ARTIFICIAL HELLS

je participe, tu participes, il participe
Marquis), performed on 4 April 1966, and which advanced territory already
broached in Lebel’s scandalous Déchirex at the American Center in 1965. 80
120 minutes dédiées au divin marquis took place in the Théâtre de la Chimère,
located at 42 rue Fontaine – the building in which André Breton lived – and
seemed a conscious provocation to the Surrealist writer (who had ejected
Lebel from the Surrealist group in 1960). The event took its lead from the
recent censorship of the film La Religieuse (dir. Jacques Rivette, 1966) and of
the publication of the Marquis de Sade’s Oeuvres Complètes. Around 400
people entered the building via the stage door (the same entrance that Breton
used to enter his apartment), a wry reference to Sade’s delight in the ‘back
passage’; they were welcomed by nude women acting as customs officers
who took their fingerprints before allowing them to pass through a narrow
corridor hung with bloody fresh meat (‘a return to the maternal belly’).
Potentially smeared in blood, viewers entered the theatre directly onto the
stage, where the action was taking place, but could also descend into the
auditorium, from which all seats had been removed. 81 Twelve sequences
were staged, which served as the point of departure for improvisations. These
included a naked soprano, Shirley Goldfarb, descending from the rafters,
singing excerpts from Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom and urinating on the audience
in the orchestra pit. Lebel himself wore a blue wig and a priest’s chasuble
smeared in shit to officiate over Goldfarb (still naked, now on a ceremonial
table), covering her in whipped cream and inviting the audience to lick it
from her body; when finished, she stood up and wore a mask of de Gaulle. In
another section, Lebel and the artist Bob Benamou ‘spanked’ a rendition of
‘La Marseillaise’ on two half-naked girls, before reversing these roles to be
spanked in turn. The most notorious part of the evening featured a transsexual
prostitute called Cynthia, dressed in a nun’s habit, who stripped, washed
her genitals, and then auto- sodomised herself with carrots and leeks. (When
she turned around to reveal her breasts and penis to the crowd, the writer
Lucien Goldmann had a heart attack.) 82 As might be imagined, the event
caused a huge scandal: the police were alerted, and attended the second
night’s performance in plain clothes, but the performers self- censored. Lebel
was arrested for ‘offence to the head of State and insult to moral conduct’,
prompting a public letter of support in defence of the artist, signed by a slew
of luminaries including Breton, Duchamp, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Rivette. 83
In her 1962 essay on Happenings, Susan Sontag argues that their ‘dramatic
spine’ is an ‘abusive’ treatment of the audience; reading this ‘art of radical juxtaposition’
through Surrealism and Artaud, she makes a strong case for the
centrality of its aggression towards the viewer. 84 Although Sontag’s essay was
written in response to US Happenings, it actually applies to very few of them;
most New York artists from that period argue that US Happenings were never
directly antagonistic towards the audience, and functioned much more like
traditional theatre, albeit one in the round. 85 Lebel is a much more fitting recipient
of Sontag’s description, as reinforced by Sartre’s observation in 1967:
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