ARTIFICIAL HELLS

social sadism made explicit
answer was concise: ‘an act of social sadism made explicit’ (un acto de
sadismo social explicitado). 21 This allusion to the psychic mechanism of
sadism has both visual and economic overtones, and makes Masotta’s
subsequent interest in Lacanian psychoanalysis entirely fitting. 22 In his
seventh Seminar, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959– 60), Lacan draws
upon Sade as an alternative model to Kant, encouraging analysands not to
compromise on their unconscious desire in the face of social and familial
pressure (the ‘big Other’). 23 In both the Happening and his post- mortem of
it, Masotta seems to establish a different ethical framework for leftist
performance art, one whose territory is informed more by the anti- humanism
of Lacanian ethics – in which ‘the only thing one can be guilty of is of
having given ground relative to one’s desire’ – than with a normative ethics
in the tradition of Aristotelian modesty and temperance. 24
Masotta’s title, To Induce the Spirit of the Image, was a direct reference to
Jean- Jacques Lebel’s Happening, To Exorcise the Spirit of Catastrophe
(1962), discussed in Chapter 3, although the works could not be further
apart in character; if anything, Masotta seemed only to desire an international
reference point for his work. Lebel’s event referred to Cold War
politics and sought collective emancipation through nudity and sexual
expression, which Masotta emphatically rejected. 25 A more pertinent international
reference point was an event by LaMonte Young that Masotta had
experienced in New York earlier in 1966, which had also used a continuous,
unaltered sound at high volume; Masotta reported that the work produced
‘an exasperating electronic endlessness’ that ‘penetrated one’s bones and
pummelled one’s temples’ to the point where it became a commentary ‘on
the continuous as continuous, and thereby induced a certain rise in
consciousness with respect to its opposite’. 26 This aggressivity towards the
audience in US Happenings, despite their prevailing lightness and goodhumoured
unpredictability, was central to Susan Sontag’s reading in
Against Interpretation (1966), with which Masotta’s reading group were
familiar. 27
However, there were other, more local, points of reference for Masotta’s
aesthetic of social aggression. The novelist Roberto Arlt (1900– 42), on
whom Masotta had published a book in 1965, was a fiction author whose
edgy, unromantic stories frequently focused on the lives of criminals,
outsiders and the poor. 28 Another point of influence was Alberto Greco
(1915– 65), whose series of photo works Vivo- Ditos (Living Finger) (1962–
64), involved the artist encircling passers- by with chalk and signing them
as ‘living sculptures’. Without exception, Greco always encircled the poor
and down at heel. Greco had also employed people to be present within one
of his gallery installations: Mi Madrid querido (My Beloved Madrid), held
at the Galería Bonino in Buenos Aires in December 1964, included two
shoeshine boys hired to sit in front of canvases with shoe polishes, inks and
brushes. Another artistic precedent was Minujín’s Suceso Plástico (25 July
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