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

artificial hells
1965), an ambitious Happening in Montevideo that revealed her own interest
in audience aggression. 29 Held in a working- class neighbourhood, the
event involved participants being herded into the Peñarol stadium at 3
p.m., to the accompaniment of Bach’s ‘Mass in B Minor’, where they were
encircled by motorbikes blaring sirens. Women and children were lifted up
by body builders; men were kissed by twenty female variety singers; fi fteen
fat ladies rolled around on the fl oor; twenty embracing couples were
fastened together with adhesive tape. 30 A helicopter appeared overhead and
dropped fl our, lettuce and 500 live chickens on top of the audience, moving
up and down so that wind from the propeller sent the hens and lettuce
leaves fl ying around. Throughout this short but intense event, the audience
could not escape the stadium: hemmed in by the motorcycles, the stadium
door was also closed off until, after eight minutes, Minujín signalled the
end. 31 Together with the work of Greco and Arlt, Suceso Plástico provided
an important precedent for the development of a type of performance in
which participants were centred as object and material of the work.
To Induce the Spirit of the Image was Masotta’s third Happening; the
two others that preceded it – El helicóptero (The Helicopter) and El
mensaje fantasma (The Ghost Message) are less pertinent to the history I
am tracing. 32 However, what all three have in common is an interest in
dividing audiences to forge two irreconcilable bodies of experience. In To
Induce the Spirit of the Image, the audience and performers were divided,
with both subjected to an excruciating noise, but one group paid to view
the other’s discomfort. In The Helicopter (2 July 1966) the audience was
divided into two groups of forty, who were taken by buses to two different
venues: to the basement of the Americana Gallery at Theatrón, in the
Marta Minujín, Suceso Plástico, 1965
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