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

social sadism made explicit
Julio Puzzolo, involved fi lling the space of the gallery with chairs facing
towards the shop window onto the street. At the opening, visitors sat on the
chairs waiting for something to happen. The artist defi ned the piece as a
‘reversible spectacle’: spectators observed the street while being turned
into a performance for passers- by. 54 For the third event, Fernández Bonina
left the space completely empty, apart from the presence of notes forbidding
viewers to speak, smoke, or bring objects of any kind into the space.
Bonina explained that ‘the experience occurs as long as each spectator
accepts the prohibitions’; the aim was to make the audience more aware of
the restraints imposed upon them in other spheres of life. 55
Near the end of the Cycle, the artists began to move out of the gallery.
The eighth action, by Eduardo Favario (9– 21 September), invited the
audience make a direct connection between gallery conventions and
mechanisms of social control: he left the exhibition space as if in a state of
abandon, with tape across the door to indicate its closure, and put up a
notice instructing visitors that the work could be found in a bookshop in
another part of the city. As Favario explained, ‘the spectator will have to
“track down” the work, abandoning his more or less static position. He
will be forced to participate actively, which will turn him into the executor
of an action which, in turn, has been posed as a work of art.’ 56 Such
work stood (for Favario) as a proposition for social change: ‘a theoretical
proposal that affi rms the possibilities of some action with the purpose of
changing our reality’. 57 The ninth event in the Cycle was an unframed
participatory situation in the street, produced by Rodolfo Elizalde and
Emilio Ghilioni (23– 28 September). It involved the two artists simulating
a street fi ght outside the premises of the gallery. Beginning verbally,
the confrontation soon became physical. Passers- by started approaching
the two men and tried to stop the fi ght by physically separating them.
The work was intended to provoke a direct response from the public,
who were unaware that the fi ght was staged – until fl yers explaining the
work’s proposal were thrown in the air, communicating the artistic nature
of the event. The artists stated that their intention was to create ‘un arte
social’: to break the ‘narrow scope of the institutionalised art market’ by
invalidating ‘the traditional exhibition space’, to use a ‘clear, effective
artistic language in order to obtain the audience’s involvement’, to install
‘the real piece of work in daily reality’ and to incite a questioning ‘of
ideas and attitudes that are accepted without objections out of the mere
fact that they resort to authority’. 58
The most striking of these events, planned to take place at the end of the
Cycle on 7 October, was devised by Graciela Carnevale. Unlike the previous
event in the Cycle, Carnevale allowed her action to unfurl without
dénouement of intentions. Her action has received considerable attention
since 2000, and was a central component of Documenta 12 in 2007. The
artist describes her intervention as follows:
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