ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
Most of the time, in effect, the Happening is a skillful exploitation of the
cruelty of which Artaud spoke. In France, Lebel exercises a certain
sadism towards the public: the latter is stunned by flashing lights, unbearable
noises, sprayed with diverse objects that are usually filthy, you have
to go to these Happenings in old clothes . . . 86
Among US Happenings, only Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy (1964)
contains anything close to Lebel’s level of physical transgression, and it is
telling that Lebel not only encouraged her to develop this work but was the
first to show it in Europe, at the First Festival of Free Expression in Paris,
1964. A Dionysian response to Abstract Expressionist painting, Schneemann’s
Meat Joy involved performers writhing half naked to pop music
while smearing each other with paint and raw fish and chickens. Audience
participation was not a formal component of the work, but Schneemann
recalls that when the work was performed in Paris,
the public started to get undressed, to crawl across the room and tie
themselves in knots, mixing with the actors on stage, it was very puzzling
and we had to send them back to the other side of the footlights. The
following evening, something even stranger happened. A man came
onto the stage and started to strangle me and bang my head against the
wall before I had time to scream or even make a move. The most terrifying
thing was that the public, even if it realised something was going on,
was unsure and told themselves that it was part of the performance.
Finally, two men understood the situation . . . 87
When reading the SI’s denunciations of the Happenings, no reference is
made to such extremities of behaviour; it is unclear whether their condemnation
is directed at the local, French iteration of this genre, or at the US
variant, which was also known in Paris. (In 1963, Kaprow performed on
three consecutive evenings at the Bon Marché department store. 88 )
Lebel, for his part, maintains that Debord never attended his events, and
that his knowledge of them was, ironically, attained entirely through the
media. 89 Artistically, however, they had much in common: both were
influenced by (and came to reject) Surrealism; both railed against the
museum as mausoleum; both were highly suspicious of mediation and
commercialisation; both sought an authentic lived experience to heighten
and liberate the everyday through play. But while Debord viewed this
heightened experience in Marxist terms – as resistance to spectacle,
defeating alienation, and auguring revolution (in which recognised
forms of artistic practice would be surpassed) – Lebel found an anarchist
model for this heightened experience in hallucinogenic drugs and
sexual liberation. 90 On several occasions Lebel cited the Situationist
Alexander Trocchi on the need for artists to seize control of the social
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