ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
‘happsoc’: ‘happy society’ or ‘happy socialism’ implies a position of ironic
distance towards these compulsory celebrations; ‘sociological happening’
produces a more ethnographic reading in which state spectacle is recoded
as a form of avant- garde event. 40 The artists did not lean towards either of
these, but rather chose to emphasise their lack of intervention, which they
viewed as the primary difference between Happsoc and Happenings: the
former was ‘non- stylised reality, free from all direct intervention . . . it’s a
process in which we use what objectively exists to induce subjective points of
view, which make it appear with a superior reality’. 41 The approach of
Happsoc (in keeping with much of the Nouveau Réaliste attitude) was also
a question of claiming temporary possession as a means to expand the horizon
of what could be considered artistic work, on the one hand, and
authorship, on the other. Significantly, the only documentation of Happsoc
I is the printed manifesto and two images of the official parades, and they
have a bureaucratic air that reflects the totalitarian aspirations of the work
itself: it was impossible for the residents of Bratislava not to be part of
Happsoc I, and presumably, any photograph taken between 2– 9 May 1965
could conceivably form part of its documentation. It is tempting to see the
structure of Happsoc I as rather Cagean – the artists defined the duration of
an event but not the action within it or the ways in which it was interpreted
– but there is no direct evidence for this influence, even if Cage had visited
Prague in 1965. The point of reference is neo- Dada, with a view to producing
art not destined for the gallery space but to be integrated back into daily
life. Ironically, this task was easier in the East than in the West due to a
complete absence of commercial galleries and institutional support for
avant- garde practice.
Presenting Bratislava as an objet trouvé, Happsoc I invited a select group
of 400 participants (those who had received the announcement) to experience
the city ‘doubly’ – as reality, and as work of art – with a view to
questioning their paradigms of seeing, experiencing and perceiving reality.
42 The emphasis was therefore on mental rather than physical
participation: ‘to see Bratislava as a ready- made’. 43 The drawback of this
radically de- authored re- perception is the loss of art’s signifying character
that inevitably accompanies the complete dispersal of the work of art into
everyday life (a drawback that also plagues many of Kaprow’s later works).
The Happsoc manifesto called upon people to participate in events and see
reality through the lens of art, which certainly dispersed authorship into
collective imagination, but it also eliminated any kind of concentrated
artistic experience; in the artists’ own rather oblique words: ‘It is a synthetic
manifestation of social existence as such and therefore, by necessity, a
shared property of all.’ 44 The next Happsoc experiment was more ambitious:
Happsoc II: The Seven Days of Creation took place later that year, also
between two significant holidays (Christmas and the New Year); it
comprised an invitation in the form of a semi- scored series of instructions
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