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

notes to pages 94– 8
theatre. In this context, Kaprow’s interest in participation was the exception
rather than the rule. See Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments
and Happenings, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966.
67 Household, for example, was commissioned by Cornell University and
presented on 3 May 1964. Kaprow’s score tells us that ‘There were no
spectators at this event, which was to be performed regardless of weather.
Participants attended a preliminary meeting on May 2, where the Happening
was discussed and parts were distributed.’ (Full script in Allan
Kaprow, Some Recent Happenings, New York: A Great Bear Pamphlet,
1966, n.p.)
68 This technique was also deployed by The Living Theatre, and is discussed
in Lebel’s book- length interview with Julian Beck and Judith Malina,
Entretiens avec Le Living Theatre, Paris: Editions Pierre Belfond, 1969.
69 Günter Berghaus, ‘Happenings in Europe in the ’60s: Trends, Events,
and Leading Figures’, TDR, 37:4, Winter 1993, pp. 161– 2.
70 Lebel, ‘On the Necessity of Violation’, p. 98.
71 Poster for Pour conjurer l’esprit de catastrophe (fi rst version, 1962), in Lebel
and Michaël (eds), Happenings de Jean- Jacques Lebel, p. 48, my translation.
72 Lebel, interview with Arnaud Labelle- Rojoux, in Lebel and Labelle-
Rojoux, Poesie Directe: Happenings/ Interventions, Paris: Opus
International Edition, 1994, p. 70, my translation.
73 In summer 1964 The Living Theatre went into voluntary exile in Europe
after the government seized their Fourteenth Street theatre because Julian
Beck and Judith Malina had failed to pay federal excise and payroll taxes.
74 Lebel gives the example of a Happening in which Taylor Meade brought
a lover, with his camel, to the performance. The camel went on stage and
wouldn’t come down for two days. ‘So this is the thing, it changed all our
plans. We really allowed things to happen. It was the contrary of rigidity.
Everything was free fl owing.’ (Lebel, interview with the author, Paris, 22
July 2010.)
75 Gualtiero Jacopetti and Paolo Cavara’s Malamondo (1964) is a fi lm that
Lebel has publicly denounced as a conscious misrepresentation of his
Happening to produce a scandalous object of consumption. Footage of
other events is edited into this pseudo- documentary, including stock
shots of Dachau concentration camp, nudist skiing, a gay rights festival
in Montparnasse, and a ‘night orgy’ in a cemetery. See Lebel, ‘Flashback’,
pp. 12– 13.
76 It is worth bearing in mind that Lebel was also a close associate of Allen
Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who lived in Paris 1959– 66 and whose
work Lebel translated into French.
77 Lebel, interview with the author, Paris, 22 July 2010.
78 Lebel, interview with the author, Paris, 22 July 2010. Lebel was close
friends with Deleuze and Guattari, whom he had met in 1955 and 1965
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