ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
alternative; together with other intellectual and social pressures, these
eventually contributed to permanent changes of attitude and reform.
Although the SI cannot be reduced to participatory art, many of the
ideas they proposed, together with those of GRAV and Lebel, nevertheless
consolidate the 1960s discourse around participatory art as founded on a
binary of active and passive spectatorship, linked in turn to the desirability
of working outside the gallery system. Today, both of these tropes have
become somewhat entrenched into black and white positions that tend to
lack the dialectical subtlety accompanying the most radical iterations of the
SI’s aim to surpass art in order to realise it as life, as well as of Lebel’s
‘negation of negation’. The latter idea, together with an apparatus of semiotic
theory and psychoanalysis, was imported to Argentina in the mid
1960s, where the valorising concept behind all of the examples discussed in
this chapter – unmediated first- hand experience – was questioned, reversed
and transformed into an interrogation of mass mediation. In both contexts,
participation became a means to deal with anxieties about reality, representation
and political oppositionality, but if the French examples discussed
here addressed this through situations of collective unity, the Argentinians
more characteristically approached participation through experiments in
social division.
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