Steve_Bamlett_blog

On Chapter 3 of:

Bishop, C. (Ed.) (2012) Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship London & New York, Verso (references to Kindle ed. – uses Loc. Numbers not pages).

Bishop rarely engages with the ‘art’ of ’68 itself (outside of a rather nice Lebel quotation), except for the Atelier Populaire’s 1968 Poster screenprint, Je participe, … L1556.I sense no desire to follow, or evidence of it, through her arguments relating to analysis of any example of this ‘art’ other than in citing this poster and using it as her chapter legend.

So how is the ‘art-history context’ of ’68 captured by Bishop?

It is in Ch.3 and is a critical excursus through art before and after the event.

We lead away from Dada & Surrealism to treating situationism and situationist tropes as their heirs. The issue of psychogeography and the dérive (increasing awareness by aimless wandering and (often textual)self-recording in urban places) is discussed. L1558f. Follows Debord’s sense that 3 artistic traditions are significant (the issue of what evidence from these remains for examination is important to their self-definition):

1. Situationist International texts’ – not usually contextualised ‘within artistic tendencies of the period’ L1587 so Bishop proposes just that.  – ‘dogmatic, anti-visual Marxism’
2. situations’ of GRAV ‘left-of-centre technophilic populism’
3. Jean-Jacques Lebel – eroticised happenings and psychodrama – ‘sexually liberated anarchism’

Themes:

• Collective v. individual authorship, audiences and controls.
• Concern with theatrical – Artaud but each presents us ‘ with a different solution to the problem of visualising ephemeral participatory experiences’ -L1595 – and what remains
• ‘…all 3 claimed a central role in the events of May 1968’

Participation is double-edged What does ‘democratisation of art’ mean in ’68 graffitti. Compares ‘To be free in 1968 means to participate’ v. the Atelier Populaire screen-print mentioned above L1614. This feels a false comparison to me. May ’68 was alive to verbal ambiguity and the fact that a word often aliied with opposed meanings – not least ‘collaboration’ (who could not within the memory of Vichy France).

The idea of ‘democratic art’.L1623

1. SI emerging from Lettrisme )1946-52), Lettriste International (1952-7) etc,  – SI 1957. Collaboratively authored images & texts. . Intersection of art & politics.
   • Detournement devised _ the ‘subversive appropriation of existing images to undermine their existing meaning.’ L1726
   • Situationist uses of works of art (WA) rather than WA per se.L1708
   • The role of ‘play’ in ;construvted situations L1781
   • Use of director or producer
2. GRAV Groupe de  Recherche d’art Visuel.
   • 1960s projects – public investigations ‘quasi-scientific visual research’ L1819
   • Change perception of ‘work-eye’ Participatory and collaborative work on the action of viewing; ‘We want to develop in the viewer a strengtyh of perception and action.’ L1838.
   • Venue is not a museum but a place #where time is in motion’ L1886.
3. Lebel (interviewed in Abidor 2018)
   1. Happenings – critiqued by SI as ‘desire to liven up a little the impoverished range of social relations’ L1918ff.
   2. Lebel (168) cited L1927. .give back to artistic activity what has been torn away from it: the intensification of feeling, the play of instinct, a sense of festivity, social agitation;,
   3. The ‘negation of negation’ L1955
   4. Understood, ‘the artist’s role in society to be one of moral transgressor, giving image and voice to what is conventionally repressed. … a conduit for collective hopes and desires, which Lebel compared to a group mind or ‘egregore’.’ L1990.
   5. Lebel (2010) cited L1999. ‘I never envisaged a separation between artist and audience, I never accepted some of the main divisions that the dominant culture has driven into our brains with  sledgehammers. For instance, the division between politics and art, between revolution and creation …and the object and subject. There is no frontier between art and life.’

Towards ’68. ‘Raoul Vaneigem argued, personal self-realisation within the collective was the most revolutionary form of art, …’ 2064 Later spoke of Lebel etc. L2074

When these people [use our concepts] in order to finally speak of some new problem               …, they inevitably banalise it, eradicating its violence and its connection with the general subversion, therefore defusing it and subjecting it to academic dissection or worse.

A Theatrical Uprising (section IV dealing with May)

All 3 …’paving the way for the largest social (and theatrical) refusal of the 1960s, May ’68.’

SDB says – I hear most here the blasé bourgeois reductio ad absurdam of revolutionary change and social-cognitive revolution to match ‘objectifying’ bourgeois concepts. To be fair she takes her lead from Lebel L2093. But Lebel doesn’t turn the uprising into a theatre-shaped object, merely uses the theatre as transformative metaphor for socio-cognitive change. L2093

What strikes me about all this is the reified abstraction that the events of May within Bishop’s prose are only allowed to be – in that they,  nor their products or meanings, are never examined outside of the context of artists’ decontextualized generalised statements. This is to what,  I think, the inclusion of May ’68 into art-history eventually reduces to. Isn’t exclusion and non co-optation preferable?

Some such statement seems appropriate for this assignment.