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

artificial hells
It goes without saying that Kerzhentsev’s record of the audience reaction to
mass spectacles was unproblematically positive. He noted that during Toward
a World Commune, which fi nished at 4 a.m. with fi reworks and sirens, ‘the
spectators remained almost motionless and followed the individual scenes
with enthusiasm’; by contrast, The Mystery of Freed Labour had a livelier
impact: when the enormous choir of workers started singing ‘The Internationale’,
‘the electrifi ed masses trampled down the fences surrounding the
scene of action, stormed the door of the Stock Exchange and joined the actors
in the powerful fi nal chorus’. 77 Huntly Carter was equally swept away, offering
the following gushing evidence of mass spectacle’s seductive force:
No- one who sees a mass spectacle of the kind can fail to be impressed by
its magnitude, and the almost ecstatic spirit of the multitude . . . As for that
rarity, the man of the theatre possessing social ideals, to him it can appear
only as a revelation, pregnant with suggestion towards that theatre of the
future which shall fully answer the need of spiritual social service. 78
Once again, Emma Goldman offers a more complex, troubled view. Observing
the May Day celebrations in St Petersburg, she notes that the visual
decoration of Uritzky Square was impressive – a mass of red fl ags – but the
crowd ‘seemed peculiarly quiet, oppressively silent. There was no joy in
their singing, no mirth in their laughter. Mechanically they marched, automatically
they responded to the claqueurs on the reviewing stand shouting
“hurrah” as the columns passed.’ 79 Goldman wonders how to explain this
silence and the fact that only ‘faint applause’ could be heard from ‘the great
throng’. She asked a Bolshevik friend and was told that since people had
actually lived through the October Revolution, ‘the performance necessarily
fell fl at by comparison with the reality of 1917’. Unsatisfi ed with this
answer, she asked her neighbour for an opinion: ‘“The people had suffered
so many disappointments since October, 1917”, she said, “that the Revolution
has lost all meaning to them. The play had the effect of making their
disappointment more poignant.” ’ 80 Any interpretation of these events means
reading between the lines, as Goldman deftly demonstrates. Her confl icting
accounts bear close resemblance to accounts of French revolutionary festivals
after 1789, presented alternately as interminably dull ceremonies or
orgiastic masquerades, depending on whether writers were favourable or
unfavourable to the political aims of the Revolution. 81
Looking back at these debates, it is perhaps inevitable that attention
comes to focus on questions of authentic engagement, since descriptions of
the action in mass spectacle are overwhelmingly tedious to read, and do not
convey the clash of styles in which they were acted, from unpolished realism
to clowning and grotesque buffoonery. What stands out from these
accounts are the impressive statistics rather than the plodding historical
plotlines and their delivery. The predictability of each spectacle’s message
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