Participatory art emerged in the early twentieth century as part of a movement to shift focus from the artist onto the audience, thus democratizing the production of art and subverting hierarchical binaries of Western canonical art thinking. The early drivers of this transformational artistic practice were the Futurists and the Dadaists, who performed pieces which encouraged audience participation and embraced chance, creating in a collaborative and communal way. Such performances were central to the programming at the infamous Cabaret Voltaire, as well as in the unfolding of what we now recognise to be modern art throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries. Central to the concept of participatory art is the idea of the ‘activated’ viewer, as put forward by Walter Benjamin in his seminal text ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1935). In this theory, Benjamin argues that when viewers of art achieve a sense of agency through contributing to a work of art, they will go on to become activated political agents, capable of independent, critical thought. This idea underpins the consistent deployment of participatory art in politically charged artworks, such as Entelechy Art’s 2016 performance piece ‘Bed’, which addressed the growing epidemic of loneliness by encouraging members of the public to speak with elderly performers who lay on beds in the middle of busy shopping streets. The confronting nature of such a work fits well with the original intent of the Futurist performers: to disrupt, agitate and provoke the public. 

While participatory art has often been held up as the epitome of Western democracy, community and equality, criticism of the practice is plentiful. In 2006, Claire Bishop outlined her thorough opposition to contemporary discourse surrounding participatory art, referencing what she believed to be a lapse in aesthetic judgement in favour of ‘Christian’ ethics of collaboration which interrupt the process by which interesting art can be made (Bishop, 2006). In ‘The Gestures of Participatory Art’ (2018), Sruti Bala describes participation in art as a concept which, when explored, seems inadequate, something that she speculates is due to its being misused, unmoored, and co-opted (Bala, 2018). This idea of participatory art seeming inadequate as both cause and effect of its co-option will form the basis of my argument. In this essay I will focus on public art as a subsection of participatory art, and the ways in which the aesthetics of community activism and outreach which lie at the centre of participatory art have been hijacked. I will focus my attention on Antony Gormley’s 1998 public sculpture ‘The Angel of the North’ as a case study in my assessment of modern-day participatory art. I will explore the influence of site, context, and funding on Gormley’s project and the ramifications that this has for community art groups. 

 Antony Gormley’s ‘Angel of the North’ has been touted as an icon of Great Britain and is a widely recognised landmark of the North. Commissioned by Gateshead Council in 1994, Gormley’s work is placed alongside the A1 motorway, dominating the landscape as the 66 foot sculpture towers above the petrol-fuelled blur of metal rushing between North and South. The fact of these geographical poles is made central in Gormley’s steel Angel, evident in its self-proclaimed Northern-ness. Site plays a significant role in the reception, usage, and recognition of public art. The Angel was carefully constructed to withstand its location; the Angel’s 177-feet-wide wings are designed to withstand 100 mph winds coursing off the motorway. While some pieces of public art such as George Rhoads’ ‘42ndStreet Ballroom’ (1983) invite direct public interaction (Rhoads’ piece relies on the movement of its parts to create its signature sound), Gormley’s Angel is built for stillness, stoic and absolute against the wide, flat sky. However, the protruding ribs and curving legs lend the sculpture a tactility which invites viewers to reach out and touch. Despite its figuration, this Angel does not fly; instead, it is anchored into the ground by 70 feet of concrete pylons which protrude into a disused mine, keeping the Angel moored to its hilltop base. While it is structurally reassuring that the Angel cannot move, this lends a sense of redundancy to the Angel, a tired and unhelpful characteristic to attach to a symbol of the North. Visitors can frequently be found sitting at the Angel’s feet, having a picnic, or using the site to break up a long journey. However, the now-infamous Gateshead hill has only recently been transformed into a recreational site. In a 2014 Guardian article, Gormley described the ‘poetic resonance’ of the Angel’s proximity to the disused mine below, a somewhat self-gratifying statement on the part of the artist. Although the Angel does not function as participatory through being in motion, it is fully realised by the fact of its site and its audience, encouraging members of the public to interact with it. Most immediately, viewers are allowed to touch the sculpture, inviting a level of intimacy often not allowed in more traditional art settings. The steel from which the sculpture is made is a weathering alloy which develops a stable, protective rust as it is exposed to the elements. This sculpture-come-monument is both moulded for and by its Northern landscape, determinedly inserted into the land and designed for longevity. 

 Deborah Cherry writes of the mnemonic function of public art, which she says imbues public spaces with ‘narratives of nation’ (Cherry, 2006) as well as becoming markers of place. ‘The Angel of the North’ functions within this framework as the subject to many photographs and the background to many selfies, proof that one was once there, as well as an active participant in the iconography of the English landscape. This monumental steel form has become not only a marker of place but a symbol of the North, its rusty exterior evoking the perceived hardy and industrial Northern spirit, resilient with coal-coloured blood, staring ahead with gritted teeth as it is battered by winds blowing from the South. Gormley has proclaimed that his Angel is symbolic of the struggling economy of the North as it is reborn after decades of recession, austerity, and underfunding. In creating a ‘symbol’ built on this paternalistic attitude, Gormley’s art participates in saviour narratives which portray the North as a victim in need of a protagonist (McKendrick et al, 2008). The Angel’s outstretched wings have been described as a welcome embrace for those travelling up the A1, a warm hug from Northern mam, putting a brew in your hand as she tells you to come in from the cold, pet. In her exploration of public monuments, Cherry goes on to explore the ways in which ‘actual and imaginary communities’ share and shape the landscapes within which such art exists (Cherry, 2006). Gormley’s plaque reveals his romanticised notions of the ‘community’ that he feels entitled to represent, comparing the hill to a megalithic mound beneath which ‘men used to work in the dark’, the antithesis to the sky which Gormley’s Angel is pinned against. 

 When thinking about artists’ relationships to Cherry’s concept of the imagined community, elements of the biographical approach become useful. While a formalist approach may disregard Gormley’s personal background, opting instead to focus on the aesthetic elements of his Angel, as Gormley so explicitly pulls our attention to the history of the site upon which he erected his Angel, he demonstrates a willingness to be holistic in his contextual thinking. Born in Hampstead Garden Suburb before boarding at the exclusive Ampleforth College in Yorkshire, Gormley’s ability to position himself as a bard of the North (or, more specifically, of Northern working-class communities) is questionable. Gormley has constructed an image of the North from a highly privileged and Southern perspective. Peering from below at something that he experiences from the centre (paradoxically making him an outsider in the North), Gormley takes up literal space in a landscape that, for so many, represents much more than an opportunity to become part of a historical narrative. His likening of the disused mine to a ‘megalithic mound’ is historicising and highly subjective, inching the miner’s strikes of merely four decades ago into pre-history, removing the human aspect of this struggle and instead using it to imbue his artwork with meaning. Gormley’s Angel was constructed by (unnamed) steelworkers in Hartlepool and now performs as a symbol of hope. However, one must only look beneath the surface to see the mine which Gormley gazes at ideologically from his plaque filled in with concrete and grout; if the Angel adorns the tomb of a violent struggle, then Gormley has sealed the grave below.

 Gormley’s piece of participatory art is contradictory in several tacit and explicit ways. Alongside his decision to take part in the mapping of disused mines that once stood as feeders of their respective communities, many of which have experienced economic difficulties since the enforced closure of said mines, Gormley’s Angel also participates in a cycle of funding allocation which perpetuates the geographical economic inequalities that Gormley claims to stand against. This is a crucial area where Gormley’s Angel deepens as a performative and insincere gesture, appropriating the actions and aesthetics of community activism to uphold the status quo. Zarina Muhammad explores the chasms between allocation of public funds and demographics, using the National Lottery Community Fund (the NLCF) as an example. She explains how, although most of the fund’s capital originates outside of London, the majority of the fund is spent inside London (Muhammad, 2019). ‘The Angel of the North’ cost £1 million in total, of which £584,000 was funded by the NLCF. The decision to award such a high-profile commission to a London-born and (at the time) London-based artist is symptomatic of the London-centric funding allocation which has kept the Capital watertight in its status as the centre of the Arts in the UK. Although it is important to recognise the viable argument that projects such as ‘The Angel of the North’ bring money and attention to formerly ignored areas such as Gateshead, it is equally as important to critically assess the allocation and expenditure of such vast amounts. 

 Participatory art has a long and meaningful association with community art groups, with one example being the Liverpool-based Black-E group, one of the UK’s oldest community arts projects. In 1997, ‘Access is a State of Mind’ was an exhibition conceived by Audrey Melville Barker at the Black-E Gallery. The show focussed on accessibility for neuro-diverse and disabled visitors in celebration of ramps being installed at the gallery’s entrance. The exhibition featured a series of rooms titled ‘Sight’, ‘Hear’, ‘Touch’, ‘Taste’ and ‘Smell’ which invited visitors to interact with installations involving herbs, bells and feathers being suspended from the ceiling to encourage participants to experience their unique relationship with their senses. In 2009, the Black-E arts centre received £50,000 in Heritage Lottery Funding for the preservation of their 40 year archive in recognition of their historic impact as well as the contribution they have made in their consistent support of new talent. Bearing such allocation of Lottery funding in mind, Muhammad references the 2017 writing of Morgan Quaintance on what he calls ‘the New Conservatism’. In this piece, Quaintance addresses the growing trend of large organisations encroaching upon (and subsequently dominating) the community arts sector’s ‘participatory territory’ through the expropriation of learning initiatives and outreach programmes (Quaintance, 2017 via Muhammad, 2019), funded by the National Lottery. As large organisations and big-name artists are awarded sizable chunks of funding, smaller organisations (which were once foundational to the arts sector) are bypassed. 

 Thinking about Gormley’s Angel, the £500,000 funding which contributed to the project could have funded the projects of 10 community art centres such as the Black-E Gallery, who have been using participatory art as a medium of social engagement for decades. This is not to argue that large scale arts projects should not receive public funding, but rather to develop and problematise Gormley’s relationship with his imagined post-industrial Northern community, who he attempts to address through his Angel. An example of an effective and meaningful relationship between artists and the community can be found in the Newcastle based Amber Collective. Founded in 1968, the film and photography collective sought to document working class communities in the North East of England, at a time which saw massive social and developmental upheaval in the area. As part of their efforts to work with and alongside the community, in 1986 the Amber Collective bought a pub in North Shields, ‘The New Clarendon’, as part of their commitment to be productive members of the community who allowed the Collective to document their lives. Amber Collective is still active, holding an extremely valuable archive of over forty-years’ worth of documentation, detailing the lives of working-class communities in the North East. Amber Collective serves as a good template for the representation of communities, in their case a real community with whom they still exist in close proximity. Antony Gormley’s efforts to resonate with an imagined working-class Northern community fall flat when compared with the work of community art groups who create a holistic participatory art practice, from conception to after-life. While Black-E and Amber Collective use their positions within their communities to interact and participate in local culture and life, Gormley creates an Angel from afar, static and anchored to the past. 

 Participatory art has presented an opportunity for collaboration, activism, and subversion for over a century, since the Futurists set out to scandalise and agitate their spectators in hope of eliciting a response, a sentiment that Claire Bishop cites in her scathing take down of modern discourse surrounding participatory art. Conversely, I do not subscribe to the thought that art must agitate in order to make a statement of value. As seen in the examples of the Black-E arts group and the Amber Collective, participatory art has been harnessed by community art groups to engage and create worthwhile bonds with those for whom they seek to create representation. Bearing in mind Bala’s previous proposal that participatory art has become inadequate due to it being ‘unmoored’ in a modern world, Gormley’s attempt at representing a community with whom he makes little effort to connect is saturated with similar feelings of dissatisfaction. Despite the sculpture being tethered to the Northern landscape by its deep concrete foundations, ‘The Angel of the North’ is an example of one-dimensional participatory art. Although the Angel sits in the heartland of Northern England’s rural space, it participates in a framework of London-centrism which sees resources and funding flowing back down the A1, an act of compliance dressed up as subversion.