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

artificial hells
tract Contra Venezia Passatista (‘Against Past- Loving Venice’) over the
piazza, before improvising a ‘Speech to the Venetians’ that ended in a
brawl. Other events specifi cally targeted the working class: in summer
1910, Marinetti lectured on ‘The Necessity and Beauty of Violence’ at the
Labour Exchange in Naples, the Chamber of Unionised Labour in Parma,
and the Revolutionary Hall in Milan. 17 It is worth remembering that these
social disruptions did not take place to épater le bourgeois, but rather to
convert the widest possible range of Italians to a nationalist, militaristic,
techno- futurist cause that aimed to motivate colonial expansion and rouse
enthusiasm for war. Participation in Futurist theatre was explicitly viewed
as a way to train and prepare the spectator for participation in this new
age: using the metaphor of sports practice, the Futurist Synthetic Theatre
manifesto optimistically proclaimed that ‘Futurist Theatre will be a gymnasium
to train our race’s spirit’. 18 It didn’t matter if audiences claimed to
hate Futurism; their ongoing presence and violent reactions created a
small- scale war that proved the validity of the artists’ programme. As long
as audiences continued to pay attention and be provoked, then Futurism
was achieving its goal of a political project geared towards affi rming
Italy’s entry into the modern world through war, technology and destruction.
Failure could only have been marked by audience neutrality: its
remaining unaffected, in a traditional spectatorial mode of benign and
detached contemplation. 19
For Marinetti, participation was therefore understood as the end of
traditional spectatorship, and as total commitment to a cause. Experiencing
new aesthetic modes such as Futurism meant abandoning one’s traditional
expectations and operating instead on the basis of total openness: ‘it is
necessary to forget entirely one’s intellectual culture, not in order to assimilate
the work of art, but to deliver one’s self up to it heart and soul’. 20 If this
abandonment evokes Romantic rapture (‘to disturb the peace of the audience’s
mind, to let it be overwhelmed by powerful emotions, albeit negative
ones’), then it was also accompanied by unquestionably regressive aspects
too: a reduction to mob mentality, and the abandonment of critical distance
and reasoned logic to a mindless anticipation of the future through nationalist
violence. 21 When reading accounts of the serate, it is hard not to
conclude that what was provoked above all was the lowest common denominator:
When the curtain went up, a howling tribe of cannibals raised their thousands
of arms and greeted our apparition with a volley of objects from
the animal, vegetable and mineral world . . . No one thought of taking
the fi rst word. We were totally overwhelmed by this reception. We
looked at our audience and began to read the banners that were displayed
from the dress circle: ‘Perverts! Pederasts! Pimps! Charlatans!
Buffoons!’ 22
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