Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

je participe, tu participes, il participe
fabric, but invariably retreated to note that however determinant the
political ambition of the Happenings, their psychical intent as ‘interior
communication’ would remain primary. 91
Finally, if Happenings artists sought to bring the everyday into the
work of art (‘We were presenting a piece of daily reality that is itself a
spectacle’), then Debord and the SI, by contrast, found it necessary to
question the very category of art altogether, sublating art into a more
intensely lived everyday life. 92 Their activities therefore proceeded in
two opposite directions – one preserving the category of art, but expanding
it to include transgressive activities; the other dissolving this category
to make life itself more artistically fulfi lling. As Raoul Vaneigem argued,
personal self- realisation within the collective was the most revolutionary
form of art, and this went much further than giving the audience things
to do: the Happenings, he argued, ‘supposedly provoke spontaneous
participation on the part of the spectators’ but effectively force the audience
– ‘passive agents par excellence’ – to participate only in a cultural
and ideological vacuum. 93 This complaint seems more artistic than political,
as if the SI could not bear to see the trivialisation of (what they
perceived to be) their own ideas by the producers of Happenings who
gained media attention:
When these people [use our concepts] in order to fi nally speak of some
new problem (after having suppressed it as long as they could), they
inevitably banalise it, eradicating its violence and its connection with the
general subversion, therefore defusing it and subjecting it to academic
dissection or worse. 94
In other words, the group resented the lack of poetic intensity in activities
they viewed as derivative of their own. This much seems a fair enough
accusation to level at Kaprow and GRAV, but if the group had actually
attended Lebel’s Happenings they would have had to reckon with a
wholly different poetics of transgression and an appeal to a new intensity
of group experience; these events were less about ‘giving people things to
do’ than entering into a space of collective transformation where categories
of individual and social, conscious and unconscious, active and
passive, would purportedly disintegrate in a ‘défoulement’ or unleashing
of pent- up tensions. 95
IV. A Theatrical Uprising
Each of the group activities discussed in this chapter aimed to impact
directly upon the viewer’s consciousness and liberate them in different
ways. If the SI provided blueprints for creative and conceptual games
within an over- rationalised city and the excess of consumer culture,
101