ARTIFICIAL HELLS

je participe, tu participes, il participe
the SI did not regard individualism to be a central problem; if anything, it
was the route to more enriching and less alienated forms of intensely lived
experience. 55
The most idiosyncratic of GRAV’s efforts towards social cohesion was
A Day in the Street, an itinerary of public actions around Paris, held on
Tuesday, 19 April 1966. Running from 8 a.m. to midnight, the itinerary
began with the entrance to the metro at Châtelet, with the group handing
out small gifts to passengers; at 10 a.m. on the Champs Elysées, changeable
structures would be assembled and disassembled; at midday, by the Opéra,
habitable kinetic objects were available for passers- by to manipulate; at 2
p.m. in the Jardin des Tuileries, a giant kaleidoscope was offered for the
curiosity of children and adults, while large balloons floated in the fountain;
at 6 p.m. in Montparnasse, the public were invited to walk on movable
paving slabs; the day culminated with a promenade along the Seine with
flashing electronic lights. Photo- documentation of the project shows a
Parisian audience of all ages laughing and smiling as they engage with various
objects (boxes, springs, blocks, balloons) in public space, under a
variety of weather conditions. 56 A drawing of the day’s itinerary shows a
strictly timetabled event, with quirky diagrams anticipating appropriate
participation from the public. GRAV’s justification for A Day in the Street
is not dissimilar to the premise of Situationist unitary urbanism: ‘The city,
the street are crisscrossed with a network of habits and actions repeated
daily. We think that the sum total of these routine gestures can lead to total
passivity, and create a general need for reaction.’ 57 However, the two
groups’ responses to this state of affairs is programmatically different.
GRAV’s ‘series of deliberately orchestrated interruptions’ is modest in
ambition: the group openly confess that they are not able to ‘smash the
routine of a weekday in Paris’, but hope that they can bring about ‘a simple
shift in situation’, and ‘bypass the traditional relationship between the work
of art and the public’. 58 A Day in the Street was carnivalesque: a single,
exceptional day of ludic events designed to enliven social interaction and
create a more physically engaged relationship to public space. If the Futurists
turned to variety theatre as a model for their activities, it is telling that
GRAV looked to the amusement park, which they perceived to be a place
where time is in motion, rather than accumulated (as in museums).
The SI viewed these developments with predictable disdain. Le Parc’s
desire to turn the ‘passive spectator’ into a ‘stimulated spectator’ or even
‘spectator- interpreter’ through the manipulation of elements in kinetic
work was, in their eyes, a question of requiring the viewer to fulfil a preexisting
set of options devised by the artist. 59 As such, this merely replicated
the systematised control exercised over citizens in the society of the spectacle,
which organises ‘participation in something where it’s impossible to
participate’ (in other words, the enforced division of time into work and
private leisure). An unsigned article in the I.S. noted that GRAV’s
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