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

artificial hells
started digging graves, and when asked what they were doing, replied, ‘If
the nuclear power plant explodes we’ll need 5 million graves so we’d better
start digging graves now.’ 79 Invisible Theatre here seems to anticipate reality
television and candid camera documentaries; the important difference is
that Boal used theatrical techniques such as Legislative Theatre towards
implementing social reform, and was elected to the city council of Rio de
Janeiro from 1992 to 1996.
Boal’s Invisible Theatre seems to be the hidden precursor of innumerable
performance- based artistic experiments in public space that operate
unannounced and unframed by a gallery apparatus. Invariably these are
geared less towards consciousness- raising and more towards our heightened
anxiety about the collapse between live and mediated, actual and
fi ction. Works like Roman Ondak’s Good Feelings in Good Times (2003),
Paweł Althamer’s Real Time Movie (2000) or Dora García’s The Beggar’s
Opera (2007), all insert themselves unannounced into the everyday fl ow of
street life, preferring to risk being overlooked entirely than to announce
themselves to an audience whose responses might be predetermined by
this knowledge. Comparing this recent art to Boal’s Invisible Theatre,
Catherine Wood notes that the former does not ‘imply an enabling sense
of agency for the participating spectator but instead registers the fear that
any instance of personal encounter might be being manipulated invisibly’.
She continues:
[They propose] a paranoid cityscape laced with a pervasive mistrust of
perception, and, therefore, of many of the assumptions upon which
one’s social and economic navigation of the city – and of the institutional
spaces of art – depend . . . In different ways, these artworks
register the uncomfortable nature of this environment, pointing to the
hysterical eruptions of theatre in every facet of interaction – from
the casual encounter in the street, to a view of the passing crowd, to the
fi gure of authority. 80
In this context, Argentine media art – such as the Happening for a Dead
Boar – seems astonishingly prescient: a work that exists solely as mediation
and operates by rumour becoming a meta- commentary on mediation and
its capacity to fi ctionalise.
V. Art as a Terrorist Act
Participatory actions in Argentina therefore emerge in response to a far
harsher set of contextual co- ordinates than does participatory art in Europe,
and have very different aesthetic consequences. If European and North
American participatory art is fi gured as a critique of spectacle in consumer
capitalism and seeks to promote collective activity over individual passivity,
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