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

artificial hells
1977. Although the government retaliated predictably and violently by
imprisoning several of the signatories, Charter 77 gave momentum to
organised opposition in the 1980s and played an instrumental role in the
Velvet Revolution of 1989.
With this political background in mind, it is possible to observe the
changing idea of public space as manifested in participatory art from the
1960s (when actions in public were possible) to the 1970s (when public gatherings
were banned), and the different ways in which artists dealt with this
in Prague and Bratislava. The fi rst fi gure to be considered is Milan Knížák
(b.1940), an idiosyncratic character based in Prague, associated with Fluxus,
and organiser of the fi rst Happenings in Czechoslovakia. Through the critic
Jindřich Chalupecký, Knížák was in contact with Allan Kaprow and Jean-
Jacques Lebel, and in 1965 was nominated as ‘Director of Fluxus East’ by
George Brecht. Yet Knížák rejected both Fluxus and the Happenings:
Fluxus for the contrived slightness of its events (which remained tied to the
format of conventional stage performance) and the Happenings for their
excessive theatricality. 10 He felt that his own work was more ‘natural’, and
closer to the reality of human life. As such, he preferred the term ‘actions’,
and sought to set his work at one remove from Western trends. Signifi cantly,
the key factor for him was the status of the participants:
the majority of actions – happenings – in the United States and of those
created by other Western authors, and almost all actions of the Fluxus group,
as far as I was able to ascertain from recent publications, are quite easily realised
without the input of the participants. This is because they rely more on
spectators than on participants. What they really create are tableaux vivants
which intend to impress by virtue of their uniqueness and their drastic
impact. Thus, they fall readily into the traditional framework . . . 11
An additional difference, for Knížák, was the question of urgency. In the mid
’60s he frequently claimed that action art was not a matter of art at all, but of
necessity, a fundamental concern to man. Western art, by contrast, seemed to
him a ‘titillation, a delicacy, a topic of conversation’; his activities, he wrote,
‘are not experimental art, but necessary activity’. 12 It is important to understand
that this necessity was not construed as political urgency: Knížák
sought a fusion of art and life (in the most utopian and naive manner) that has
no direct equivalents in the West. His approach is less politically motivated
than those of Guy Debord and Jean- Jacques Lebel, and more poetic and
provocational than Kaprow’s, even while he shared with all of these fi gures
the desire for a more intensely lived social experience.
Most of Knížák’s actions took place outdoors, on the street and in backyards.
In order to minimise interruption by police authorities, they were
undertaken swiftly and lasted no longer than twenty minutes. One of his
most celebrated actions was A Walk Around Nový Svět (1964). 13 Knížák
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