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

artificial hells
demanding an active role can be seen by the lengths to which they went to
buy food to hurl on stage, or bring musical instruments along to the theatre.
Breton struggled to negotiate this transition away from consuming
violence and towards an intelligible stance of moral consistency through
the creation of small- scale collectively realised social actions, in which
the audience position was more prescribed, but which were perceived at
the time to be failures. By contrast, the mobilisation of mass audiences
and performers in St Petersburg abandoned any pretence to spontaneity;
as Lunacharsky stipulated, ‘by means of General Military Instruction, we
create rhythmically moving masses embracing thousands of and tens of
thousands of people – and not just a crowd, but a strictly regulated,
collective, peaceful army sincerely possessed by one defi nite idea’. 122
Paris and St Petersburg thus stand as polar opposites in the imagination
of an unframed art in public space. In Paris Dada, an authored and
subversive lineage attempts to provoke audience- participants into a self-
refl exive examination of their norms and mores; in Russian mass spectacle,
the state imposes the aesthetic potency of collective presence to provide
a focus for national achievement masked as a celebration of transnational
proletarian identity. If the former is disruptive or interventionist, presenting
small- scale instances of dissensus in the face of dominant moral and
aesthetic norms, the latter is constructive and affi rmative, presenting
public space as the locus of an artifi cial mass cohesion.
In all three instances, which tentatively mark out a new territory for
audience inclusion in the twentieth century, the issue of participation
becomes increasingly inextricable from the question of political commitment.
For Futurism, participation ushered in an active embrace of
right- wing nationalism. In post- revolutionary Russia, participation
denoted an affi rmation of revolutionary ideals. Only Dada, in its negation
of all political and moral positions, provided a compelling alternative to
ideologically motivated participation, even while its Parisian iteration
moved towards a position of moral analysis and judgement. 123 As such it is
popular today to claim that such art is ‘implicitly political’, as if this term
had any identifi able meaning; if this phrase tells us anything, it is less about
Dada’s (anti- ) artistic achievements than the pervasiveness of our present-
day determination to fi nd a ‘political’ character for art in the face of liberal
democratic consensus. The relationship between artistic form and political
commitment becomes increasingly fraught as these early case studies transform
in the following decades: Dada and Surrealist excursions become the
Situationist dérive, while the most immediate heir to Russian mass spectacle
is found in the grotesque displays of military prowess and mass conformity
at the Nuremberg rallies (which deployed the slogan ‘No spectators, only
actors’ to describe its liturgical form of mass participation). 124 The memory
of these totalitarian regimes weighed heavily on the post- war generation,
for whom mass organisation became anathema. Instead, as we shall see in
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