ARTIFICIAL HELLS

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conscious socio- political critique of affluent consumer society; the North
Americans, by contrast, ‘regarded their activity as an apolitical means of
changing people’s attitudes toward life. In some cases, this may have
implied a sociocritical attitude. But more often it was restricted to altering
the process of perception’. He continues:
Life as experienced in a [European] Happening was no longer a mere
reproduction or symbolic interpretation of our existential reality. It was
rather a confrontation with our alienated existence in late- capitalist society,
a discourse on the conflict between our real self and its alienated
state. Through the performance the audience was encouraged to experience
the authenticity of their existence in opposition to ‘life unlived.’ . . .
Alienating through artistic means an alienating existence (reality)
approximates the Hegelian triad of negation of negation. Dialectics as
‘the mother of progress’ lies at the basis of many Happenings in Europe. 69
In the work of Lebel, this ‘negation of negation’ was evidenced in numerous
references to current affairs, and in a libertarian emphasis on free
expression (‘the advent of sexuality’), myth and hallucinatory experience. 70
His 1962 Happening Pour conjurer l’esprit de catastrophe (To Exorcise the
Spirit of Catastrophe) was held in the context of a group show Lebel had
organised at Galerie Raymond Cordier, and featured many of his regular
collaborators, including the artists Erró and Tetsumi Kudo. The poster for
the event was typical in reproducing a lengthy manifesto by Lebel, which
in this instance denounced
Blackmail, the war of nerves, of the sexes, of the eye and the stomach,
the coercion of nuclear Santa Claus, tricolour terror, moral misery and
its political exploitation, physical misery and its political exploitation,
modern art on its knees before Wall Street, the Paris Commune forgotten
in favour of a stupid school of the same name. Enough of this. We
have to engage in a collective exorcism . . . 71
The event comprised a stream of actions accompanied by a five- piece jazz
band whose improvised music was directly analogous to the loose compositional
structure of the events that took place around the audience. Erró
projected images of erotica and works of art onto the naked stomach of
Johanna Lawrenson (wearing a mask in the style of a Gustave Moreau
painting); Lebel wore a cardboard- box TV set on his head and spoke
about permanent revolution and conscientious objectors; Tetsumi Kudo
brandished one of his huge ‘phallus’ sculptures and gave a lecture in
Japanese on ‘The impotence of philosophy’; Jacques Gabriel and François
Dufrêne conversed in an invented language; various performers wore a
de Gaulle mask (including Dufrêne and Lebel); dressed as an old lady,
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