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

artificial hells
perhaps regard them as spectatorphilic: Futurist performances were not
designed to negate the presence of the audience, but to exaggerate it, to
make it visible to itself, to stir it up, halt complacency, and cultivate confi -
dence rather than docile respect. 13 To this end, Futurist performers reversed
the conventional criteria of audience engagement: they were willing to
undergo ‘the scorn of the public’, especially on the opening night, and
developed a ‘horror of immediate success’. 14 However, the extent to which
spectators needed this retraining was debatable. With audiences (of all
classes) attending in their thousands, there was clearly a pre- existing desire
on the part of the public to participate in such events: to be harangued and
provoked, and to have the opportunity to heckle and assault in return.
Moreover, this desire for self- assertion on the part of the audience was
already manifest in art galleries elsewhere in Europe. Kandinsky recalled
that during an exhibition in Munich in 1910, ‘the owner of the gallery
complained that after the exhibition closed each day he had to wipe clean
the canvases upon which the public had spat . . . but they did not cut up the
canvases, as happened to me once in another city during my exhibition’. 15
A year later Albert Gleizes, writing on the Cubist section of the Salon
d’Automne in Paris, noted that the room became ‘a mob like the one at the
Indépendants’:
People struggle at the doors to get in, they discuss and argue in front of
the pictures; they are either for or against, they take sides, they say what
they think at the tops of their voices, they interrupt one another, protest,
lose their tempers, provoke contradictions; unbridled abuse comes up
against equally intemperate expressions of admiration; it is a tumult of
cries, shouts, bursts of laughter, protests. 16
In this context, Futurism’s innovation was not so much about empowering
the audience as harnessing and redirecting its energy and attention: Futurism
created the conditions for a symbiosis between an artistic embrace of
violence and audiences who wanted to be part of a work of art and feel
legitimated to participate in its violence. Importantly, this applied not only
to working- class members of the audience at Futurist serate but also to the
upper and middle classes who threw vegetables and eggs, and brought
along car horns, cow bells, whistles, pipes, rattles and banners. The aim
was to produce a space of participation as one of total destruction, in which
expressions of hostility were available to all classes as a brutal form of
entertainment.
Theatrically framed provocation was not the only means deployed by
Futurists to stir up public opinion. It was supported by other public activities:
meetings, riots, speeches, poetic tournaments, picket lines, rallies
and boycotts. In 1910, for example, Marinetti and friends climbed the
campanile in St Mark’s Square, Venice, to shower 80,000 copies of their
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