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

notes to pages 119– 23
57 Ibid.
58 Emilio Ghilioni and Rodolfo Elizalde, ‘Proposal for the Ciclo de Arte
Experimental, September 23– 28 1968’, in ibid., pp. 112– 13.
59 Carnevale, in LHN, p. 299.
60 Carnevale, interview with the author, Rosario, 8 December 2009.
61 In the event, the majority of press coverage came from arts publications,
since the media were too wary of running such an overtly anti- propagandist
story in the mainstream news. Attempts to connect the project to
militant research and political intervention tended to come from abroad,
such as ‘Les Fils de Marx et Mondrian: Dossier Argentine’, Robho, 5– 6,
1971, pp. 16– 22.
62 ‘I can tell you for certain that there was no relationship between my
husband [Augusto Boal] and Masotta nor between Boal and contemporary
artists. My husband’s theatre was very clearly engaged with the
revolutionary left and pursued by the dictatorships of that period in Latin
America, and all his research was directed towards helping the oppressed
and the militants who were fi ghting against the dictatorships, of which he
had himself also been a victim when he was kidnapped, imprisoned and
tortured, after which we had to exile ourselves. It’s for this reason that his
priority goal was to help the left . . .’ (Cecilia Boal, email to the author, 19
October 2010.) At the same time, however, Cecilia Boal – a psychoanalyst
– participated in study groups with Masotta.
63 See, for example, Image Theatre, Newspaper Theatre, Photo- Romance,
Myth Theatre, etc., discussed in Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed,
London: Pluto Press, 2000, pp. 120– 55. This emphasis on empowerment
was directly indebted to Paulo Freire, whose Christian Socialism
embraced a non- orthodox form of Liberation Theology. I will return to
Freire in Chapter 9.
64 Ibid., p. 141.
65 Augusto Boal, Hamlet and the Baker’s Son: My Life in Theatre and Politics,
London and New York: Routledge, 2001, p. 304.
66 Ibid.
67 For the full account of this intervention, see Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed,
pp. 144– 7. A different version is given in his Hamlet and the Baker’s Son,
emphasising the humanitarian law.
68 Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed, p. 147. Boal notes that this works against
the very premises of an artist’s desire to work in public: ‘Consternation:
The reason we do theatre is to be seen, isn’t it?’ (Boal, Hamlet and the
Baker’s Son, p. 304).
69 The US- backed Onganía dictatorship had forbidden mini- skirts for
women and long hair for men, operated a policy of clampdown on
perceived opponents in the universities, and cracked down on labour
unrest (in 1969). By the mid 1970s the repression was even more extreme,
with secret detention centres where 20– 30,000 kidnapped people were
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