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

notes to pages 111– 2
designed to tease and abuse the audience. . . . There is no attempt to cater
to the audience’s desire to see everything. In fact this is often deliberately
frustrated, by performing some of the events in semi- darkness or by
having events go on in different rooms simultaneously. . . . This abusive
involvement of the audience seems to provide, in default of anything
else, the dramatic spine of the Happening.’ (Susan Sontag, ‘Happenings:
An Art of Radical Juxtaposition’ [1962], in Against Interpretation, London:
Vintage, 2001, pp. 265, 267.) Masotta quotes part of this passage in his
essay ‘Three Argentines in New York’ (1966), LHN, pp. 185– 90. My
conversations with US artists from this period (Schneemann, Bob Whitman,
Julie Martin, Alison Knowles, interviewed in February 2010)
counter Sontag’s view: all of them confi rmed that US Happenings (or
better, ‘artists’ theatre’) were far from aggressive, and characterised by a
sympathetic spirit, with a focused and concentrated audience.
28 Oscar Masotta, Sexo y traicion en Roberto Arlt (Sex and Betrayal in Roberto
Arlt), Buenos Aires: Editorial Jorge Álvarez, 1965.
29 The account given here is taken from the document ‘Suceso Plástico’ in
the Marta Minujín archive, and an interview with Marta Minujín in
Buenos Aires, 7 December 2009. Before the adoption of Happenings as a
descriptor, Minujín referred to her work as sucesos, or events, a word that
carries the connotation of something evolving successively in time. Her
defi nition evokes the value system of Happenings: ‘It is the development
of an idea through live situations that use contrast, dissociation, and a
speed almost without everyday time, to provoke a type of shock, removing
the spectator from his inertia and transforming everything into a
collective situation. . . . It is not a spectacle because there’s no distance
between the viewer and the action, the spectator participates, takes part in
the suceso.’ (M.L.T., ‘Marta Minujín: sus “Sucesco” y la Creciente Desaparición
de las Galerías y Marchands’, El Pais, Montevideo, 19 July 1965,
in Minujín archive, Buenos Aires, my translation.)
30 All of these participants seem to have been secured on the morning of the
event, by Minujín roving the streets (with three buses) to see what kind of
participants she could fi nd.
31 The event was a scandal in Uruguay and led to a trial, resulting in Minujín
being banned from that country for twenty years. Although the cause
of scandal was the treatment of a chicken by one of the participants (who
tore it apart and began using its blood to paint), a greater shock for
Uruguayans was the overt waste of food resources in an impoverished
neighbourhood. (Conversation with Luis Camnitzer, New York, 23
March 2010.)
32 The Ghost Message is closer to the media art experiments of Jacoby and
Costa and clearly evolved in dialogue with them. On 16 and 17 July 1966,
Masotta put up a poster bearing the neutral statement, ‘This poster will be
broadcast on Television Channel 11 on July 20’. On July 20, two
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