Page 54 - Studio International - June 1970

1
3 who sang the praises of spectator participa-
Scene at opening of the Biennale des Jeunes
tion. These are the new slogans : 'Personalize
your alienation'; 'Press it yourself: the
button that does nothing'.8
Spectator participation is a technique—a
twenty-five-year-old one—which was intended
originally as a reaction against the artist's
authoritative one-way communication, against
immitable hard and fast aesthetic propositions,
and in favour of a dialogue with the artist.
Over the years, certain groups, notably the
Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel, singled
out a more social sense of the term; they set
up participation as an apprenticeship for
liberty, gradually eliminated the object as
intermediary, and limited the spectator to one
option: to face up to his alienating situation
and to change it. Society became the canvas
on the artist's easel. Others, however, felt it
necessary to turn the proposition back upon
itself. Many well-wishers in official circles
approve of participation in art as a remedy for
unrest: 'Let them participate! It will keep
them out of mischief for a time.' This is the
spirit in which at a recent Paris Biennale, a room
was placed at the disposal of the public. Any-
one could go there and do what he liked. At
the private views, a certain number of artists
had exhibited slogans denouncing the link
between the Biennale and the government;
the so-called experiment room was immedi-
ately closed, and a police guard was stationed
in the gallery to stop anyone sticking up
militant slogans. (A few artists were arrested.)
It was liberty, plus supervision; participation,
but on the lines laid down by the government.
happened since May 1968: the progressive is that the organizers saw fit to cloak this As the commercial culture circuit runs down,
liquidation of Kinetic art under the pressures extremely modest event with the authority of and the artists leave by the back door, the
of retail trade. Kineticism started out with Mayakovsky and Tatlin. One incendiary industrialists come in by the front door. q
the objective of destroying both the art object phrase from Mayakovsky, photographs of
and the constructional use of form, and of demonstrations featuring Tatlin's revolution-
pursuing visual experimentation, the creation ary works, and news pictures of the parades in
of environments and the active involvement Petrograd in October 1918, served as an
of the spectator. This could have led to a introduction to the long series of neon dis- See Jean Baudrillard's excellent Le Systeme des Objects
(Gallimard).
questioning of the stability of everyday plays and other coloured nosegays presented
2 The epithets come from Herbert Marcuse's Towards
existence, and perhaps even to the opening by the forty candidates. This is a typical case Liberation.
up of a hinterland where a dialectical con- of an amalgam in which critics will pretend 3 Eduardo Sanguinetti : Pour un avant-garde
frontation of the social and the aesthetic to see a filiation between, say, Raymond révolut-ionnaire (1965); also in Tel Quel (Spring 1967).
would have been possible. In fact, quite on sticking up a pot-of-flowers emblem in a busy 4 Utopie [group] : Déraison de l'architecture (Editions
Anthropos).
the contrary, the output of most kinetic street and the vast collective ceremonies
5 It works like this: the collector is allowed to deduct
artists has transformed itself with staggering which stirred the great Bolshevik crowds of
from his taxes the value of a work which he intends to
rapidity: they now produce coloured plexi- Trotsky's and Lenin's time. This is a delicate give to a cultural institution, and this is assessed not
glass ashtrays, decorative gadgetry to enliven business : the organizers, torn between the according to the price he paid for it but according to the
upper-middle-class drinking parties, and desire to force the elusive avant garde back speculative market value at the time of the donation,
which may take place years later. A Jim Dine,
`environments' for executives, in the super- into the fold and the risk of conjuring up
bought for $1000 in 1962, is worth $12,000 in 1969,
stores which apparently feel a need to boost something they cannot deal with, have to
and it is this sum which is deducted from the donor's
their stocks of spiritual values. gauge their efforts very meticulously. At any tax payments. The role of the galleries, which are
Better still; the light-show idea recently moment the machine may come apart in financed for this purpose, is to speed up the constant
played a part in a particularly conclusive their hands and transform itself into a spurt process of price inflation. Even when they lose money,
it is financially worthwhile to keep them going.
demonstration. Under the title 'Art in the of libertarian feeling which will overflow the
Pierre Gaudibert : 'Contestation, recuperation et
street' `(L'art dans la rue'), the CNAC appointed venue (a rococo hotel in the 8th modernite, Opus international, no. 15.
offered us, in December 1969, an ill-organized Arrondissement) and transform itself into the 7 See 'Le cinétisme est-il un académisme ?' Robho, no. 2
and ill-commented photographic montage of unmentionable : an inflammatory art which (December 1967).
forty projects for public illuminations in will start off by indicting their 'culture' itself. See also the exhibitions of toys and technological
gadgetry that have been put on at the ICA in London.
Paris, most of which would have been turned In the jury which met to award the prizes at
The infantilization of the artist and the spectator is one
down flat—on quality grounds—by the Grands this exhibition, there were several officials— of the ways in which art today is being reduced to a
Magasins du Printemps. What is interesting notably those from the staff of the Prefect— marginal and inessential position.