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

notes to pages 78– 80
8 Participation for the SI is not to be understood in the sense that Lebel and
GRAV use this term, that is, to describe an artistic strategy. Rather, the
SI’s interest in participation denotes full participation in society; see the
unsigned ‘Manifeste’ dated 17 May 1960, Internationale Situationniste, 4,
1960, p. 37.
9 See for example Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the
Twentieth Century, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, and
Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a
Postmodern Age, London and New York: Routledge, 1992. A rare
comparative study is Jon Erikson’s ‘The Spectacle of the Anti- spectacle:
Happenings and the Situationist International’, Discourse, 14:2, Spring
1992, pp. 36– 58. Catherine Millet’s Contemporary Art in France (Paris:
Flammarion, 2006), is more typical in including only one reference to
Debord and the SI in her nearly 400- page survey.
10 ‘On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in
Time: The Situationist International, 1957– 1972’ toured from the
Centre Pompidou to the London ICA and culminated at the ICA,
Boston 1989–90.
11 Rod Kedward, La Vie en Bleu: France and the French Since 1900, London:
Allen Lane/ Penguin, 2005, p. 404. ‘A man is alienated when his only
relationship to the social direction of his society is the one the ruling class
accords him . . . cancelling out social confl ict by creating dependent
participation.’ (Alain Touraine, The Post- Industrial Society, London:
Wildwood House, 1974, p. 9.)
12 See for example the SI: ‘While participation becomes more impossible,
the second- rate inventors of modern art demand the participation of
everyone.’ Unsigned, ‘The Avant- Garde of Presence’, Internationale
Situationniste, 8, 1963, p. 315, my translation.
13 Michel Ragon, ‘Vers une démocratisation de l’art’, in Vingt- cinq ans d’art
vivant, Paris: Casterman, 1969, pp. 355– 73.
14 Frank Popper, Art – Action, Participation, New York: New York University
Press, 1975, p. 12.
15 Ibid., p. 280.
16 Jean- Jacques Lebel, having grown up in close proximity to the Surrealist
group (and been eventually excluded from it), deliberately avoided this
approach, while Guy Debord continued to use Breton’s ‘papal’ model of
leadership for the SI.
17 The institutional recuperation of Dada began to take place at the end of
the 1950s, given momentum by Robert Motherwell’s anthology The
Dada Painters and Poets (1951); the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam,
held the large exhibition ‘Dada’ in 1959; in the same year, ‘L’Aventure
Dada’ was organised by Georges Hugnet at Galerie de l’Institut, Paris,
and followed by a Dada retrospective in 1966 at the Musée Nationale
d’art Moderne. We could also cite the Nouveaux Réalisme exhibition
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