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

notes to pages 142– 5
the Conceptual Art in Slovakia’, in Conceptual Art at the Turn of the
Millennium, p. 26.)
44 Filko, Mlynárčik and Kostrová, ‘Manifest Happsoc’, in Pospiszyl and
Hoptman (eds.), Primary Documents, p. 87.
45 Instructions for the action included going to the station for ten minutes at
6 p.m. on 27 December, lighting a candle on 30 December, and so on.
Rather than seizing the city as a ready- made, it requested a small- scale
simultaneity of events from its participants. The schema is not unlike the
small collective actions required of participants (sometimes an entire
village) by the young Czech artist Katerina Šedá.
46 Restany describes Mlynárčik’s move to the land as a question of spiritual
survival under normalisation. (Restany, Ailleurs, p. 53.) US Land Art’s
engagement with open, uninhabited spaces is exactly synchronous with
Eastern European art’s move to the landscape, but motivated by quite
different reasons (a desire to circumnavigate the commercial art world, to
engage with the sublime expanses of the US landscape, and so on).
47 These ‘hommages’ to assorted artists could be compared to the efforts
made by Argentinian artists to recreate various Happenings from North
America during the mid 1960s. But if the Slovakian artists operate on the
basis of playful hommage to their international colleagues (which was
not censored), the Argentinians are more analytical; performance re-
enactments (discussed in Chapter 4) became a way to analyse, criticise
and surpass the works of their better- known contemporaries from the
hegemonic centre.
48 Chalupecký notes that the event ‘cost a small fortune. Mlynárčik didn’t
have, as is usual elsewhere, anyone to fund him. He had to be a sponsor
to himself. He realized a lot of decorative projects for architecture, paintings,
sculptures, glass works and metal works and he dedicated all
earnings to his manifestations, interpretations, games and celebrations.’
(Chalupecký, Na hranicích umění, pp. 118– 19, translation by Tomáš
Pospiszyl.) It was possible for artists to earn good money in the 1960s and
1970s, particularly if they sold works overseas (Mlynárčik was unusual in
having gallery representation in Paris). All artists were required to have
a job, of which the highest paid was to produce monumental commissions
for new architectural projects (Filko); other professions include teaching
art (Koller), designing fi lm posters (Knížák), and working in the zoo
(Peter Bartoš) or museums (Kovanda, Štembera, Miler).
49 See Henry Périer, Pierre Restany: L’Alchemiste de l’art, Paris: Editions
Cercle d’Art, 1998, p. 335: ‘Then he handed out the presents; twenty
works of art that Mlynárčik had requested from his artist friends around
the world. Thus it was that an electrician and his wife who would have
hoped for useful presents hailing from the West actually found themselves
with a collection of César, Nikos, Niki de Saint- Phalle, Bertini,
Hains . . . objects that were curious to their eyes, and which they didn’t
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