Warning: Participation in the Museum of the Commons

Since 1999, as part of his long-standing project On Translation: Warning, the artist Antoni Muntadas has been displaying a simple sentence on ephemeral publications such as postcards, flyers and billboards in public places, set in white capitals on a red background: ‘WARNING: PERCEPTION REQUIRES INVOLVEMENT’.

This warning, which could be read as an invitation, a statement of intent, an exhortation or even a threat, alerts us to the mechanisms that are present in all forms of communication, with a particular emphasis on those triggered by works of art. It also hints at the strategies employed in media and advertising for the benefit of the market and of politics as spectacle. In our current social and cultural context, passivity appears to be encouraged in uncritical recipients by the proliferation and mass reproduction of images, consumed via endless scrolling. As Andrea Soto Calderón explains in her book La performatividad de las imágenes (2020), the paradoxical effect of living in a world saturated by images is a drastic reduction in our ability to observe attentively. From this perspective, the real issue with the exponential growth of image production-and-perception in today’s society is the steep decline in the power of the image: a kind of erasure through excess. Against this backdrop, the message conveyed by Muntadas’s On Translation: Warning is like a snap of the fingers that breaks the spell, draws us out of our perceptive lethargy and revives the possibility that we may actively participate in the process of perception. Warning: involvement is essential for true perception.

The aesthetic regime of perception that is produced by the excessive proliferation of images is situated within broader social dynamics. Apathy and disaffection are fuelling a gradual dismantling of collective gathering spaces and unravelling community networks at different levels. Faced with this trend towards the disintegration of communities in modern-day societies, numerous responses have emerged from the arts sector as part of what Claire Bishop terms the ‘social turn’ – an artistic shift towards community in which artists have evolved from their traditional position as producers of artworks to become generators of situations. Here, the idea of an artwork as an object is replaced by that of the artwork as a project or process with blurred boundaries, in which spectators are invited to participate. Bishop traces the genealogy of this social turn in the arts in her book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (2012), which covers a variety of movements and practices ranging from the Situationist International to performances by Graciela Carnevale and Oscar Masotta during the Argentinian dictatorship, the mass performances by the Proletkult Theatre in the early days of the Soviet Union, the dissident ceremonies and demonstrations held by Milan Knížák in 1960s Slovakia, and Augusto Boal’s influential Theatre of the Oppressed. It also includes more recent performative practices, such as those of Dora García, among many others. In the words of Jacques Rancière, these practices appeal to an emancipated spectator, and challenge, often radically, the idea that art is to be passively received. Whether we like it or not, in these practices, perception and involvement are one and the same.

In 2023, the Museo Reina Sofía was visited by a total of 2,530,560 people. Would it be correct to say that all these visitors were ‘participants’ in the museum? At the Education Department, we would be overjoyed to learn that many of them had heeded Muntadas’s exhortation as they discovered the work of Guatemalan artist Margarita Azurdia, watched one of Angela Melitopoulos’s video installations or marvelled at Ángeles Santos’s impressive painting A World (1929). We like to believe that, even amid the trend towards indiscriminate image consumption described earlier, many of these people played an active part in the communication loop established by artworks, closing a circle left open by the artists, through their presence and undivided attention. Let us hope that, at the very least, the experience offered by the museum helps to transform the ways in which they observe, listen, perceive and pay attention, are present. With this in mind, the Education Department is keen for large numbers of people to feel invited to take part, as the title of this publication suggests, in this radical practice of perception.

The Museo Reina Sofía’s ‘Team of Teams’ project takes up an old conversation topic around the idea of the audience at cultural institutions that has been raised by successive L’Internationale programmes. As The Constituent Museum: Constellations of Knowledge, Politics and Mediation (2018) explains, the term ‘constituencies’ offers a way of describing the relationship between institutions and their interlocutors that transcends the notion of the visitor and casts doubt on the use of other terms such as ‘audience’ and ‘user’. It was during the Our Many Europes programme (2018–22) that the term ‘constituencies’ began to be more widely discussed and its potential and limitations analysed, as in publications like FROM/TO: Letters From/To the Constituent Museum (2022).

In this new cycle for L’Internationale, with the Museum of the Commons programme (2023–26) the Museo Reina Sofía is exploring the idea of participation through public programmes involving networks, schools and educational resources, of which this publication, Taking Part: A Guide to Participatory Tools and Techniques, is one. Intended as a simple guide, written by political scientist Jorge Gaupp, advisor to the Museo Reina Sofía’s Study Centre, it begins with an introductory essay that compiles recent arguments and research on the evolutionary relevance of cooperation and participation in humans, contrasting them with ideas and movements that promote competition and individualism as drivers of progress. The bulk of the publication features an extensive range of carefully chosen activities and techniques which have been updated and classified to encourage varying degrees of participation among all kinds of groups, from students of any age and level of education, formal or informal, to activist collectives, groups of adults, study groups and institutional groups, among others. It draws on such varied sources as social activism, corporate management, education, institutional governance and theatre.

We understand participation as a muscle, trained through gestures as simple as forming a circle and holding hands, gazing into the eyes of someone we have just met or handling conflict through role play. We are aware that through such simple (albeit often unwittingly complex) actions – actions that bring people together – a more participatory, democratic society can emerge. Only under these conditions (and through empowered outreach strategies) will there be a place for art that we feel part of, that we want to be part of and to take part in.