Practices of Fluid Authority: Participatory Art and Creative Audience Engagement

"Practices of Fluid Authority" is a creative and scholarly research project examining a range of participatory art practices to locate works that invite audiences to experience creativity and practice authorship. Whereas contemporary discussions of participation and audience engagement often occur in the shadow of Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics and assume that participation is a means for fostering greater conviviality, sociability and democratic engagement, Fluid Authority suggests that participation may be a means to de-mystify the creative process and blur the stable distinctions between artists and audiences. Reflecting upon art history, art theory and contemporary creative practice, the thesis incorporates case studies that illustrate that Fluid Authority is a recuperative art form that revisits and reconstitutes past works as the "medium" for audiences to experience creative engagement.;To understand how such participatory art practices function, the "legacy" of Allan Kaprow is introduced. While Kaprow was not specifically interested in introducing his audiences to creativity, his early works established a series of situations that invited audience participation and offered creative experiences to those that executed his works. To understand how his and other past artworks might be available for re-use, the thesis also introduces the idea of recuperative art practice. While recuperation is important to Fluid Authority, the thesis examines a range of overlapping and conflicting motivations that are evident in the practice, including the desire to preserve works that are difficult to archive and the hope to re-animate the criticality of past works.;By looking to such examples as David Khang's "citational" performance practice, The Patch Project organized by TRUCK Contemporary Art in Calgary and the "Community Mapping Project" Imaginary Ordinary, the thesis identifies a form of recuperation that views past works as retrievable material that may be utilized as a "medium" for new creative ventures. Extrapolating from these creative examples, the thesis concludes with an account of my own efforts to develop works that demonstrate Fluid Authority by revisiting and revising past creative precedents to serve as the basis for new works that facilitate the audience's participation and experience of creativity.