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

artificial hells
during the 1940s. 46 Although most of GRAV’s work was undertaken in
Paris, the group also showed internationally: in Europe (Documenta 3),
the United States, South America, and in Japan. The emphasis was on
polysensorial environments and kinetic sculpture as a means to affect the
viewer’s perception, on rethinking the ‘work–eye’ (oeuvre–oeil) relationship
to transform conventional experiences of time, and on establishing
‘new means of public contact with the works produced’. 47 In a manifesto
from 1967, GRAV asserted that they aimed
through provocation, through the modifi cation of the conditions of
environment, by visual aggression, by a direct appeal to active participation,
by playing a game, or by creating an unexpected situation, to exert
a direct infl uence on the public’s behaviour and to replace the work of art
or the theatrical performance with a situation in evolution inviting the
spectator’s participation. 48
Accompanying this, but of secondary importance, was an attack on the
‘mystifi cation’ of the individual artist, the cult of personality and the art
market. This position was explicitly anti- elitist, with a commitment to
‘rehabilitating a certain concept of the public, belittled by obscurantist art
criticism’. 49 GRAV’s output comprised two- and three- dimensional optical
and kinetic installations exploring psychological and physiological
responses to movement, colour and light, but it also included works directly
involving the general public and random passers- by: visitor surveys (Public
Investigation, 1962; Public Investigation in the Streets, 1966) and organised
games (A Day in the Street, 1966, discussed below).
The group’s name refl ects the way in which they felt this activity to
constitute a supra- individual project of quasi- scientifi c visual research;
until they disbanded in 1968, GRAV basically functioned as a communal
studio. On the whole, critics responded to this and understood their work
to be about generating open- ended propositions, even while there was the
continual risk that the emphasis on play and perception risked appearing
somewhat slight. 50 Later the group came to recognise the limitations of
their approach, but throughout the ’60s they did not hesitate to give their
activity- based art an emancipatory and didactic gloss: expanding the viewer’s
perception was perceived as the fi rst step to their disalienation and
increased autonomy.
GRAV’s Labyrinth (1963), for example, produced for the third Paris
Biennial, comprised a series of twenty environmental experiences, from
wall- based reliefs to light installations and mobile bridges. It was designed
to trigger nine different categories of spectatorship: from ‘perception as
it is today’ and ‘contemplation’, to ‘visual activation’ (in front of works
both static and kinetic), ‘active involuntary participation’, ‘voluntary
participation’, and ‘active spectatorship’. 51 Like most participatory art in
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