The House of Dust by Alison Knowles
INHABITED BY PEOPLE FROM MANY WALKS OF LIFE
Joshua Schwebel
Audience Engagement
2017, 50 interventions over 10 weeks
Intervention, administrative protocol, minimum wage
Joshua Schwebel examined the participatory dimension of Alison Knowles’ work (and of Fluxus in general), paying particular attention to the notion of audience activation. He assembled a workforce of activators, whom he paid to regularly visit the exhibition and to “activate” the works of other artists in the exhibition that required audience participation. By way of this intervention, these workers underlined a social shift from the 1960s, where public participation constituted a radical and utopic proposal, to our current time, in which a central aspect of austerity neoliberal politics is to delegate labour to consumers. A project developed within the Art by Translation program.