Flexible, shaky form. “Fatality of the commentary” and socially engaged art.
Flexible, shaky form. “Fatality of the commentary” and socially engaged art.

Summary/Abstract: The article has analyzed the methodological proposals for exploring the history of the art of social involvement, which Claire Bishop puts in her book Artificial Hells. According to this Anglo-American critic and art historian, a key role in writing the history of this type of artistic activity can play the notion of form. In its view, this concept allows for differentiated components of participatory actions and often contradictory tendencies which they reveal. This article discusses the possibility of analyzing participative activities using the notion of form, and also argues that using the notion of form in such a context can lead to completely different results than assumed by Claire Bishop: blurring the structure of a work of art and shifting the accent from the effectiveness of such actions to building their meaning and determining the strength of their impact only at the level of theory.

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