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

artificial hells
refi nery owners hoarding the sugar. Tucumán Arde has subsequently
become a locus classicus of political exhibition- making, but it is telling that
in order to communicate forcefully an unequivocal message, participation
as an artistic strategy had to be sacrifi ced for a return to a more conventional
mode of spectatorship, albeit one informed by an aesthetic of
multi- sensory installation.
IV. Invisible Theatre
It was precisely the limitations of didactically motivated political art in the
face of an increasingly repressive dictatorship that formed the starting
point for the Brazilian director Augusto Boal (1931– 2009), whose innovative
strategies for public theatre in South America seem at fi rst glance to
have much in common with the fi nal events of the Ciclo de Arte Experimental,
even though the two groups were unaware of each other at the time. 62
These innovations grew out of developments in the late 1960s in Brazil,
and were honed during the director’s exile in Argentina (1971– 76) and
travel to Peru (1973), and are documented in his book Theatre of the
Oppressed (1974; English 1979) – an explicit reference to Paulo Freire’s
Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968; English 1970) – which he wrote while
living in Buenos Aires. Boal had been a catalysing fi gure in São Paulo’s
Arena Theatre in the mid to late ’60s, whose productions initially nationalised
foreign classics (such as Gogol and Molière) before shifting to
Brechtian- infl uenced musicals such as Arena Conta Zumbi (1965), coauthored
by Boal and Gianfrancesco Guarnieri. Boal’s close reading of
Brecht led him to break not only with identifi cation as a key theatrical
device, but to reconfi gure entirely the audience/ actor relationship in new
forms of participatory performance for raising consciousness and empowering
the working class. 63 One of Boal’s key arguments is that spectators
should be eliminated and reconceptualised as ‘spect- actors’. However, this
is not done in the name of symbolically realising a community to come (the
utopian mode invoked so often in European participatory art), but more
forcefully as a practical training in social antagonism, or what Boal vividly
describes as a ‘rehearsal of revolution’. 64
Of the many innovations in social theatre that Boal devised, the most
relevant to contemporary art is Invisible Theatre, developed in Buenos
Aires as an unframed mode of public and participatory action designed to
avoid detection by police authorities. Boal wrote that in Invisible Theatre,
‘spectators would see the show, without seeing it as a show’. 65 The form
was developed in collaboration with a group of actors who wanted to
promote a humanitarian law whereby those without money could eat at
restaurants (dessert and wine excepted) on showing a particular identity
card. The result was less a play than a loosely constructed situation in a
restaurant, in which some of the cast were actors, while the roles of manager
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