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

artificial hells
form of a stream of questions. 24 The two works produced after this experience
seem to place participants in a similar condition of introspection, and it
is telling that two accounts of this work both emphasise how the participants
felt gently ‘manipulated’ by the artist. 25 Knížák’s use of the word ‘ceremony’
to describe these events nevertheless maintains an allusion to collective
action, and looks ahead to his work of the 1970s, in which participation
becomes increasingly silent and ritualistic.
It seems revealing that Knížák found his experience in the US to be frustrating,
and returned to Prague long before the expiry of his visa. The
critic Pierre Restany reports that he could not express himself through
American reality, suggesting that ideological differences continued to be
crippling for artists from the East (‘the new generation in eastern Europe
has been grown in an absolutely non- competitive structure, the perfect
antinomy of the occident’). 26 Restany’s summary is correct if somewhat
idealised: after being a minor celebrity in Prague, it was hard for Knížák to
adjust to being one of hundreds of artists in New York City, all of whom
seemed to have a similar approach to blurring art and life. Knížák’s diffi -
culty in making an impact there is reinforced by his diaristic travelogue of
this period, Cestopisy (Travel Book), where he laments that the only people
who pay attention to art are other artists and their friends (unlike, one
assumes, the general public addressed by works like A Walk Around Nový
Svět). In Prague, Knížák was alone in proclaiming the radical fusion of art
and life; he was dumbfounded to fi nd this a commonplace idea in the US:
I’ve discovered a huge paradox here. Certainly all of you know how the
entry of simple things into art, the rapprochement of art and reality, that
modest and noble celebration of the simplest acts, has become glorifi ed
and exaggerated. Now it’s reached the point where many artists who
sweep the stairs claim that they are doing their piece . . . Any kind of
activity whatever, even the most insignifi cant, is almost instantaneously
stamped with the hallmark of art. 27
Knížák describes running up and down escalators in several department stores,
and how, after the intensity of this experience, ‘all these artistic programmes
tasted like distilled water to me’. 28 His identifi cation with Fluxus rapidly dwindled,
although he engaged in productive dialogue with Allan Kaprow. 29 Finally,
the need for money to survive in the US meant that paradoxically he felt less
free than in Czechoslovakia. Not only was the cost of living in Prague very low,
since the state provided housing, but this same state gratifyingly responded
when he provoked its authority. In the US he lacked an Oedipal father to antagonise
and thereby receive affi rmation through its acknowledgment; at the end
of Travel Book he speaks of being hugely content to be back in Prague where he
had organised seven concerts that were banned.
In the 1970s, however, normalisation conspired to make such tauntings
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