RA

As Bishop puts it the term RA is applied to work that is openened and resistant to closure. An interactive “work-in-progress” rather than a completed object. Artworks seem to be based on a system of ideas, as something ideological rather than collection-based.
Instead of the interpretations of the artwork being open to continual reassessment, the work of art itself has become the constant flux. However my main concern with RA, and Bishop touches on this as well, is that it seems to set up social division of labour as a model for producing socialised art. The production of art becomes the subject and the participants become the creators. Yet more often then not these participants are ‘unwillingly’ lead into this circumstance of individual will becoming subordinate to the identity of the whole, with the artist (individually) still holding the symbolic capital - authorship. I see this as happening in works like that of Mark Asher.
While this alone is no real defect it seems that the ‘model’ in itself can be problematic. If RA is meant to be a spontaneous convergence of intellectual and ‘manual’ labouring doesn’t the model lend to imitation rather than autonomy. In Camera Lucida R. Barthes speaks the nature of constantly mimicking one’s self in front of a camera - of acting ‘appropriately’, as one should. For if one was aware of the goings on of the RA model and therefore not an ‘unwillingly’ participant does that take from it’s spontaneity? (if one is already aware of how to act)
Yet on the other hand, without this ‘model’ of post-aesthetic art production how can RA possibily define itself? It has to acknowledge itself as art before it can define itself as outside of art.