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

artificial hells
nature of artistic creation and cooperation.’ 50 However, this ‘sociological
happening’ was not without confl ict and tension: the painter Fulla issued an
offi cial statement the following day denying his agreement to the event; a
scandal burst out, Mlynárčik’s work was called ‘an insult to Slovakian
culture’ and he was dismissed from the Union of Soviet Artists (membership
of which was necessary to exhibit one’s work). 51 These incidents reveal
the gap between Mlynárčik’s optimistic rhetoric and the dominant conditions
of normalisation: the celebratory tone of his ‘permanent manifestations’
such as Eva’s Wedding seem strikingly in disaccord with political reality,
especially when we consider the introverted character of art produced in
Prague during this period.
There are various ways of explaining this disjuncture. On the one hand,
we can point to the particular reception of socialism in Slovakia: in general,
the conditions there were more liberal than in the Czech land, while the
advent of state socialism had substantially modernised this rural and primarily
agricultural country (hence the possibility of a non- ironic reading of
Happsoc as ‘happy socialism’). 52 Slovaks tend to assert that their national
character is one of quiet co- operation rather than heroic resistance (there
is, for example, no tradition of masochistic body art as one fi nds in Austria
and the Czech Republic), and this argument sheds light on the affi rmative
mood of Mlynárčik’s participatory art. Traditional events such as weddings
offered an opportunity for festivities and a perfect guise for unusual activities;
the underground rock band Plastic People of the Universe, for
example, often camoufl aged their concerts as wedding celebrations. For
Mlynárčik, a wedding with folkloric elements would seem to provide a
legitimate cover for an extravagant art event. But however we account for
the tenor of Mlynárčik’s work, events like Eva’s Wedding are unquestionably
compensatory: a utopian fantasy geared towards the co- creation of a
more tolerable experience of the everyday, an escape through festivity and
hommage anchored in vernacular tradition rather than sombre ritual. This
is not to undermine the work by subjecting it to contemporary criteria;
rather, it is to point up the extent to which Mlynárčik – like Knížák – is
always more interested in individual liberation than in social justice or
solidarity. 53
Rather like Knížák setting up the A- Community, Mlynárčik seems less
interested in the formation of a counter- public sphere than in the creation
of a sovereign domain of which he is the sole organiser (of artists and
non- artists alike). This interpretation is borne out by a subsequent
project, the imaginary land of Argíllia that he founded in 1974. Although
a local peasant called Ondrej Krištofík was proclaimed King of Argíllia,
everything to do with the formation of Argíllia’s protocols and representation
was the preserve of Mlynárčik and his colleagues in the art world.
Galerie Vincy in Paris was renamed the head of Agence Argíllia- Presse,
while friends and critics were given elaborate titles (Chalupecký, for
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