ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
Jean-Jacques Lebel, 120 Minutes Dedicated to the Divine Marquis, 1965.
The spanked rendition of ‘La Marseillaise’.
to physically activate the viewing subject and expand their perception. Lebel,
by contrast, refuses to recognise the performer/ audience distinction:
I never envisaged a separation between artist and audience. I never
accepted some of the main divisions that the dominant culture has driven
into our brains with sledgehammers. I don’t believe those divisions exist.
For instance, the division between politics and art, between revolution and
creation (the creation of artworks, not creation in a religious sense), and
the object and the subject . . . There is no frontier between art and life. 77
As such, Lebel maintains that everyone present at a Happening, be they on
stage or in the audience, was a participant in a collectively produced mythic
experience. The artist is a dispositif through which people’s ‘desires and
hopes and languages and impulses merge into one collective voice’, and
Lebel draws a direct analogy between this and what Félix Guattari referred
to an ‘agencement collectif d’énonciation’. 78 Lebel places this radical blurring
in direct contrast to a ‘capitalistic’ organisation of ideas in society, where
‘everything is organised like a department store’; to undo this rational
organisation and expedient control he turned to sexual abandonment and
hallucinogenic drugs to break down the barrier between subject and object,
creating a space of ‘both/ and’ and ‘neither/ nor’. 79
The most extreme instance of this approach was the Happening 120
minutes dédiées au divin marquis (120 Minutes Dedicated to the Divine
98