Spectator Participation in Art Since the 1960s

From sculpture and performance to art and technology projects, video art, and installation art, this book charts the rise of interpersonal modes of art spectatorship. It provides a historical account of mirroring processes in contemporary art and offers insight into the phenomenological and socio-political concerns that have inspired artists to stage processes of affective, perceptual, and behavioral mirroring between art viewers.

Photo-Essay included in: Framework 62, No. 1, Spring 2021, pp. 107–133. Copyright © 2021 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan //
https://www.frameworknow.com/news/journal62-1

Special Issue:
DOCUMENTING THIRD CINEMA (1968–1979): OVERLOOKED AND
LITTLE-KNOWN DOCUMENTS AROUND THIRD CINEMA
GUEST EDITORS: Jonathan Buchsbaum and Mariano Mestman  //

INTRODUCTION
Jonathan Buchsbaum and Mariano Mestman  //

ESSAYS
Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino
“Cine militante: una categoría interna del Tercer Cine” (1971)
“Militant Cinema: An Internal Category of Third Cinema” //

Group CinémAction
“L’impact du ‘troisième cinéma’ dans le monde” (1979)
“The Impact of ‘Third Cinema’ in the World” //

Octavio Getino
“Algunas observaciones sobre el concepto del ‘Tercer Cine’”(1979)
“Some Observations on the Concept of ‘Third Cinema’” //

PHOTO-ESSAY
Jonathan Buchsbaum and Mariano Mestman
Images of the Itinerary of the Group Cine Liberación and “Third Cinema” //

This special issue is dedicated to the memory of Octavio Getino (1935–2012), Fernando Pino Solanas (1936–2020) and Guy Hennebelle (1941–2003), artisans of Third Cinema and militant cinema across the world. -----------------------------------

Abstract:
The proposal of Third Cinema from the group Cine Liberación has had a broad impact on world political cinema since the end of the 1960s. The articles translated in this issue are three little-known but seminal documents that demonstrate how their thinking about radical filmmaking changed during the tumultuous years from the production of the film The hour of the furnaces (1968), beginning in 1966, through the years of clandestine distribution of the film and the escalation of the repression, to the violent coup d’état in 1976 installing the military dictatorship that forced Solanas, Getino, and so many others into exile. Anglophone readers have known the film and the manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema” (1969) since their completion through subtitled prints and translations of the manifesto. The documents translated in this Special Issue show that Solanas and Getino in fact were constantly revising their earlier ideas, especially in response to a rapidly changing political ferment in Argentina.
    First chronologically, the lengthy article by Getino and Solanas, “Cine militante: una categoría interna del Tercer Cine,” was completed in March 1971. This article shows the evolution of their thinking about political cinema that led them to this formulation of militant cinema, “the most advanced category” of Third Cinema. In 1979, Getino wrote the essay “Algunas observaciones sobre el concepto del ‘Tercer Cine,’” a meticulous retrospective analysis that explains the dialectic between the writings published by the group Cine Liberación and the process of clandestine distribution of the film in Argentina until the period following Perón’s return to Argentina in 1973. Also in 1979, a French collective devoted to political cinema, the newly founded French CinémAction group—created by Guy Hennebelle and Monique Martineau in 1978 in Paris— compiled a dossier of eleven responses to survey questions about the impact of the film and the manifesto in different countries during the decade since the explosive response to the first European screening of The Hour of the Furnaces at the Pesaro Film Festival (Italy) in 1968. That CinémAction dossier offers perhaps the most articulate and concentrated assessment of the significance of Third Cinema among committed film activists from all three continents.
    As we have written previously about these documents, we propose here a brief presentation highlighting several questions that remain pertinent to understanding better the history of Third Cinema. At the same time, in our Photo-Essay, the many images include more specific references to the history of the film and the manifesto since they first appeared in 1968/1969 to 1979.

In recent years, performative arts in Poland have seen a proliferation of hybrid art installations combining not just different media, but also procedures from the field of academic research, designing new technologies, as well as political action and philosophical inquiries. In this context, post-theatre doesn’t have to (and shouldn’t) become yet another artistic genre that comes ‘after theatre’. Instead, it could define different kinds of spaces for dynamically creating new ways of being in the world and thinking about it. Still, with their attachment to traditional genre-related classifications, critics and art scholars have yet to find a language to precisely describe this kind of post-theatre experiences, taking as their starting point the audience member experience they regard as constitutive. This lack of language is evidenced by few reviews for, and critical assessments of the work of Dead Baitz, a group comprising scholars Agnieszka Jelewska and Michał Krawczak, composer Rafał Zapała, multimedia artist Paweł Janicki and software developer Michał Cichy. It’s extremely difficult to write about Dead Baitz’s work without taking into account the situated experience of a critic or scholar. The present article aims to fill this gap, while offering a broader reflection on the issue of participation in the latest art installations. However, the starting point for these reflections will be not so much a survey of Dead Baitz’s artistic methods as the analysis of the author’s own experience of participation in the installations Post-apocalypsis (2015) and Anaesthesia (2016). By employing the autoethnographic method (Ticineto-Clough) and the findings of contemporary ensemble theory (DeLanda), I’ll try to demonstrate taking part in these art installations falls outside the participation theories developed to date (Rancière, Bourriaud, Bishop). This is because underlying these theories is the tacit assumption that participation in art events is limited to humans. But Dead Baitz installations feature different types of ensembles of human and non-human participants – ensembles which are either absent from, or assigned a marginal role in, the established participation theories. In this context, it seems fitting to speak of cyberparticipation rather than simply participation. Etymologically, the proposed term stems from the prefix ‘cyber-’, commonly used today. It derives from the Greek adjective kybernētēs  - the source of the word ‘cybernetics’, denoting both the helmsman – the one who steers the ship – and the helm. In this understanding of the term, cyberparticipation is relevant not just to digital culture phenomena, but also to the experience of at once controlling and being controlled, which is peculiar to culture in its most recent form.

This paper proposes a new methodology for practice-as-research: “Anticipation, Action, and Analysis”. Critical evaluation of my performance artwork Lost for Words functions as the vehicle to describe Anticipation, Action, and Analysis and to theorise, article and demonstrate how slapstick can offer useful insights into the operations of the physical body in participative art performance that go beyond abstract theorisation. Scrutinising and examining slapstick’s performativity in relation to the subject of participation (Bourriaud 1998; Bishop 2006) within Performance Art, this paper concentrates discussion on my performance Lost for Words (2011) as a performance that by making use of slapstick as an extreme physical bodily interruptive process, really supports the problems and difficulties involved in participation within Performance Art. My definition of slapstick in this performance relates to undertaking a set of actions which forces participants’ bodies to interrupt how it normally behaves. The paper achieves this by addressing what happens when, as part of the structural framework of the performance, interruptive processes related to bodily incongruity and repetition (Heiser, 2008) are engineered into activities undertaken by participants engaging in physical and bodily processes. Defining the term collectivity as meaning being a member of a group of people with possibly shared experiences, interests and motivations, the paper also amplifies consideration of how the performance can be used to provide useful insights into the importance that collectivity and conviviality (Bourriaud 1998; Clayton 2007) plays within participatory processes. By way of contrast, the paper explores how the anti-social nature of Schadenfreude (Glenn 2003; Miller, 1993; Svendsen 2010 et al.) can also play its part as well as the, as argued, contradictory nature of hospitality (Derrida 2000) in examining how the performer and audience relation can be construed as host/guest.

During the 1968 protests, students, workers and city dwellers reclaimed the street and other public places as
private space. The ambiguous perception of the boundaries
between public and private questioned cultural ideas of domesticity and property. A similar
subversion of the presumption of separate spheres intersects the art discourse; this is perhaps best
seen in a selection of works by Ugo La Pietra and Gianni Pettena. For example, Pettena’s
Laundry (1969) and Portable Chairs (1971), and La Pietra’s Reappropriation of the city (1977),
Art in the social realm (1976-77), and Interior/Exterior (1977-78), reflect on the disconnection
between individuals and the public space, which is reclaimed by performing domestic actions in
the public sphere, or by literally inserting interior furnishings into exterior architecture. Arguing
for a necessary dialogue between inside and outside, citizen and social fabric, Pettena and La
Pietra contribute to the development of tools for radical design: they reject the utopia of progress
associated with modernism, inventing an ephemeral alphabet of intervention in the build
environment.
La Pietra and Pettena’s strategies of active resistance have parallels in the thought of theorists
like Marcuse, Lefebvre, and de Certeau, among others.
These thinkers articulate the possibility of opposition to oppressive societies; the
performative quality of the production of space; and the centrality of the everyday in shaping
society.
The goal of this article is to understand La Pietra and Pettena’s works as a contribution to this
theoretical discourse, instead of looking at their work as mere application of theories formulated by
others.
While valuing the role of philosophy in the interpretation of the artworks’ cultural and social
role, this paper also argues that artists, designers and architects themselves were not passive
executors of other intellectuals’ ideas, rather they were formulators of ideas and practices in
dialogue with scholarly and critical theories circulating in their same context.