ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
Khatib’s ‘Attempt at a Psychogeographical Description of Les Halles’
(1958). The essay pays attention to the area’s diurnal and nocturnal ambience,
the main routes of access and the use of particular areas, and makes
constructive suggestions for rethinking this central area of Paris as a space
for ‘manifestations of liberated collective life’; in the meantime, Khatib
suggests, it would do well to serve as ‘an attraction park for the ludic education
of the workers’. 6
I begin with this discussion of the dérive because, in Guy Debord’s
contribution to the SI’s seventh conference in 1966, he observed that the
group’s strategies of the dérive and unitary urbanism had to be understood
in terms of their ‘struggle’ with utopian architecture, the Venice Biennale,
the Happenings, and the Groupe Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV). 7 In
keeping with his suggestion, this chapter will examine three forms of
open- ended participatory art in Paris during the 1960s, contrasting the
theory and practice of the Situationist International to the ‘situations’ of
GRAV and to the eroticised and transgressive Happenings of Jean- Jacques
Lebel. It should immediately be acknowledged that, art historically, none
of these figures are canonical: in an Anglophone context, there is little literature
on GRAV, while Lebel has only recently become the focus of
attention (most notably in the work of Alyce Mahon). The SI cannot be
considered straightforwardly as artists, and especially not as producers of
participatory art, even if today’s proliferation of neo- Situationist activities,
which frequently denigrate art and the aesthetic, all demand a re- visitation
of the SI’s activities from an art historical perspective; in this case, it is one
that places their claims for participation alongside a laboratory model of
artistic experimentation and an eroticised theatrical counterculture. 8
Despite the mountain of literature on the SI produced within Cultural
Studies, there have been very few attempts to contextualise the group
within artistic tendencies of the period. 9 More usually, writers defer to the
SI’s self- proclaimed exceptionalism and distance from mainstream artistic
activities, particularly following the controversies occasioned by their first
museum show in 1989. 10
This chapter picks up a number of themes outlined in previous chapters:
the tension between collective and individual authorship, the cultivation of
multiple audiences, and the conflicting demands of individual agency and
directorial control. Once again, theatrical metaphors are prevalent: Lebel
was influenced by Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty (from The Theatre
and Its Double, 1938), while an early tract by the French section of the SI is
titled ‘Nouveau théâtre d’opérations dans la culture’ (1958). Each of the
groups presents a different solution to the problem of visualising ephemeral
participatory experiences: GRAV leave us with sculptures and (more rarely)
installations; Lebel and his contemporaries offer partially drafted scores and
photographs to be re- interpreted; while the SI hand down films, discursive
tracts and architectural models, which serve primarily as suggestions or tools
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