ARTIFICIAL HELLS

notes to pages 90– 4
54 ‘Manifeste du GRAV’, Abstract Art, p. 296, my emphasis.
55 It is important to be attuned to the difference between individualism,
demonised in the discursive criteria of today’s socially engaged art, and
Debord’s critique of isolation in The Society of the Spectacle.
56 A questionnaire was also handed out to the public, which included questions
like: ‘Modern art – such as it is found in the galleries, salons and
museums – is it interesting, indifferent, necessary, incomprehensible,
intelligent or gratuitous?’, and ‘In your opinion, what sort of initiative
has this been: one that could be described as publicity- seeking, cultural,
experimental, artistic, sociological, political, or in no way at all?’
(Reported in Popper, Art – Action, Participation, p. 26.)
57 GRAV, ‘Une journée dans la rue’, in Caramel (ed.), Groupe de recherche
d’art visuel 1960– 1968, p. 44, my translation.
58 Ibid., my translation.
59 Unsigned, ‘L’avant- garde de la Presence’, pp. 16– 17.
60 Unsigned, ‘L’avant- garde de la Presence’, p. 19, my translation. GRAV’s
commitment to formal experimentation, with the metaphor of political
connotations deployed as a supplementary justification (rather than motivating
raison d’être), has much in common with Bourriaud’s defence of
relational aesthetics.
61 Stein, in Douze ans d’art contemporain, p. 386. By 1975, Le Parc also recognised
these failings, but in artistic rather than Marxist terms. When asked
for his main criticisms of GRAV between 1960 and 1968, he replied: ‘not
enough shared work, not enough confrontation, not enough imagination,
and [not enough] effort to produce collective activities, not enough
daring; too little risk, too much fear of the ridiculous, too much respect
for conventions, too much slowness; the fact of being always late in relation
to events.’ (Le Parc, in Caramel [ed.], Groupe de recherche d’art visuel
1960– 1968, p. 131, my translation.)
62 Unsigned, ‘L’avant- garde de la Presence’, p. 20, my translation.
63 The ‘chose’ (thing) was made by Tinguely and was ritually carried up the
Grand Canal in a gondola before being thrown into the lagoon off San
Giorgio, with white flowers. For a longer description see Gunnar Kvaran,
‘Lebel/ Rebel’, in Jean- Jacques Lebel: Bilder, Skulpturen, Installationen,
Vienna: Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, 1998, pp. 54– 5;
and Jean- Jacques Lebel and Androula Michaël (eds.), Happenings de
Jean- Jacques Lebel, ou l’insoumission radicale, Paris: Editions Hanzan,
2009, pp. 36– 41.
64 Jean- Jacques Lebel, ‘Flashback’, in Lebel and Michaël (eds), Happenings
de Jean- Jacques Lebel, pp. 7– 8.
65 Jean- Jacques Lebel, ‘On the Necessity of Violation’, Tulane Drama
Review, 13:1, Autumn 1968, p. 103.
66 This was not true, however, of work by Claes Oldenburg, Red Grooms,
Bob Whitman and others, which is more accurately referred to as artist’s
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