Kill, Cassandra M B
(2024)
The hospitable institution? Researching participation in a gallery youth collective.
PhD thesis, University of Nottingham.
Abstract
In recent years, the youth collective has become a widespread feature in UK contemporary art galleries, based on sustained, regular participation, which often espouses the aim of positioning young people as institutional insiders. Within the cultural sector, participation in the gallery youth collective is often claimed to render elite institutions more inclusive, democratic, and porous, and to benefit young people professionally, personally, and politically.
This thesis interrogates what participation in one gallery youth collective – 1525 at Nottingham Contemporary – involved and did for young people and relevant gallery workers, based on collaborative ethnographic research carried out between 2019 and 2020. The research involved participant observation in gallery youth collective activities and attempts to activate participatory methods. A parallel methodological inquiry considered the affordances and limitations of participation in the research alongside the substantive inquiry. The analysis of the gallery youth collective identifies three key elements of the offer that it made to young people – routes into work in the arts, a caring community, and youth voice – and examines how they and gallery workers took up each part of the offer.
Theories of hospitality – including the work of Ahmed and Derrida and Dufourmantelle – are brought together with Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism to consider the ways which the idealised rhetoric of participation is at odds with – and often complicit in – the continued reproduction of the elite position of the host institution, in both the gallery and research methods. The cruel optimism of hospitality is used to examine the events that unfolded in both 1525 and the doctoral research when the Covid-19 pandemic arrived in the UK in spring 2020. This thesis presents the crisis of the pandemic as a rupture that unveiled the latent contradictions of trying to enact hospitality in a fraught institution in which participation was simultaneously espoused as a central activity, and - under the challenging conditions of neoliberalism - frequently positioned at the precarious edges.
This thesis argues that the precarity of the gallery youth collective, and the dominance of notions of impact and deficit in regimes of neoliberal audit, amplified the hostility of the gallery-as-host, leading participation-as-hospitality to often emerge as hierarchical domination. Nevertheless, this research shows that in the intimate collective meetings, the facilitator invoked a more radical and fluid form of collective hospitality. Taking up the work of Deleuze and Guattari allows a theorisation of how collective meetings invoked a rhizomatic mode of participation-as-hospitality that enabled young people’s divergent becomings and supported the emergence of youth voice beyond cliché.
The methodological strand of this thesis also takes up the cruel optimism of hospitality, arguing that the idealisation of participatory research methods can be similarly complicit in reinforcing and concealing the dominant position of the host (in this case the institution of academic research) rather than furthering the often-espoused emancipatory aims. However, this research suggests that taking up a more affective mode of ethnography can resist a conditional mode of hospitality which depends on participants’ assimilation into adult norms, by instead attending to young people’s everyday modes of participation as valid forms of collaborative knowledge production.
This thesis contributes to an emerging body of knowledge about the gallery youth collective and has a wider significance to other participatory contexts including universities, schools, and third and public sector organisations. The research is also significant for theoretical literatures, as it demonstrates the affordances of combining hospitality with cruel optimism and suggests the value of conceiving of hospitable relations beyond fixed, binary positions of host and guest. By surfacing the complex and contradictory hospitable relations involved in participation, this research disrupts the idealised accounts that commonly circulate in practice and academic literatures alike and illustrates that sustained critical engagement with the underlying power relations is an essential part of maximising participation’s ethical potential.
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