ARTIFICIAL HELLS

je participe, tu participes, il participe
It is telling that after May ’68 Lebel ceased to make Happenings, considering
them to have been achieved in the occupations, barricades and protests;
the avant- gardist dream of turning art into life via a collective creative
experience had (for him) finally been realised.
Constant had anticipated something akin to this state of affairs when
he wrote that in the proposed city of New Babylon, ‘the whole of life will
become a Happening, making Happenings redundant’. 98 The SI, for their
part, equally claimed May 1968 as the realisation of their ideas, but gave
them a slightly less glorious status: ‘The occupations movement was the
rough sketch of a “situationist” revolution, but it was no more than a
rough sketch both as practice of revolution and as situationist consciousness
of history. It was at that moment intellectually that a generation
began to be situationist.’ 99 After that point the SI’s activities became
increasingly strained: Debord attempted to devolve power with a new
editorial board, but acknowledged that ‘if “boredom is counter- revolutionary”
then the SI was very quickly succumbing to the same fate’. 100
Mustapha Khayati resigned in 1969, Vaneigem in 1970, and Viénet the
year after. GRAV, meanwhile, disbanded in November 1968, but this
derived from internal differences rather than from a crisis prompted by
political commitments. 101
In the light of contemporary artistic practice, these experiments with
participation leading to 1968 give rise to several important points about
audience. It is telling that none of the collective efforts described above pay
particular attention to who their participants might be; one could even claim
a total absence of class consciousness among the artists in this regard.
Despite their frequent attacks on ‘bourgeois’ art and its institutions, Debord
and Lebel came from well- to- do families and did not countenance the possibility
of targeting activities towards an audience outside their community of
artists and bohemian intelligentsia; these events consolidated (rather than
created) group identity. GRAV, by contrast, explicitly sought a general
audience, locating A Day in the Street in a series of public spaces, but understood
the viewer to be a generic passer- by, a universal ‘everyman’. The SI
were content to function as a club, continually seeking membership but
subjecting potential applicants to rigorous enforcements of purity. 102 The
desire of today’s artists to reach disenfranchised or marginal constituencies
is a more recent development that reflects the influence of community arts in
the 1970s (discussed in Chapter 6) and the fragmentation of class politics
into myriad identitarian concerns in the 1980s.
With hindsight, however, these artistic differences dissolve into a shared
narrative: on a political level, the artists were united against colonialism
and racism, French intervention in Algeria, and consumer society’s valorisation
of the individual. From this perspective, artistic differences can and
should be reframed as variations on a common theme of opposing imperialist
capitalism in favour of generating a collectively produced cultural
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