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

notes to pages 150– 4
almost no interaction or interrelations exist between the inhabitants of
one burrow and the inhabitants of another. There is less sociableness here
than between animals who live in the forest . . .’ Thanks to Vit Havránek
for this reference.
66 Georg Schöllhammer, in Havránek (ed.), Jiří Kovanda, p. 111. He continues:
‘Kovanda’s question is, “Can you imagine – and not in an everyday
sense – what it means to step away from this society, to reject it, to reject
its language, and to think of yourself as the Other, as an autonomous
subject?”’
67 ‘For me it was something more personal than society’s alienation, or
people’s alienation from that society. I always felt it was more of a
personal matter for each individual and not a social matter. . . . The
personal aspect always predominated over the social.’ (Kovanda, interview
with Hans- Ulrich Obrist, in ibid., p. 107.) In this light, comparisons
to US body artists seem less apt than references to a younger generation
of Eastern European artists, specifi cally Paweł Althamer’s Real Time
Movie (2000) or Roman Ondák’s Good Feelings in Good Times (2003); see
Havránek, ‘Jiří Kovanda: The Faint Breeze of the Everyday’, Flash Art,
November–December 2007, p. 81.
68 Kovanda, interview with Hans- Ulrich Obrist, in Havránek (ed.), Jiří
Kovanda, p. 108.
69 Mlčoch, quoted in Hlaváček, ‘Vzpomínka na akčni umění 70.let, rozhovor
s Janem Mlčochem’, p. 77.
70 Lunch II (1979) took place in the Main Square of Bratislava.
71 See Budaj, interview with Jan Richter for Czech Radio, 24 May 2007,
transcribed at www.radio.cz.
72 The experimental theatre director L’ubomir Durček produced brief
choreographed actions in public space: formal disruptions such as Barrier
(1979), in which a group of people held hands across a busy street.
73 Andrei Erofeev, ‘Nonoffi cial Art: Soviet Artists of the 1960s’ (1995), in
Pospiszyl and Hoptman (eds.), Primary Documents, p. 42. See also William
J. Tompson, Khrushchev: A Political Life, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995,
Chapter 10.
74 Groys, interview with the author, New York, 28 January 2010.
75 ‘The communal apartment is a place where the social dimension occurs in
its most horrifying, most obtrusive, and most radical form, where the
individual is laid bare to the gaze of others. Furthermore, this gaze
belongs to largely hostile strangers who consistently exploit their advantages
of observation in order to gain advantage in the power struggle
within the communal apartment’ (Boris Groys, ‘The Theatre of Authorship’,
in Toni Stoos [ed.], Ilya Kabakov: Installations 1983– 2000, Catalogue
Raisonné, vol.1, Kunstmuseum Bern: Richter Verlag, 2003, p. 40).
76 In 2005 there were six members, according to an interview with Monastyrsky
in Flash Art, October 2005 (p. 114). The initial group were Nikita
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