ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
Lebel pushed a pram draped in the French flag weeping ‘Baby, my baby!’
before impersonating a robotic Nazi; an unknown woman got undressed
and climbed into a hammock; three others (including Erró) began frenetically
dancing; the climax was Lebel and several others removing their
clothes and making an ‘action painting’ in which Lebel leapt across the
canvas and out of the gallery shouting ‘Heil art! Heil sex!’ Lebel later
described this Happening as
reactive, but dialectically: reversing the very terms of anxiety, a bit like a
voodoo rite . . . I took consumer society and returned it, like a bag with
all its crap: nuclear technology, war (1962, it was the end of the Algerian
war), exploitation, misery, racism, pop fans, advertising, porno, cars,
sport, the serious threat of a generalised nuclear conflict (the Cuban
Missile Crisis and Soviet missiles). 72
With its overt references to consumer society, and to sexual and political
taboos, Lebel’s work could not be more different from the average
Happening by US artists at this time; it was much closer to the Artaudian
sensibilities of The Living Theatre, then touring Europe in
self- imposed exile from New York. 73 In both Lebel’s events and those
Jean-Jacques Lebel, To Exorcise the Spirit of Catastrophe, 1962
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