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

social sadism made explicit
generate spontaneous movement of the material. In addition to these objects,
an Invisible Cube is placed in front of the seated performer. Since De
Dominicis once observed that a person with Down’s Syndrome ‘was to be
interpreted as a different state of being’, the whole installation adds up to a
situation of non- communication. 44 The work stages two irreconcilable
types of vision and consciousness: the gaze of the performer with Down’s
Syndrome, and the gaze of those who look at him. This reading is reinforced
by the one offi cial photograph of this performance, in which we see
a viewer in the middle of putting on her spectacles; the image seems to
emphasise the disjunction between two different experiences of looking
and thinking (three, in fact, if we count ourselves). 45
Each of these examples, like Bony’s The Worker’s Family, are isolated
precedents for a tendency that has become familiar in contemporary art
since the early 1990s. But it is telling that Bony, when interviewed in 1998
at the time of its restaging, confessed that he still didn’t know how to
describe this piece, since it existed as both a conceptual operation and
concrete materiality: he referred to it as a ‘conceptual proposition’ since
‘a group of people can’t be the material of the work’: ‘it wasn’t a performance,
because it hasn’t got a script, it isn’t body art, there’s no clear
category for this work, and I like that very much, the fact that not even I
can fi nd a precise categorisation. I fi nd extremely important the fact that
there is a certain feeling of being on the limit.’ 46 Bony’s uncertainty about
how to defi ne his piece, as well as his feeling of liminality, continues in
the critical queasiness that accompanies the exhibition of people in works
of art today. In Bony’s case, the viewer’s self- consciousness in front of
the family is not simply the heightened awareness of a phenomenological
encounter – as one ideally experiences in relation to minimalist objects
– but a shared embarrassment: it imposes upon us, as one critic wrote in
a review of Bony’s work, ‘the shared humiliation of looking at these
people who have been paid in order to let themselves be seen’. 47 This
complicated dynamic seems to have been in Bony’s mind as he referred
to himself as a ‘torturer’ – for him, The Worker’s Family was based less on
politics than on the production of moral unease: ‘it is obvious’, he said,
‘that the work was based on ethics, for exposing them to ridicule made
me feel uncomfortable’. 48
The Worker’s Family is an exception within Bony’s oeuvre: until that
date his work had spanned fi gurative painting, 16mm fi lms, realist sculpture,
minimalist structures and installations with projection; his subsequent
output, like most artists under the dictatorship in the 1970s, underwent
enormous adaptation in order to survive. 49 But when placed alongside the
early work of Minujín and Masotta, The Worker’s Family consolidates a
narrative of performance- based work in ’60s Argentina as one of adopting
particularly aggressive strategies of reifi cation, frequently played out in
relation to class. Although the best- known works of this period have a
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