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

notes to pages 139– 41
Dick is already a classic at thirty. At times I fi nd it a little embarrasing. . . .
why for God’s sake does the avant- garde become academic so quickly, so
rapidly? In the Museum of Modern Art I saw a fantastic Pollock and a
Mathies and it seemed to me less academic than when Dick Higgins, on a
darkened stage, shouts beautifully and savagely . . . and then the lights
came up and people clapped! And I don’t even think he forgot to bow:
performer Dick.’ (Ibid., pp. 214– 15.)
30 As Tomáš Pospiszyl notes: ‘The audience for photo documentation of
Czech performers from the 1970s is not a group of anonymous watchers.
This is not only because we often know them by names and that
they know very well that they are taking part in an art action. They
know that the photographs will be seen by a large secondary audience
and maybe by the police, who can decode them as a disturbance of the
peace. They take that risk. Just the fact that they are present and photographed
means they become part of the event. They are not people
from the street as in Knížák’s happenings. Even if they remain passive
during the whole event, they are participants, accomplices.’ See Pospiszyl,
‘Look Who’s Watching: Photographic Documentation of
Happenings and Performances in Czechoslovakia’, in Bishop and
Dziewańska (eds.), 1968– 1989: Political Upheaval and Artistic Change,
p. 85. The Czech sections of this chapter are indebted to Pospiszyl’s
nuanced reading of this period.
31 The article also notes that Knížák was unable to participate in this work
‘for political reasons’. See Knížák, Actions For Which at Least Some Documentation
Remains, p. 202.
32 See Knížák, Invollstandige Dokumentation/ Some Documentary 1961–
1979, p. 80.
33 Pospiszyl, ‘Look Who’s Watching’, p. 82.
34 In focusing this discussion on Mlynárčik and his large- scale participatory
works, I will be omitting reference to his production of assemblages
and photomontages, and his work with the experimental architecture
group VAL (Voies et Aspects du Lendemain), 1968– 74, a research team
producing visionary proposals along the lines of Archigram in the UK.
Like Knížák’s experiments with music, these parallel activities show the
extent to which these artists are not solely interested in participatory art
actions.
35 In the 1990s, Mlynárčik’s name – along with that of Ján Budaj and the
philosopher Egon Bondy – appeared on a list of people who had collaborated
with the Státna Bezpečnost or secret service. However, it remains
debatable to what extent Mlynárčik actually did inform on fellow artists
or was expected simply to report on his numerous travels abroad; this
may simply have been a concession he was willing to make in order to be
afforded more artistic freedom and travel. Knížák, by contrast, was
Chancellor of the Prague Academy of Fine Arts (1990– 97) and director
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