n important role. The traditional practices of the artworld often turned, or were turned political. At an opening of an exhibition of photographs of Provo actions, so the story is told, the always aggravated police began to beat the crowds of spectators waiting to get in. The exhibiting photographers themselves, waiting for their public inside the gallery, began to take pictures of the police action through the windows.
In 1971 the famous Christiania squatted city in the center of Copenhagen was initially occupied by a crowd coming from an art exhibition where the plans for just such an action had been exhibited.
With political interpretations of the conceptual art movement, gallery culture was increasingly used in a deliberately political way. One of the most explicit was the sensational “lock-in” of gallery goers in Argentina at an opening of an exhibition by in Rosario, Argentina in a glass-walled storefront in 1968. This action was a powerful social sculpture which, like the circumstantial Provo event before it, suddenly displayed a vitrine-like collection of elegantly clad angry art fanciers to the street.
Situationists Always Say “No!”
This turning, or détournement, of conventional cultural usages is precisely what the Situationists had in mind as a revolutionary tactic which they did not deign to call “social sculpture.” Nevertheless, sculpting the social world was the group’s intent. Their analysis of the Happening movement was contemptuous.
Jon Erickson succinctly summarizes the critique of Situationist leader Guy Debord, in terms so prescient I shall quote him at length. Debord “saw happenings in the light of the ‘team projects’ of capitalism, the creation of ‘spectacular pseudo-culture’ that reflected capitalism’s ‘recapture of the worker as the “personality well-integrated in the group.”… It is the same project everywhere: a restructuring without community” (SOS 192). He criticized the exclusionary ‘anti-spectacular spectacle’ as ‘restricted to actors alone,’ comparing them to the professional revolutionaries of Leninism (Knabb 131). Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, in examining its participatory ethos, saw that ‘the ultimate logic of the happening and its derivatives is to supply the society of masterless slaves, which the cyberneticians have planned for us, with the spectatorless spectacle it will require’ (85).”
This critique is prescient because it speaks together two terms, art and labor, which are usually kept separate. It is a springboard for comment today on the contemporary institutional and academic versions of “participatory art.” These elite forms of artmaking need to be questioned for the ways in which they glamorize new regimes of capitalist labor and consumption in a post-industrial age.
Fluxus: Art is Motion
Kaprow himself was uninterested in politics. He cared about systems, rules – the formal structure of the event-as-art itself. Some of the artists of the Fluxus movement, however, had no such compunctions.
Lithuanian artist George Maciunas organized the international Fluxus movement, a loose-knit network of artists who often worked together. In 1962, while working at a U.S. Air Force base in Wiesbaden, Germany, Maciunas produced the first Fluxus Festival. The event was structured like a musical concert with scripted actions performed by artists, among them Wolf Vostell, Nam June Paik, Alison Knowles and Dick Higgins, artists who would go on to comprise the core of the Fluxus movement.
Maciunas idealized the Russian Constructivist artists' group LEF, and he published numerous Fluxus manifestoes spiced with revolutionary political intentions. While Maciunas believed art should merge with popular amusement, Fluxus events tended to be abstract. The actions were at once humdrum -- with segments drawn from everyday life -- and bizarre. Like musical compositions, these events were infinitely repeatable as "scores." A pure instance of this kind of work is by George Brecht, who wrote simple sets of instructions for art events on cards which any reader could enact. Yoko Ono’s art instruction texts are co