ARTIFICIAL HELLS

delegated performance
Franz Erhard Walther’s steel Standing Pieces of the 1970s). These works
blur the difference between many types of participatory art, as is reinforced
in the photographic documentation of ‘La Monnaie Vivante’, in which
more recent types of so- called ‘exploitative’ art are placed next to
earlier work, reminding us that the dancers of, say, Simone Forti’s
Huddle (1961) are also being paid for their bodily labour. This juxtaposition
of generations and types of work (participatory, conceptual,
theatrical, choreographic) is also staked as an engagement with interpassivity
(rather than interactivity), because this is the dominant mode installed
by mass media and an information society. Bal- Blanc argues that all the
works he exhibits show the way in which individual drives are subordinated
to economic and social relations, and how these rules are parsed in
the entertainment industry’s laws of transmission and reception (‘interpassivity
reveals what interactivity conceals, an admission of dependence on
the user; interactivity, by contrast, gives the impression that the subject
masters his language’). 37 In other words, interpassivity is the secret
language of the market, which degrades bodies into objects, and it is also
the language that artists use to reflect on this degradation.
It is not unimportant that Bal- Blanc’s development of this project was
rooted in his own experience performing for two and a half months in Felix
Gonzalez- Torres’s Untitled (Go- Go Dancing Platform), 1991. In this work,
a scantily clad male wears headphones and dances upon a light- bulb- studded
minimalist podium for at least five minutes a day for the duration of the
exhibition in which it appears. 38 Bal- Blanc’s feeling of depressed subjection
after a month of performing this work raised a number of questions for him
that were only answered when he later encountered the performances of
Santiago Sierra. 39 Like many of the artists in ‘La Monnaie Vivante’, Sierra
seems to use perversity as a meditation on the degree to which social and
Pierre Bal-Blanc, video still of Working Contract, 1992
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