Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Performance Interventions)

‘thus creates, within its method of production and then at the moment of its exhibition, a momentary grouping of participating viewers’ (p. 58).

In the context of such a bonfire of social welfare’s principles and structures, what could any arts possibly do to quench the flames or, indeed, to prevent themselves inadvertently adding fuel to the fire?

Rather, he claims that it attempts to ‘create various forms of modus vivendi permitting fairer social relations’ (p. 46) in what he terms ‘everyday micro-utopias’ (p. 31).

I believe in and want social engagement because people are, need to be and benefit from being socially interdependent.

Who gets to do what, where, when and how in this cultural practice, and how does this affect people? What are this practice’s relationships to social engagement, communication, social justice, equality and democracy; how might it contribute to or weaken them? If it invites participation, who can participate and on what terms? What is the quality of

political ideologies such as neoliberalism are not principally imposed through top-down government ‘controls’, but rather through ‘governmentality’ – the dissemination of knowledge that people internalize so that they become self-governing

these artworks ‘construct models of sociability suitable for producing human relations, the same way an architecture literally “produces” the itineraries of those presiding in it’ (p. 70).

Nicolas Bourriaud has famously termed socially ‘relational’ (Bourriaud, 2002)

– social engagement and equality of opportunity – are, for me, two of its most precious possibilities.