‘Who, me?’ 

‘Yes, we were already expecting you.’ 

‘When I invite people to take part in some of my propositions, what am I offering them and what is expected from them, from me, for me, for them?’ This should be a basic question addressed to participatory processes, which would help to indicate more precisely how this or that project is building the image of the artist and its other, the so-called ‘participant’. There was a time when artists did not conceive of their practice as a gesture towards someone else: it was enough that the art piece had been completed and had its internal aspects resolved. There wasn’t even space for interpretation: before modernism, the ‘reading’ of the piece pointed to a non-ambiguous narrative. During modernism, however, the structure itself of artistic language guaranteed that the artwork would function correctly by pointing to the future, bringing forward advanced critical topics. But somehow in the mid-1950s a shift occurred — towards a sort of ‘participatory condition’ of contemporary society — that was meant to de-centre the artistic gesture and add a new role into the art system or circuit: that of the active participator, a figure of otherness who would not only become more and more relevant for art processes but would also decisively influence the shift from critical to curatorial practices at the end of the twentieth century. 

Yes, Marcel Duchamp considered that the reception of his work would influence its meaning, but he was more concerned about the impact that an anonymous and general mass of people (that is, an ‘audience’) would have on his place in history. He did not write specifically on the production