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

artificial hells
experiments of this period, since they rethink not only who makes music, but
its instrumentation, audience and site of reception. Persimfans, however
pleasingly eccentric in its ideological rejection of the conductor, remains
wedded to existing conventions of classical musical performance: modulating
a convention but falling short of overhauling the idealist category of music.
III. Excursions and Trials
It is telling that the avant- garde examples from this period of Russian
history tend to be attached to single names rather than collectively coauthored
productions; even mass spectacles such as The Storming of the
Winter Palace are attributed to a singular director. While this can be
attributed to history’s preference for the monographic, it also, perhaps,
indicates the artistic weaknesses of collectively authored Proletkult theatre
in this period, or at least its inability to transcend local topics and
concerns. In a different way, the Dada Season or Grande Saison Dada,
held in spring 1921, also serves as proof that collective production
survives only with diffi culty within the canon, further sidelined by being
performance- rather than object- based. 88 Using techniques of media
provocation and publicity honed by the Futurists, Paris Dada built on the
innovations of Zurich Dada’s Cabaret Voltaire (1915– 17) and organised
mixed bills of performance, music and poetry in concert halls such as the
Salle Gaveau. By spring 1921, for reasons that I will elaborate below, the
group decided to take performance out of a cabaret context and into
extra- institutional public space. The experimental events of the Dada
Season form a poignant contrast to the Russian experiments at this time.
Both sought to involve the public, and to use public space, but to entirely
different ends; if Russian mass spectacle was overtly ideological and
affi rmative, the Dada group was (at least in its early phase) all- negating,
anti- ideological and anarchist.
The focus of the Grande Saison Dada was a series of manifestations in
April and May 1921 that sought to involve the Parisian public: ‘Visits –
Dada Salon – Conferences – Commemorations – Operas – Plebiscites
– Summons – Accusation Orders and Judgements’. 89 Louis Aragon
mentions a series of meetings and discussions, designed to give ‘all possible
pomp and grandeur to this new offensive’, but the most salient events of
the season were an excursion to the church of Saint Julien- le- Pauvre and
the Barrès Trial. 90 In a radio interview broadcast in 1952, André Breton
identifi ed three phases of Dada activity as it developed in Paris: a phase of
lively agitation initiated by the arrival of Tristan Tzara in the city (January–August
1920); a ‘more groping phase’ that tended towards the same
goals but through ‘radically renewed means’, under the impulse of Aragon
and himself (January–August 1921); and a ‘phase of malaise’ where the
attempt to return to the initial form of manifestations caused more
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