Thirteenth International Conference on The Arts in Society

Abstract

This paper discusses a recent project (‘Speak to the Earth and It Will Tell You’) by artist Jeremy Deller, which was presented at Skulptur Projekte 2017. It consisted of a ten-year collaboration with local gardeners, who recorded their social and horticultural activities in diaries, which were then presented in a gardener’s cabin. Following art historian Claire Bishop’s call to judge participatory projects aesthetically, rather than ethically or instrumentally (aesthetics, here, is taken in the Rancièrian sense of pertaining to the perceptual configuration of society), this paper asks if the ideas and effects generated in this project for participants viewers succeed in disrupting prevailing social constructions of time, space and social activities. Based on a close reading of the work and on local press accounts, I argue that the work manages to construct an anachronistic spatio-temporal environment, where time is slow, reliable and diachronic and space presents itself as culturally and architecturally homogeneous. By so doing, the project negates prevailing forms of experience, namely the precarity, heterogeneity and virtualization of contemporary life. These findings contribute to the debate regarding the the political potential of participatory art by broadening the scope of available aesthetico-political strategies. They also add to the discussion on the political (in)efficacy of anachronisms in art, by suggesting that in a our hectic, heterogeneous present, it is the reenactment of past ‘manners of beings’, rather than past contents, that might prove more disruptive—a suggestion consistent with Rancière’s claim that art “is political insofar as it frames a specific space-time sensorium.”