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

social sadism made explicit
one of the windows open, and the private view- goers emerged to freedom
through the ragged glass orifi ce. Some of the people present nevertheless
believed that the rescuer had ruined the work and began hitting him over
the head with an umbrella. The police arrived and – making a connection
between the event and the fi rst anniversary of Che Guevara’s arrest –
closed down the event and with it the rest of the Ciclo de Arte Experimental.
The Rosario Cycle presents a number of important issues for the genealogy
of participatory art I am tracing: not simply the move out of gallery
into public space, and a rethinking of the exhibition as a series of collaborative
yet highly authored events, but as signalling a change in the use of
people as a material in Argentinian art. Rather than hiring people to
perform themselves as a social sculpture to be observed by others (as in
Masotta’s To Induce the Spirit of the Image and Bony’s The Worker’s Family),
Carnevale proposes the work of art as a situation collapsing performer and
viewer into a fractured social body. The provocation of this entity, and the
unpredictability of its response, constitute the core of the work’s artistic
and political resonance. Unlike Masotta, who presents the work of art as a
critical experiment, Carnevale’s event is both metaphorical and phenomenological:
to make the audience aware of, and to feel in their own bodies,
the violence they were living in (‘we couldn’t stay neutral, we needed to
make an action to get out of this imprisonment’). 60
During the following year, many of the artists involved in the Cycle
collaborated with sociologists, journalists and artists from Buenos Aires to
redirect their activities away from the production of visual art and towards
an exhibition of counter- propaganda in defence of exploited sugar workers
in the northern province of Tucumán. The interdisciplinary group who
undertook the project Tucumán Arde conceived it as a denunciation of a
corrupt government and as a call to revolt. It did not reinforce an already-
existing aesthetic programme, but embodied an activist, partisan approach
to a social and political crisis; the aim was to expose the viewer to the reality
of social injustice, and to generate press that would reveal the truth of the
situation. 61 The fl oor of the exhibition’s entrance was covered with banners
bearing the names of the sugar- plant owners of Tucumán and indicating
their connections to fi gures of power within the ruling class. The walls
were plastered with a collage of newspaper reports on Tucumán and the
refi neries, gathered and arranged by León Ferrari. In the central room,
banners with slogans and statistics were positioned alongside massive
blown- up photographs and projected slides of Tucumán inhabitants, their
living conditions, and protests. Other components included interviews
recorded in Tucumán played on loud speakers, while the fl oor was
obstructed with heaps of food donated to be sent to Tucumán. A blackout
threw the building into darkness every two minutes as a reminder that a
Tucumán child was dying at these intervals. On the opening day, sugarless
coffee was served as an allusion to the sugar shortage brought about by
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