ARTIFICIAL HELLS

je participe, tu participes, il participe
the 1960s, the ideal viewer of GRAV’s installation was conceived in
universalist terms, as a classless (male) subject capable of returning to
perception with an ‘innocent eye’. This use of new materials and technologies
to access a primitive untainted perception resulted in kinetic
environments with a certain emotional uniformity, despite the strong
emphasis on play. The installation was accompanied by a short manifesto
entitled ‘Assez des Mystifications’ (Enough Mystifications), whose antiromantic
sentiments were a fitting counterpart to the group’s scientistic
approach:
If there is a social preoccupation in today’s art, then it must take into
account this very social reality: the viewer.
To the best of our abilities we want to free the viewer from his apathetic
dependence that makes him passively accept, not only what one imposes
on him as art, but a whole system of life . . .
We want to interest the viewer, to reduce his inhibitions, to relax him.
We want to make him participate.
We want to place him in a situation that he triggers and transforms.
We want him to be conscious of his participation.
We want him to aim towards an interaction with other viewers.
We want to develop in the viewer a strength of perception and action.
A viewer conscious of his power of action, and tired of so many abuses
and mystifications, will be able to make his own ‘revolution in art’. 52
The conflicting messages of this manifesto are undeniable: the very idea of
‘making’ someone participate undermines the claim to defeating apathy,
and almost incapacitates the viewer from the beginning; all he or she can do
is fulfil the artists’ requirements to complete the work appropriately.
Despite the group’s rhetoric of openness, the viewer’s experience in Labyrinth
revolved around a limited range of prescribed responses that go hand
in hand with an insistence on ‘perceptual re- education’, as Schechner
described the Happenings in 1965. 53 Equally striking is the group’s emphasis
on a ‘revolution in art’ rather than in society. If the SI wished to
transform the world by starting with their own life experience in non- alienated
‘moments’ and ‘situations’, GRAV were more modest in aiming to
shift the institutional art world’s valorisation of individuality (by working
in a group) and to expand the perception of viewers who participated in
their visual research.
Despite their claims for the centrality of the audience, the experiences
produced by GRAV’s installations are primarily individual rather than
social, and today we would more correctly describe them as interactive
rather than participatory. Even so, the group came to believe that these
experiences had social implications. Initially, GRAV’s frequent and
outspoken disparagement of single authorship and the market implied only
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