Abstract/Summary

This paper offers a feminist critique of ‘participatory practice’, exemplified here by Tino Sehgal, Renzo Martens and Santiago Sierra, as a practice which objectifies people-as-artistic-material under the guise of the production of empathy, experience, emotion and intersubjectivity. I argue that masculinised participatory practice be framed as 'melancholic' in that it is a terminal mourning for the lost art object of 1968, which fails to recognise this loss, thus destroying itself as art dissolves into capitalist life. I suggest that resistance to this process might happen at the site of the body-as-material, in the voice and actions of the worker-participant who constitutes the artwork.