ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
studies (many of which have sunk without art historical trace), Popper
rightly points to the difficulty of establishing a hard and fast distinction
between physical activation and the incitement to mental activity. The final
page of his book features a flow chart in which three genealogies of art
(Post- Dada/ Pop/ Conceptualism, Political Art/ Socialist Realism, and
Post- Bauhaus/ Constructivist Kinetic Art) all come together via spectator
participation to form ‘Democratic Art’, defined as one in which ‘the power
of aesthetic decision lies in the hands of all’; its consequences – ‘the disappearance
of the work and the diminished responsibility of the artist’ – are,
he argues, only ‘superficially negative phenomena’ when seen in light of
the resulting social and artistic gains. 15
These writers’ equation between democracy and participatory art, as a
radical new tendency with social implications, needs in turn to be contextualised
by French art in the 1950s, which was dominated by the abstraction
of art informel on the one hand (Jean Dubuffet, Henri Michaux, Jean
Fautrier) and the figurative realism of art engagé on the other (socialist
realist painters such as André Fougeron). Surrealism continued to be a
lingering cultural presence into the 1960s, albeit in a decadent mode: the
commitment to Marx and Freud that had characterised Surrealist activities
of the 1920s had transformed into an embrace of mysticism and the occult,
as witnessed in the group’s elaborate Eros exhibition at Galerie Daniel
Cordier in 1959. For a younger generation of artists, the unconscious was
overrated as a revolutionary principle, while the group’s Oedipal organisation
around Breton as paternal leader was explicitly to be rejected. 16 Dada
rather than Surrealism became the primary point of reference, not only for
the SI but for Lebel and the Nouveaux Réalistes, formed in 1960. 17 In 1959,
the first Paris Biennial, for artists under the age of thirty- five, encouraged
popular interest in visual art, bolstered by the convergence between art and
high fashion (such as Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘Mondrian’ dress, 1965) and the
popularisation of art and multiples (the department store Prisunic produced
artist editions in 1967, leading Martial Raysse to declare that ‘Prisunic
stores are the museums of modern art’). 18 In short, the artistic backdrop to
participatory art in Paris of the 1960s was an idea of democracy as the levelling
equality of consumer capitalism. Everyday culture, accessible to all,
was at the core of this understanding of democracy; while this stood in
some degree of opposition to elitist cultural hierarchies, and to figurative
modes of leftist art in the 1950s, it rarely delved into questions of class
difference and social inequality.
I. The SI: Surpassing Art
As has often been stated, the SI emerged from a number of post- war artistic
and literary groups including Lettrisme (1946– 52), the Lettriste International
(c.1952– 7), the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus (1953– 7)
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