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

je participe, tu participes, il participe
audience is ‘the “solitary crowd” of the society of the spectacle, and here Le
Parc is not so advanced that he believes in reality; in the organisation of this
alienation, there is certainly no spectator free to stay purely passive, even
their passivity is organised, and the “stimulated spectators” of Le Parc are
already everywhere’. 60 In other words, the participants of GRAV’s perceptual
experimentation were insuffi ciently distinct from the passive spectators
of mass consumer capitalism; without a choice not to participate, it replicated
this structure wholesale. It was more important, felt the SI, to entirely
abandon the present- day function of art and art criticism under capitalism;
to repress both in the name of a revolutionary critique. To be fair, GRAV’s
Joël Stein later acknowledged this problem:
At the start, this interaction between the spectator and the work tends to
establish a direct contact and provoke a spontaneous reaction, independent
of a given culture or pre- established aesthetic considerations. But it can
become a sort of entertainment, a spectacle in which the public is one of the
elements in the work. The public can become subject to taking ideological
sides; it can also be a new way to condition the public, even numb them. 61
In sum, although GRAV deployed a terminology of ‘situations’ and superfi
cially shared a great deal of the SI’s political rhetoric, their attempt to
encourage viewer participation was experientially somewhat pedestrian.
At the same time, we should be wary of siding too rapidly with the SI’s
hectoring dismissals: it is symptomatic of the forcefulness of a Marxist
critique of art that GRAV’s modest shifts in perception seem minor and
inconsequential in comparison with the total (and utopian) overhaul of
both society and sensibility that the SI were claiming as their goal. It should
be recognised that, for all their prosaic output, GRAV’s artistic propositions
aimed to engage with the general public in a far more generous fashion
than the SI’s cliquish events, which were underpinned by competitive and
dogmatic pronouncements against those who co- operated with the existing
institutions of art. At the same time, the banality and earnest didacticism of
GRAV’s work foreground an ongoing paradox with participation as an
artistic device: from opening up a work to manipulation and alteration by
the viewer, it rapidly becomes a highly ideologised convention in its own
right, one by which the viewer in turn is manipulated in order to complete
the work ‘correctly’.
III. Lebel: Collective Exorcism
It was not just Le Parc and GRAV that came under attack from the SI for
pseudo- participation. Happenings, in their ‘naïve search to “make something
happen” ’ and ‘desire to liven up a little the impoverished range of
human relations’, were also the subject of scathing rejection. 62 The fi rst
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