Viewers of contemporary art are often invited to involve themselves actively in artworks, by entering installations, touching objects, performing instructions or clicking on interactive websites. Why have artists sought to engage spectators in these new forms of participation? In what ways does active participation affect the viewer's experience and the status of the artwork? Spanning a range of practices including kinetic art, happenings, environments, performance, installations, relational and new media art from the 1950s to the present, this critical anthology sheds light on the history and specificity of artworks that only come to life when you - the viewer - are invited to 'do it yourself.'

Rather than a specialist topic in the history of twentieth- and twenty-first century art, the 'do-it-yourself' artwork raises broader issues concerning the role of the viewer in art, the status of the artwork and the socio-political relations between art and its contexts.

Anna Dezeuze: What the do-it-yourself artwork can do for you
PART I: PARTICIPATION IN CONTEXT
Anna Dezeuze: "Open work," "do-it-yourself artwork," and bricolage
Judith Rodenbeck: "creative acts of consumption" or, death in Venice
Arnauld Pierre: Instability: the visual/bodily perception of space in kinetic environments
Guy Brett: 3 Pioneers
PART II: PERFORMING PARTICIPATION
Catherine Wood: The rules of engagement: Displaced figuration in Robert Morris's sculpture
Frazer Ward: Marina Abramovic: Approaching zero
Amelia Jones: Space, body and the self in the work of Bruce Nauman
Janet Kraynak: Tiravanija's liability
Jennifer Gonzalez: the face and the public: Race, secrecy and digital art practice
PART III: ANALYSING PARTICIPATION
Anna Dezeuze: Play, ritual and politics: Transitional artworks in the 1960s
Christian Kravagna: Working on the community: Models of participatory practice
Miwon Kwon: Exchange and reciprocity in some art of the 1960s and after
Claire Bishop: Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics
Beryl Graham: What kind of participative system? Critical vocabularies from new media art
Index