ARTIFICIAL HELLS

social sadism made explicit
defence and post- mortem of this action, ‘I Committed a Happening’
(1967), provides an invaluable resource not only for understanding the
event but also for approaching contemporary controversies around the
display of people in art (discussed in Chapter 8). The basics of the event
were as follows: twenty elderly people were paid to stand in a storage
room, in front of an audience, and be subjected to fire- extinguishers, a
high- pitched deafening sound and blinding white light. At the beginning
of the event, Masotta lectured the audience on the subject of control,
even though the exact opposite seemed to be taking place: he recalled that
as the audience filed in, ‘I felt as though something had slipped loose
without my consent, a mechanism had gone into motion.’ 14 In this introduction,
Masotta also made reference to the economic circuit in which his
work was imbricated, reminding the audience that they had each paid 200
pesos to watch the event, while the participants had been paid 600 pesos
each to perform.
Masotta’s text repeatedly brings up the question of guilt, along with a
number of other psychoanalytically inflected terms. The guilt implied by
the title (‘I Committed a Happening’) is an ironic confession directed at the
Marxist intellectual Gregorio Klimovsky, whose reactions typified the
dominant leftist response to contemporary art at that time, and Happenings
in particular, disparaging them as a frivolous waste of resources. Having
been criticised by Klimovsky for ‘concocting’ a Happening when the
correct leftist attitude would be to ‘abstain’ from Happenings altogether
and address real problems (such as hunger), Masotta recounts that he felt
queasy – but was determined to refute the false option ‘either Happenings
or Left politics’. 15 The rest of the text serves as a justification for his artistic
experiment – not as an ideal social model (one of the hallmarks of the
utopian avant- garde) but as a lens through which to engage more directly
with the contradictions of the existing social and political context. This
context was tumultuous: the Revolución Argentina took place on 29 June
1966 – the coup d’état by which General Onganía seized power from
Arturo Illia, the democratically elected president, and suspended the
constitution. 16 Masotta had been planning his work for a festival of Happenings
during that summer, but had put the plan on hold since many felt it
was inappropriate to be making Happenings at a time of such political
upheaval. Finally realising the project in November 1966, Masotta changed
some details of the work from his initial proposal: rather than hiring thirty
or forty performers recruited from the ‘downtrodden proletariat: shoeshine
boys or beggars, handicapped people, a psychotic from the hospice, an
impressive- looking beggar woman who frequently walks down Florida
Street’, he chose to hire twenty elderly, lower- middle class men and
women. 17 He encouraged them to dress as the class beneath them, since this
process of acting would enable them to be more than merely passive
subjects. 18 Despite this apparent concession, Masotta revoked his earlier
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