The aim of our article is to reflect upon intervention as a threshold where art and action research meet. For this, we will relate calls to apply the capacity of the performing arts to the social sciences to examples of neo-avant-garde art practices which show a renewed interest in (intervening into) the everyday production of public space. We recount and analyze two vignettes of artistic interventions to illustrate the politico-aesthetic power of art to interfere with how the social is assembled and to provoke new constellations of what is visible and sayable. Such experimental forms of engaging with the public raise the issue of a minoritarian politics of participation. Rather than being just another tool in the researcher’s toolkit, taking into account these practices can illustrate and inform certain dimensions of what could be called performative action research.