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

artificial hells
a Russian line of peasant rebellion, intellectual radicalism, Populism, the
fi rst storm of 1905, War, and the revolutionary year 1917 . . . and a
European line of slave revolts, the French Revolution, the Paris
Commune, and three generations of the socialist family – the grandparents
(the utopian socialists), the parents (Marx and Engels), and the
children (the Bolsheviks). 72
The displays of participatory presence in mass spectacle, then, stand as the
aesthetic and ideological counterpoint to Proletkult theatre’s emphasis on
participatory production: in the former, a hierarchical apparatus of state propaganda
used theatre to mobilise public consciousness through the
overwhelming image of collectivity; in the latter, the state gave support to a
grass- roots amateur culture that encouraged the workers to participate in a
de- hierarchised creative process. The question of how success was to be measured
in each instance continues to be vexed. Fülöp- Miller’s horror of
Bolshevik collectivism is manifest in the very fi rst illustration in his book: a
black- and- white photograph of a grimly downtrodden crowd, tersely
captioned ‘the masses’. He argues against the Bolshevik commitment to
‘theatricalised life’, drawing attention to its waste of resources and function
of distraction, scathingly noting that mass spectacle was done primarily to
raise morale, but had nothing to say on the actual problems of the day (the
rationing of food, the requisitioning of houses, the electrifi cation of Russia,
or the need for new agricultural equipment in the countryside). 73 This
distance between theatrical representation and social reality is corroborated
by the Lithuanian anarchist Emma Goldman, who describes appalling levels
of poverty and education, poor factory conditions, labour camps, breakdowns
of the train system, and the continuation of high living standards for
the bourgeoisie while the masses remained exactly where they were prior to
the Revolution. 74 For both writers, the artistic impact of mass spectacle was
undermined by a calamitous economic context and a colossal waste of
resources, and for Fülöp- Miller, by rendering the proletariat the subject of a
representation that was crassly symbolic and superfi cial. 75 Mass spectacle, he
argued, was hypocritical both in its structural organisation and artistic values:
These ‘compositions’ are not, however, the work of proletarians; they originate
entirely with the intelligentsia, and merely betray what a poor opinion
Bolshevik leaders have of the level of this ‘mass man’, to whom, in the same
breath, they assign the sole right to artistic production. All these symbols, all
the laboriously thought- out effects of these mass festive performances
unmistakably bear the stamp of the artistic, and thus, it may be unconsciously,
betray that their authors are not proletarian poets, but in the highest degree
Bolshevik aesthetes. Perhaps the ‘mass man’ has the capacity for new artistic
creation in him; but, in order to develop it, he must be free of himself to
create, without regard to the political desires of the Government. 76
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