ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
decision to provide little flags so that the performers could indicate if they
wanted to leave, since it had the effect of ‘softening the situation’. The
effect he wanted was a ‘spare, naked, hard’ experience, in direct contrast to
the frivolous media image of the Happenings. An aesthetic decision, then,
came at the cost of his participants’ comfort, and yet Masotta persisted with
his vision. For example, he noted that the participants paid him much more
attention after he increased their fee from 400 pesos to 600 pesos: ‘I felt a bit
cynical’, he wrote, ‘but neither did I wish to have too many illusions. I
didn’t want to demonise myself for this social act of manipulation which in
real society happens every day.’ 19
In To Induce the Spirit of the Image, this manipulation was figured through
an act of overt reification: turning glaring spotlights onto the elderly participants
to subject them to the audience’s gaze, emphasising the economic
and psychological distance between viewer and performer – in direct
contrast to the Happenings’ tendency to collapse this distinction. Masotta
observed:
Against the white wall, their spirit shamed and flattened out by the white
light, next to each other in a line, the old people were rigid, ready to let
themselves be looked at for an hour. The electronic sound lent greater
immobility to the scene. I looked toward the audience: they too, in stillness,
looked at the old people. 20
The conclusion to Masotta’s text is revealing. The Happening clearly
perturbed his friends on the left, who wished to know what it meant. His
Oscar Masotta, To Induce the Spirit of the Image, 1966
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