Investigating the Effects of Participatory Art on the Environment Based on Mikhail Bakhtin`s View

Participatory Art is an approach to making art that engages public participation in the creative process, and observers of the work. This type of art is incomplete without audiences' physical interaction. The activities of participatory art challenge the dominant form of making art, in which a small class of professional artists makes the art while the public takes on the role of passive observer or consumer. Participatory art requires the artists either not to be present, or that they somehow can recede far enough to become equal with the participants. Participatory art creates a dynamic collaboration between the artist, the audience, and their environment. This kind of art is not just something that audiences stand and look at. The fact is that the aim of the artist is that the audiences take part in the process of making art to create and learn more and more. It is important to mention that participatory art exists under a variety of overlapping headings, including interactive, relational, cooperative, activist, dialogical, and community-based art. In some cases, participation by a range of people creates an artwork, in others the participatory action is itself described as the art. Participation in the collective creation of art is not new. Across the globe, throughout recorded history people have participated in the creation of art from traditional music and dance to community festivals to mural arts. Today, the value of participatory art is measured by its effects on a specific society or around the world. Therefore, the artists of participatory art try to find out the suitable solutions to improve the important problems of societies by attractive interesting ways and new artistic ideas. Today, the artistic team consisting of artists and participants has started an effective movement to decrease the difficulties of the environment too. At present, one of the important issues to attract the attention of many different groups of society such as artists is environmental problems. In this regard, artists attempt to overcome the challenges of environmental difficulties by unique and new methods, including participants' voices and their discourse. Dialogue is a written or spoken conversational exchange between two or more people, and a literary and theatrical form that depicts such an exchange. Dialogue and polyphony which include a diversity of simultaneous points of view and voices are relevant to the thought of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895- 1975). Mikhail Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language. His writings, on a variety of subjects, inspired scholars working in many different traditions (Marxism, Semiotics, Structuralism, Religious Criticism) and disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, and psychology. Bakhtin's communication legacy reaches beyond rhetoric, social constructionism, and semiotics as he has been called the philosopher of human communication. Bakhtin concentrates heavily on language and its general use. Bakhtin's theories on dialogism influence interpersonal communication research, and dialogism represents a methodological turn towards the reality of communication, in all its many language forms. To understand Bakhtin as a communication scholar, it is important to recognize the features of dialogue. For Bakhtin, the social world is also made up of multiple voices, perspectives, and subjective ‘worlds’. To exist is to engage in dialogue, and dialogue must not come to an end. According to Bakhtin`s perspective, dialogue does not occur between fixed positions or subjects. People are also transformed through dialogue, fusing with parts of the other’s discourse. The other’s response can change everything in one’s own consciousness or perspective. Dialogue can produce a decisive reply which produces actual changes. In addition to dialogism, he is known for a series of concepts that have been used and adapted in many disciplines: the carnivalesque, the chronotope, and heteroglossia. Carnivalization is a term used by Bakhtin to describe the techniques Dostoevsky uses to disarm this increasingly ubiquitous enemy and make true intersubjective dialogue possible. The "carnival sense of the world", a way of thinking and experiencing that Bakhtin identifies in ancient and medieval carnival traditions, has been transposed into a literary tradition that reaches its peak in Dostoevsky's novels. The concept suggests an ethos where normal hierarchies, social roles, proper behaviors, and assumed truths are subverted in favor of the "joyful relativity" of free participation in the festival. Carnival, through its temporary dissolution or reversal of conventions, generates the 'threshold' situations where disparate individuals come together and express themselves on an equal footing, without the oppressive constraints of social objectification: the usual preordained hierarchy of persons and values becomes an occasion for laughter, its absence an opportunity for creative interaction. In carnival, "opposites come together, look at one another, are reflected in one another, know and understand one another. Dostoevsky's art: love and hate, faith and atheism, loftiness and degradation, love of life and self-destruction, purity and vice, etc. Everything in his world lives on the very border of its opposite. According to Bakhtin’s opinion, Dostoevsky was the creator of the polyphonic novel, and it was a fundamentally new genre that could not be analyzed according to preconceived frameworks and schema that might be useful for other manifestations of the European novel. Dostoevsky does not describe characters and contrives plot within the context of a single authorial reality: rather his function as the author is to illuminate the self-consciousness of the characters so that each participates on their terms, in their voice, according to their ideas about themselves and the world. Bakhtin calls this multi-voiced reality "polyphony": a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices. Later he defines it as "the event of interaction between autonomous and internally unfinalized consciousnesses. On the other hand, Polyphony in literature is the consequence of a dialogic sense of truth in combination with the special authorial position that makes possible the realization of that sense of truth on the page. Bakhtin reads Dostoevsky’s work as containing many different voices, unmerged into a single perspective, and not subordinated to the voice of the author. Each of these voices has its perspective, its validity, and its narrative weight within the novel. Dostoevsky’s ‘dialogical principle’ is counterpoised to the ‘monologue’ (single-thought discourse; also termed ‘homophony’ – single-voice) characteristic of traditional writing and thought. In the monologue, one transcendental perspective or consciousness integrates the entire field, and thus integrates all the signifying practices, ideologies, and desires that are deemed significant. Anything irrelevant to this perspective is deemed superfluous or irrelevant in general. This investigation studies the effectiveness of participatory art on the environment and seeks to answer this question: How the participatory art can improve the challenges of the environment by diverse voices of audiences and their discourses?The research method is descriptive-analytical. The data collected by library and internet resources. Since Bakhtin`s view is focused on Dialogue and Polyphony Heteroglossia, in this article the analysis of participatory art is based on Bakhtin`s ideas. The purpose of this article is to investigate the effectiveness of participatory art in improving environmental challenges. In this regard, the stages of specific participatory art activities that took place in Portugal (2013) were selected to survey based on Bakhtin`s views. Adapting Bakhtin`s ideas with the mentioned participatory art activities show that in different stages of an audience-centered participatory art process, the artist can use the local initiatives, simple actions, without using computer-centric patterns. Participatory art by providing equal opportunities allows participants to talk freely and express their ideas and experiences concerning the place where they live. Expressing the features of a particular place and recalling its favorable past conditions, cause to increase participants' understanding of the place. Therefore, in an appropriate atmosphere by dialogue, audiences can suggest useful solutions to solve the environmental challenges.