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

artificial hells
It is in this literary context, with a strong reverence for textual expression,
that the Collective Actions Group (CAG) (Kollektivnye Deistvia, or
K/ D) was formed in 1976; at its inception there were four members; by
1979 there were seven. 76 The group took its lead from the fi rst generation
of Moscow Conceptualists, especially Kabakov; their central theorist,
Andrei Monastyrsky (b.1949), has recalled that their earliest pieces were
perceived as a form of poetry reading. 77 Most of their actions typically
followed a standard format: a group of fi fteen to twenty participants were
invited by telephone (at a time when, of course, phone lines were tapped)
to take a train to a designated station outside Moscow; they would walk
from the station to a remote fi eld; the group would wait around (not knowing
what would happen), before witnessing a minimal, perhaps mysterious,
and often visually unremarkable event. On returning to Moscow, participants
would write an account of the experience and offer interpretations of
its meaning; these subsequently became the focus of discussion and debate
amongst the artists and their circle. 78
It should immediately be apparent that the intellectualism of this structure
is a considerable development of the 1960s model, in which it was
regarded as suffi cient simply for things to ‘happen’, and through which the
participating subject would attain a more vivid, authentic level of reality
(as seen for example in the work of Knížák and Kaprow). Monastyrsky
complicates this paradigm by aiming to produce situations in which participants
had no idea what was going to happen, to the point where they
sometimes found it diffi cult to know whether or not they had in fact experienced
an action; when participants’ engagement fi nally occurred, it was
Ilya Kabakov in his studio, reciting one of his Albums, c. 1976
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