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

artificial hells
suggesting that destructive modes of participation might be more inclusive
than those that purport to be democratically open. 25 This is an uncomfortable
conclusion to support: as is well known, Futurism’s embrace of nation
and war came to establish the ideological foundations of Italian Fascism,
and as Walter Benjamin pointed out, Fascism is precisely the political
formation that allows people to participate in, and enjoy, the spectacle of
their own destruction. 26 In 1924, Leon Trotsky asked:
did not Italian Fascism come into power by ‘revolutionary’ methods, by
bringing into action the masses, the mobs and the millions, and by
tempering and arming them? It is not an accident, it is not a misunderstanding,
that Italian Futurism has merged into the torrent of Fascism; it
is entirely in accord with the law of cause and effect. 27
Trotsky goes on to point out the similarity of means between Italian
Fascism and the Russian Revolution. The difference between the two, he
explains, is that ‘We stepped into the Revolution while the Futurists fell
into it.’ 28 In other words, if Italian Futurism blindly harnessed participatory
destruction, then collective cultural production in post- revolutionary
Russia was based on strategic affi rmations of social change.
II. Theatricalising Life
In the years immediately following the 1917 Revolution, the triad of author,
work of art and audience underwent an ideological reprogramming that
spanned art, theatre and music. In general terms, the aim was to bring
cultural practice into line with the Bolshevik Revolution, although what
exactly this comprised was a fraught question: to reduce the aristocracy’s
grip on culture, or to promote cultural production by the working class?
To abandon traditional media and embrace new technology, or to destroy
bourgeois culture altogether? To refl ect social reality, or to produce it? The
best- known examples of the post- revolutionary avant- garde – defi ned
initially as Futurist, then Constructivist, and after 1921 as Productivist –
dealt with these questions by rejecting bourgeois, individually produced
forms of art (such as painting), founded in taste and produced for a patron
market, in favour of practices integrated into industrial production and
designed for collective reception. Artists such as Tatlin, Rodchenko,
Popova and Stepanova sought a social and practical application for their
work, designing clothing, ceramics, posters and furniture for mass production
and consumption. In the discussion that follows I will not be focusing
on this elision of the fi ne and applied arts, but rather on theatre and performance
as privileged vehicles for collective participation. Although fi lm is
frequently regarded as the advanced art form par excellence of the Soviet
Revolution, it is the immediacy, economy and proliferation of theatrical
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