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

notes to pages 135– 8
employed to disorient the participant; what followed was a natural development
of the latter method [i.e. spontaneous reaction].’ Knížák saw
evidence of the latter when an ordinary working girl participating in one
of his actions declared: “I have completely torn my one and only skirt up
to the waist, and destroyed my stockings completely, but I do not regret it
one bit!” (Knížák, Actions For Which at Least Some Documentation
Remains, pp. 7– 8.)
18 Ibid., p. 7.
19 Knížák is one of the few artists of this period to keep a track record of
audience response to some of his works, although this is invariably a catalogue
of reactions without analysis. See also his documentation of People
Who Were Given Paper Planes on October 3, 1965, in Knížák, Invollstandige
Dokumentation/ Some Documentary 1961– 1979, Berlin: Edition Ars
Viva, 1980, pp. 100– 2.
20 Milan Knížák and Jan Maria Mach, ‘An Event for the Post Offi ce, the
Police, and the Occupants of no.26 Vaclavkova Street, Prague 6, and for
all Their Neighbours, Relatives and Friends’, in Pospiszyl and Hoptman
(eds.), Primary Documents, p. 121.
21 Milan Knížák, ‘A- Community 1963– 1971’, in Fluxus East, p. 80.
22 Knížák, Actions For Which at Least Some Documentation Remains, p. 158.
Knížák claims that this work was fi rst produced in 1966 in Prague but
there is no documentary evidence to support this.
23 Diffi cult Ceremony is closer to recent iterations of this theme, such as
Carsten Höller’s The Baudouin/Boudewijn Experiment (2000). See Claire
Bishop (ed.), Participation, London: Whitechapel and Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2006, pp. 144– 5.
24 Action for My Mind comprises a long series of questions, beginning:
‘Do I exist? Who am I? What am I like? Am I good? How many
hands do I have? Am I the Buddha? What do I want? Do I believe in
God? Do I believe in anything? In someone? Could I kill? Have I
killed?’, and so on.
25 A full transcript, plus two accounts by participants, can be found in Geoffrey
Hendricks (ed.), Critical Mass: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance,
Intermedia and Rutgers University, 1958– 1972, Rutgers, New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2003, pp. 113– 15.
26 Pierre Restany, ‘De Varsovie, Žilina, Prague, avec Amour’, Domus, 518,
January 1972, p. 56.
27 Milan Knížák, Travel Book, English translation by Paul Wilson in Claire
Bishop and Marta Dzeiwańska (eds.), 1968– 1989: Political Upheaval and
Artistic Change, Warsaw: Museum of Modern Art, 2010, p. 216. First
published in Czech as Milan Knížák, Cestopisy, Prague: Post, 1990.
28 Ibid., p. 214.
29 ‘I was also at the New School for an evening put together by Ron Gross
from the work of Dick Higgins, Jackson McLow and Larry Friedfeld.
323