — and built. That includes unlearning. Unlearning whose voices get cited, whose labor gets valued, whose ways of knowing get taken seriously. The work this dissertation will do is not additive — it is not asking to be included in the existing conversation. It is asking what we might build if we started from different ground entirely. And it will do that from inside a practice that is already doing it, in community, over time, without waiting for permission.
Bishop asks: what kind of relations does the work produce, for whom, and why? It is a good question. A different question: what does the work sustain? What does it build, over time, in the lives of actual communities? What knowledge does it generate that could not have been generated any other way? And who gets to say whether it worked?
Those are the questions worth answering.
works cited
01 Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October, no. 110, Fall 2004, p. 67.
02 Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” p. 79.
03 Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Duke University Press, 2011), p. 64.
04 Claire Bishop, “The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents,” Artforum, February 2006, p. 180.
05 Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (Verso, 2012), p. 40.
06 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (University of North Carolina Press, 1983), p. xix.
07 Robinson, Black Marxism, p. 73.
08 Robinson, Black Marxism, p. 73.
09 Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2019), p. xv.
10 King, The Black Shoals, p. 4.
11 Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969! Artforum, 1971.
12 Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto (Little, Brown Spark, 2022), p. 131.
13 Kester, The One and the Many, p. 14.
14 Irene Mata, Domestic Negotiations: Gender, Nation and Self-Fashioning in US Mexicana and Chicana Literature and Art (Rutgers University Press, 2011), pp. 15–16.
15 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Routledge, 1994).
16 Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Power of Women Collective, 1975), p. 5.
17 Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics and Postwork Imaginaries (Duke University Press, 2011), p. 230.
18 David Graeber, “It Is Value That Brings Universes into Being,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, vol. 3, no. 2, 2013, p. 224.
19 Matthew B. Crawford, “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work,” The New Atlantis, vol. 18, Summer 2006, pp. 15, 23.
20 David Graeber and Nika Dubrovsky, “The Museum of Care: Imagining the World After the Pandemic,” Arts of the Working Class, no. 11, Apr. 2020, davidgraeber.org/articles/the-museum-of-care-reimagining-the-world-after-pandemic/.