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

the social under socialism
for participants. 45 Happsoc III: The Altar of Contemporaneity, by Stano Filko,
went on to posit the appropriation of the entire territory of Czechoslovakia
as the artist’s own work in June 1966, and the gesture is typical of his
fervently megalomaniac cosmic conceptualism.
As tightly scored conceptual experiments with the social, Happsoc stands
in sharp contrast to Mlynárčik’s subsequent participatory works in the later
1960s, which were more emphatically physical, visual and collective. These
events alluded to vernacular tradition (such as weddings and village festivals)
and to art history (restaging nineteenth- century masterpieces as live
events), and often involved the participation of people who had no idea
they were forming part of a work of art. Many of these took place in the
countryside or in Mlynárčik’s home town of Žilina in the north of Slovakia.
In part this rural relocation was a necessary consequence of ‘normalisation’:
action art had to take place illegally, and expelled itself to the margins
of the city or more frequently into the countryside (such as the Tatra
mountains) to avoid surveillance; the landscape stands as a symbolic escape
from contemporary social reality organised by bureaucratic directives, and
perhaps also as an assertion of Slovak national identity (mountains cover
40 percent of the country). 46
Mlynárčik referred to these events as ‘permanent manifestations of
joining art and life’, a category that he had proposed and defi ned in
Autumn 1965, and which he used to refer to the Happsoc I and II, but also
to his photographs of graffi ti in Paris and Czechoslovakia during May ’68.
One of his most striking works of this period is the collaboratively
authored First Snow Festival (1970), with the artist Miloš Urbásek and the
experimental musicians Milan Adamčiak and Robert Cyprich, which was
organised as an unoffi cial parallel to the world skiing championships in the
High Tatras. The leitmotif of the First Snow Festival was the recreation of
works of art from the Renaissance to the present day; the main material
was snow, which the artists used in various ways, interpreting works that
seem to have no apparent or direct link to snow or skiing, but which
usefully indicate the degree of international contact between artists at this
time. Urbásek, for example, painted a series of snowmen in a Homage to
Niki de Saint Phalle, while Robert Cyprich’s Cross- Country Homage to
Walter de Maria comprised two parallel ski tracks in the snow for fi fty
kilometres. Milan Adamčiak paid homage to Otto Piene of the Zero Group
with a work comprising a burning circle in the snow. Other artists referenced
included fi gures from US Pop (Lichtenstein, Wesselmann,
Oldenburg, Segal), European contemporaries (Arman, Christo, Kounellis,
Miralda, Uecker) and historical fi gures such as Brueghel, da Vinci,
Malevich and Magritte. The emphasis was on transient material, and playful
reappropriation of works of art, amounting to a temporary improvised
biennial in the snow. 47
Other works by Mlynárčik took the form of festivals restaging historic
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