Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...
Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...
Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...
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artificial hells<br />
actuality that no stage performance, with trained actors <strong>and</strong> modern lighting,<br />
could touch <strong>the</strong> fringe <strong>of</strong>’. 56 This immediacy is detectable in what images <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong><br />
production exist: <strong>the</strong> silhouette <strong>of</strong> a man st<strong>and</strong>ing on a walkway above an<br />
industrial chasm <strong>of</strong> pulleys, bars <strong>and</strong> pipes, backlit by an industrial glow. Eisenstein’s<br />
example immediately st<strong>and</strong>s out from <strong>the</strong> vast body <strong>of</strong> Proletkult <strong>the</strong>atre<br />
productions, whose formulaic character leads one to imagine each production<br />
as being more or less <strong>the</strong> same play with minor variations in personnel <strong>and</strong> plot.<br />
In Gas Masks, <strong>the</strong> chasm between quality (<strong>of</strong> production) <strong>and</strong> equality (in both<br />
its message <strong>and</strong> accessibility) seems to have been far less gaping than usual.<br />
Amateur <strong>the</strong>atre groups also gave rise to related organisations such as <strong>the</strong><br />
Living Newspaper (1919) – a <strong>the</strong>atrical ‘feuilleton’ or dramatised montage,<br />
based partly on political events <strong>and</strong> partly on local <strong>the</strong>mes emerging from<br />
everyday life – <strong>and</strong> <strong>the</strong> agitpop collective Blue Blouse (1923 onwards). 57 By<br />
1927 <strong>the</strong>re were over 5,000 Blue Blouse troupes <strong>and</strong> 7,000 Living Newspaper<br />
groups in clubs, collectives <strong>and</strong> factories, as well as hundreds <strong>of</strong><br />
peasant amateur <strong>the</strong>atre companies in each province. This enthusiasm for<br />
<strong>the</strong>atre extended to pageants <strong>and</strong> demonstrations; <strong>the</strong> Austrian writer René<br />
Fülöp- Miller <strong>of</strong>fers an amusing account <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong>se events, which included<br />
allegorical scenes about labour <strong>and</strong> industry, public trials to enlighten <strong>the</strong><br />
people (about health, illiteracy, <strong>the</strong> murderers <strong>of</strong> Rosa Luxemburg, <strong>and</strong> so<br />
on), <strong>and</strong> a very creative pageant involving diagrams <strong>of</strong> factory output, <strong>and</strong><br />
a funeral <strong>and</strong> cremation <strong>of</strong> old farm machinery, with participants dressed up<br />
as turnips <strong>and</strong> cucumbers. 58 Characteristically, Fülöp- Miller also dismisses<br />
<strong>the</strong> message <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong>se events as politically simplistic <strong>and</strong> naive – but it was<br />
only a short step from <strong>the</strong>se parades <strong>and</strong> pageants to <strong>the</strong> open- air mass spectacle,<br />
a craze that reached its peak in St Petersburg in 1920.<br />
Before discussing mass spectacle, we should note that art history <strong>and</strong><br />
<strong>the</strong>atre history <strong>of</strong>fer distinct genealogical narratives for this phenomenon.<br />
For art history, <strong>the</strong> precursor took place in 1918, when Russian Futurist<br />
artists produced a dynamic scenographic reworking <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> Winter Palace<br />
<strong>and</strong> <strong>the</strong> square in front. In this setting,<br />
Altman, Puni, Bogoslavskaya <strong>and</strong> <strong>the</strong>ir friends decided to stage a mass<br />
re- enactment <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> storming <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> Winter Palace . . . The realism was<br />
provided by a whole borrowed battalion <strong>and</strong> <strong>the</strong>ir equipment, <strong>and</strong> thous<strong>and</strong>s<br />
<strong>of</strong> good Petrograd citizens, <strong>the</strong> whole dramatised by giant<br />
arc- lights . . . Small wonder that when <strong>the</strong> authorities heard about it<br />
later – no permission had been thought necessary for a <strong>the</strong>atrical pageant<br />
– <strong>the</strong>re was a severe reprim<strong>and</strong> for <strong>the</strong> comm<strong>and</strong>er <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong> battalion who<br />
had known nothing about it. It might have been real! 59<br />
Theatre historians, by contrast, present mass spectacle as emerging from a<br />
set <strong>of</strong> <strong>the</strong>oretical <strong>and</strong> ideological commitments that had been brewing since<br />
<strong>the</strong> early 1900s, <strong>and</strong> never mention <strong>the</strong> event in 1918. Once again <strong>the</strong> key<br />
57