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

artificial hells
On the other hand, this cataclysm of insults and attacks can also be read as
the sign of a desire on the part of the audience to participate – a demand
that is increasingly gratifi ed as the twentieth century progresses.
After 1918, when Marinetti returned from service at the front, Futurist
performances became more spectacular and overtly political. Up until
1914, the Futurist serate had no regular structure, and could consist of
poetry readings, political declamations, plays, lectures, art displays and
brawls. Typical early serate presented politically provocative speeches
alongside recitals of the key ideas of Futurism (as declared in their manifestos),
and demonstrated how the latter could be translated into a performative
language. Paintings were brought on stage, music was played and free-
verse poetry recited, but the evenings could also include juggling, dancing
and competitions. At this point, Futurist aesthetics were in harmony with
political goals but not entirely subservient to them. Gradually, political
ambitions grew more prominent, with more clearly defi ned claims for anti-
traditionalism and militant nationalism, leading to a consolidation of
formal developments. After 1914, a scenographic component was introduced
and the style of production was less casually improvised.
Performances were more scripted, and engaged with the conventions of
theatre: Marinetti’s Le Basi (Feet, 1915), for example, was a series of seven
scenes with minimal dialogue, in which the public saw only the actors’ legs
beneath a partially raised curtain. 23 New technology was embraced in the
form of electric refl ectors, coloured panes of glass, beams of coloured light,
neon and ultraviolet tubes, all theorised by Enrico Prampolini. 24 Audiences
were far larger (as many as 5,000) and Marinetti’s close friendship with
Mussolini meant that the group now had the means to build an experimental
theatre in the baths of Septimius Severus in Rome, leading to ambitious
experiments in total theatre, such as Anton Guilio Bragaglia’s Il Teatro
Sperimentale degli Indipendenti (1923– 36).
In Futurism, then, performance became the privileged paradigm for
artistic and political operations in the public sphere. More than painting,
sculpture or literature, performance constituted a space of shared collective
presence and self- representation. The Futurist desire for dynamism,
activation and emotional arousal is repeated in innumerable avant- garde
calls of subsequent decades, when performance was perceived as able to
rouse emotion more vividly than the perusal of static objects. But if the
Futurist approach to participation was via negativa – as a form of total
emotional response in which one could not occupy the position of a
distanced observer but was incited to take part in an orgy of destruction
– then the 1960s model would be conducted in a more optimistic light, as
an artistic metaphor for emancipation, self- awareness and a heightened
experience of the everyday. Paradoxically, the creative options available
to audiences seem less determined in Futurist performances than in the
scored participation of the Happenings and other experiments of the 1960s,
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