ARTIFICIAL HELLS

notes to pages 109– 11
16 ‘The military junta under General Onganía has rapidly established an
almost total dictatorship; all parties have been disbanded; Parliament and
the regional assemblies have been abolished and the traditionally autonomous
universities have been brought under firm state control; the new
regime has proclaimed itself the “representative of all the people,” and
President Onganía now exercises all legislative and executive powers,
with complete discretion over whether or not to select a Constituent
Assembly to advise him on drafting laws.’ (Robert Looker, ‘Coup in
Argentina’, The Notebook, International Socialism, No. 27, Winter 1966–
67, pp. 5– 6.)
17 Masotta, ‘I Committed a Happening’, p. 196. These, he imagined, would
be ‘seated motionless in a motley array, on a platform’.
18 ‘I told them that they should dress as poor people, but they shouldn’t use
make- up. They didn’t all obey me completely; the only way not to totally
be objects, totally passive, I thought, was for them to do something
related to the profession of an actor.’ (Ibid., p. 200.)
19 Ibid., p. 199.
20 Ibid., p. 200.
21 Ibid.
22 It also anticipates the idea of humans as ‘living currency’ in Pierre Klossowski’s
La monnaie vivante (1972), discussed in Chapter 8.
23 Lacan sums up this demand with the question, ‘have you acted in conformity
with your desire?’ See Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis,
1959– 60, London: Routledge, 1992, p. 311. It is important to stress that
for Lacan, acting in conformity with one’s desire is not hedonism or
libertarianism, but a painful encounter with the truth of one’s own being:
‘even for him who goes to the end of his desire, all is not a bed of roses’
(p. 323).
24 Ibid., p. 314. It is worth noting that Masotta would not have had access to
Seminar 7, although he had known about Lacan since 1959 via debates in
Les Temps modernes; his ethical framework was more Sartrean than Lacanian.
Thanks to German García for this point.
25 Masotta had also seen a Happening by Lebel in Paris in April that year
(possibly Déchirex) and noted that ‘practically – and sexually – everything
happened: a naked woman masturbating, an act of coitus in the
middle of the space’ (‘I Committed a Happening’, p. 201). Masotta immediately
took a stance against Lebel: ‘our Happenings had to fulfill only
one condition: they must not be very French, that is, very sexual’ (p. 197).
He also explained the title as referring to a change in his own image: ‘from
a critic or an essayist or a university researcher, I would become a
Happening- maker’ (p. 197).
26 Ibid., p. 195.
27 Sontag writes: ‘Perhaps the most striking feature of the Happening is its
treatment (this is the only word for it) of the audience. The event seems
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