From
the theater’s booth we explained the idea of the [re-enacted] Happening
over a microphone. We gave information about the authors and the
actions of each of the original Happenings and we said–which was the
truth–that it was not our intention to repeat Happenings but to produce
for the audience a situation similar to that experienced by
archeologists and psychologists. Starting from some remains that had been conserved to the present, they had to reconstruct a past, the original situation.1
-Oscar Masotta, 1967
In Seminar XI, Lacan sustains that repetition is one of
the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. But if, as Heraclitus
says, “you can’t step in the same river twice,” repetition seems to be
something of a misnomer, consisting in the return, not of the same, but
of the different–the return of something else, something other. Thus in
fact it would seem there is no return… For no two “things” are ever
identical or exactly the same.2
-Bruce Fink, 1995
In 1966 Allan Kaprow christened Buenos Aires a “city of
Happenists.” It was the year Kaprow collaborated with Marta Minujin and
Wolf Vostell on
Three Countries Happening, a simultaneous event
in three cities: New York, Buenos Aires, and Berlin. Meanwhile, the
Argentine trio Roberto Jacoby, Eduardo Costa, and Raul Escari were
devising their
Total Participation Happening, in which press releases and photographs of a Happening that never took place were given to various Buenos Aires newspapers.
El Mundo
(circulation 300,000) bought the story and ran it. There were also the
“deconstructed” Happenings by Oscar Masotta, an Argentine artist and
critic who deftly combined avant-garde aesthetics with Lacan’s theory of
the subject and Sartre’s political imperative for committed art. What
connected these experiments was a relentless focus on an event’s
repetition, a rogue take on Kaprow’s Happening given his famous axiom that
Happenings should be performed once only.
3
But for a generation of Argentine artists–one associated with a flurry
of neo-avant-garde strategies imported from the Northern Hemisphere and
staged at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (ITDT) in the mid-1960s–what
mattered was the way a Happening’s secondary documentation in the media
was, in and of
itself, a singular event. As Jacoby put it, “[A]
mass audience does not see an exhibition, attend a Happening or go to a
soccer game, but it does see footage of the event on the news…. In the
final analysis, it is of no interest to information consumers if an
exhibition took place or not; all that matters is the image of the
artistic event
constructed by the media.”
4
Whether or not we experience the original event, its reproduction
ushers in another one. Perhaps, following Lacan, it’s because repetition
involves the return of the
different, not the same.
What follows is a case study for a practice of repetition,
one conceived in Buenos Aires by Oscar Masotta amidst an onslaught of
military coups that would eventually lead to the Dirty War of the 1970s
and 1980s. On this Argentine field we encounter Masotta’s Lacanian
interpretation of the Happening, a model that lays the foundation for a
psychoanalytic branch of Conceptualism highly relevant today for a group
of international, contemporary artists interested in critical
aesthetics–that tripartite investigation of art, politics, and theory.
In Masotta’s times, critical aesthetics entailed simultaneously
negotiating the strategies of the neo-avant-garde, a wave of military
coups, and the introduction of Lacan’s theorization of the subject. This
combination of disciplines, historical events, and intellectual
ruminations now
repeats among a select group of contemporary practitioners.
5 But this repetition is no mere duplication. Rather, these events–aesthetic, political and theoretical–are
happening
(again) for the first time in the discursive field of contemporary art
and politics. For some the events are quite literally new, as they have
no memory (primary or secondary) of the historical or neo-avant-garde
vis-a-vis contemporary art. For others it’s figuratively new. But it is
the latter–that subject who
knowingly repeats, always as if
for the first time–who
functions as a courier of historical memory and is thus an interrogator
of cultural practice–that concerns me. And this contemporary practice
of repetition is happening at a moment when the discovery of Oscar
Masotta (led in large part by the Museum of Modern Art’s 2004
publication
Listen Here Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde) has piqued an international interest in this kind of critical aesthetics.
First, a brief history of the Argentine
campo.
6
Oscar Masotta, c. 1966. Photo courtesy Susana Lijtmaer. reproduced in Listen Here Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004). Used with permission of the estate of Oscar Masotta. © Susana Lijtmaer.
Buenos Aires: 1960s
Located in Buenos Aires, the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella (ITDT) was
Argentina’s most dynamic and modernizing cultural organization. It was
founded in the mid-1960s in honor of the industrialist and collector
Torcuato Di Tella. Run by Guido Di Tella, the institute not only
displayed the Di Tella’s collection, it also sponsored national and
international awards. Lucy Lippard, Clement Greenberg, Pierre Restany,
and Allan Kaprow all acted as jurors for the ITDT. In 1967, when Masotta
delivered his lecture “After Pop We Dematerialize” there,
7
he began by citing the Russian Constructivist artist El Lissitzky; “The
idea that moves the masses today is materialism: however, it is
dematerialization that characterizes the times.” Masotta argued, via
Lissitzky, that as “correspondence grows, so the number of letters, the
quantity of writing paper, the mass of material of supply grow until
they are relieved by the radio. Matter diminishes, we dematerialize,
sluggish masses of matter are replaced by liberated energy.”
8
In this spirit, Masotta urged, “[I]f there is talk now of not
concerning oneself with content, it does not mean that avant-garde art
is moving toward a new purism or worse formalism. What is occurring
today in the best pieces is that the contents are being fused to the
media used to convey them.”
9
And if the medium was now the message, as Marshall McLuhan said, it was
up to the artist to chip away at the imaginary nature of this message
in the context of mass media. For Masotta, this entailed, as we will
see, a Lacanian consideration of the looking subject in the context of
neo-avant-garde strategies that migrated between disciplines and
regions.
10
A year later, the American critic Lucy Lippard published “The Dematerialization of Art,” in
Art International.
For her, “dematerialism” evoked an “art as idea,” whereby “matter is
denied, as sensation has been converted into concept.” Ostensibly this
was a dialectical turn
away from Greenberg’s Modernist
painting–known as “art for art’s sake”–on the road first to what Lippard
termed a “rational-esthetic” and then a “post-esthetic.” That said, she
offered a caveat: “Dematerialized art is post-esthetic only in its
increasingly non-visual emphases. The esthetic of principle is still
esthetic, as implied by frequent statements by mathematicians and
scientists about the
beauty of an equation, formula or solution.”
11
And yet the heart of Greenbergism–essence, beauty, harmony, and
order–was still beating. Like Greenberg’s Modernism, Lippard’s
dematerialism had less to do with the signifier–the
material of an artwork–than it did with the signified–the artwork’s non-visual aesthetic
fact.
Even though Lippard tossed aside Greenberg’s notion of “medium
specificity” in favor of a logical positivist Conceptualism, the essence
game of transcendentalism that defined high Modernism remained
in its place. Moreover, it may have been enough for Lippard to reject the visual, but in so doing, the subject who
looks at a Conceptual artwork wasn’t taken into consideration.
While Lippard was devising her Conceptualist formulations
in New York, Masotta was devising a model of dematerialist art
production around this issue of the looking subject, a redirected
investigation he made while discovering the structuralist psychoanalytic
writings of Lacan a full decade before artists in the Northern
Hemisphere would do so. Moreover, while those in Europe and America
would later encounter Lacan through the institutionalization of his
writing in academia throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Masotta’s discovery
was made contingently as a “lucky find” in the early 1960s. This entails
another story.
Following the death of his father in 1960, Masotta fell
into a deep depression, to the point of contemplating suicide. As
historian Mariano Ben Plotkin recounts, this was the moment that Masotta
discovered psychoanalysis: “Suddenly I had to forget Merleau-Ponty and
Sartre, ideas and politics, ‘commitment,’ and the ideas I had invented
about myself. I had to look for an analyst.”
12
Meanwhile, the Argentine sociologist Enrique Pichon Riviere had taken
the bereaved Masotta into his home, where Masotta gained access to the
structuralist writings of Lacan and Levi-Strauss. His studies with
Riviere, which began as a means of distraction from melancholia, would
lead to Masotta’s seminal paper introducing Lacanian theory, a text he
wrote in 1964 and published in 1965 in
Pasado y Presente.
13
A key periodical of the New Left, this choice of venue attests to
Masotta’s continued interest in politics–or at least a psychoanalytic
turn
within the political field. Even more significant, Masotta’s essay–in
which he sought to reconcile Sartre’s existentialist philosophy and
Marx’s materialist theories through Lacan’s structuralist
phenomenological lens–was the first discussion of Lacan in Argentina and
most likely the first one in the Spanish Language.
14
Oscar Masotta, Para inducer al espíritu de la imagen (To Induce the Spirit of the Image), Instituto Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1966. Photo courtesy Susana Lijtmaer. Reproduced in Listen Here Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004). Used with permission of the Estate of Oscar Masotta.
And the results? Having read Lacan’s Seminar II on “The
Purloined Letter,” a seminar Masotta would later explicate to artists in
a lecture series delivered at the ITDT,
15
his focus shifted to the subject’s relation to the symbolic
register–that linguistic field of signifiers through which the subject
is determined. Following Lacan, Masotta was concerned with the
efficacy of the symbolic world (conscious thought) in contrast to the complete
inertia
of the Symbolic register (unconscious thought) that is anomalous to the
subject. Against Lippard’s formulation of dematerialism, this was an
anti-positivist approach because it took up more than what the subject
knows to be true. In tandem, it took up what is
unconscious in
the subject–those inert “thoughts” that paradoxically determine the
subject’s consciousness relationship to the Symbolic signifying system.
This followed Lacan’s axiom that the unconscious is structured like a
language and is therefore knowable in the field of the Other, even
though the subject’s
own consciousness is “incapable of accounting for the
eternal and indestructible nature of unconscious contexts.”
16
Like Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter, the subject’s unconscious
thoughts are always hiding in plain view of the Other. It is thus to the
field of the Other that the subject turns to find the “truth” of his or
her shifting desire. Notably, because Masotta delivered his Lacanian
lectures to artists at the ITDT, the Symbolic register to which he
referred delineated more than the socio-political field, which was the
primary concern of the Argentine Lacanian Left. Masotta purposely
extended his investigation to consider the aesthetic field as well.
In the mid-1960s, it was a radical and even precocious move to wage a tripartite investigation into the
limits of representation within the visual field (dematerialist art), the subject who
looks within the discursive field (Lacanian theory), and the social function of aesthetic critique
vis-a-vis the political field (New Left).
17 But it wasn’t without political application or
ramification.
This burst of hybrid intellectual activity by Masotta and his cohorts
at the ITDT was concurrent with the military coup d’etat of June 1966,
led by General Juan Carlos Ongania. Whereas previous military coups in
Argentina established temporary juntas, the
Revolucion Argentina,
headed by Ongania, established a new political and social order, one
opposed to both liberal democracy and communism.
Unapologetically
fascist, Ongania immediately waged La Noche de los Bastones Largos
(The Night of the Long Sticks), when police stormed the Faculty of
Sciences of the University of Buenos Aires, beating and arresting
students and professors. This attests to the bravery–or frivolousness,
depending on your ideological bias–of the combined revival of
psychoanalysis and the avant-garde amidst the advancement of a
totalitarian dictatorship that would eventually enact genocide upon the
Argentine Left from 1976-83.
A Happening Redux
The 1966 coup set the political
mise-en-scene for Masotta’s
essay “I committed a Happening,” written to counter the
condemnation–made by one Professor Klimovsky in the newspaper
La Razon–that
“perpetrators” of Happenings would better serve the Left by investing
their creative “imagination in lessening this tremendous plague (of
‘hunger’).”
18 For Masotta, this choice–
either Happenings
or
Left politics–was a false dialectic. His rebuttal evoked Walter
Benjamin’s address to the Institute for the Study of Fascism, made in
1934, when he denounced the false choice the Left was forcing artists to
make between political correctness and aesthetic engagement.
19
For Benjamin, the Left needed to interrogate aesthetic tendencies, not
merely reject them. Similarly, Masotta argued that Happenings
reclassified the materialist basis of Art with a capital “A” (its most
noble form being bronze or marble) and site (traditionally confined to
the museum). As such, Happenings had the potential of interrogating and
demystifying the hegemonic value system of art production/consumption by
formally imbuing (critical) aesthetics with a social function.
This entailed reorienting the subject’s imaginary and symbolic
relationship to a conventional artwork or art event, returning from the
repressed the evocation of a form’s different connotative value that’s
over-determined by standing aesthetic convention. The Happening’s
critical potential, then, was not ontological. In its most conventional
application, a Happening could just as easily reestablish cultural
hegemonies, as was the case of a Happening performed by La Monte Young
in New York City, in 1966, which Masotta had attended.
20
In “I committed a Happening,” Masotta described his experience of Young’s event:
After climbing the last staircase [into a downtown New
York City loft], one was assaulted by and enveloped in a continuous
deafening noise, composed of a colorful mix of electronic sounds….
Something, I don’t know what, something Oriental, was burning
somewhere…. The lights were turned out; only the front wall was
illuminated by a blue or reddish light…. Beneath the light, and almost
against the wall, facing the room and facing the audience…were five
people…sitting on the ground, one of them a woman, in yoga position,
dressed in what was certainly Oriental clothing, and each of them
holding a microphone. One of them played a violin, while…the four others
remained as though paralyzed, with the microphones almost glued to
their open mouths…. [T]he four, stopping only to breath, were adding a
continuous guttural sound to the sum of the electronic sounds…. There
was in this timeless spectacle a deliberate mix–a bit banal for my
taste–of Orientalism and electronics.21
Upon returning to Buenos Aires in April 1966, Masotta
decided to repeat Young’s Happening. Though it might be more appropriate
to say–employing Guy Debord’s term–that Masotta
detourned it.
22 Entitled
To Induce the Spirit of the Image,
Masotta’s Happening waged a dual critique of Western Zen-fetish, a
social phenomenon that disgusted Masotta in the context of American
capitalism, and class stratification, something one saw
everywhere in Argentina.
Performed at ITDT, Masotta retained Young’s idea of
“putting on” a continuous electronic sound at a high volume for an hour,
as he would the arrangement of the audience and performers–face to
face, with the performers being lit. However, instead of five performers
seated in yoga positions, Masotta hired twenty elderly actors, dressed
as “motley-colored downtrodden-looking” individuals, to stand on an
illuminated platform. When Masotta discharged a fire extinguisher the
event began:
I told [the audience] what was happening when they
entered the room…that I had paid the old people to let themselves be
seen, and that the audience, the others, those who were facing the old
folks, more than two hundred people, had each paid two hundred pesos to
look at them. That in all this there was a circle…through which the
money moved, and that I was the mediator. Then I discharged the fire
extinguisher, and afterward the sound appeared, rapidly attaining the
chosen volume. When the spotlight that illuminated me went out, I myself
went up to the spotlights that were to illuminate the old people and I
turned them on. Against the white wall, their spirit shamed and
flattened out by the white light, next to each other in a line, the old
people were rigid, ready to let themselves be looked at for an hour. The electronic sound lent greater immobility to the scene. I looked toward the audience: they too, in stillness looked at the old people.23
In the context of Young’s original Happening–a past
someone may or may not know independently–it’s helpful to read Masotta’s
experimental Happening through the logic of a double-blind study. Based
upon a technique in clinical research where neither the researcher nor
the patient knows whether the treatment administered is considered
inactive (placebo) or active (medicinal), in a double-blind study no one
knows who is in the inactive control group and who is in the active
experimental group. Analogously, in Happenings one finds an attempt to
deny the distinction between audience (passive group) and performer
(active group), following the neo-avant-garde axiom that
audiences should be eliminated entirely.
“All the elements–people, space, the particular materials and character
of the environment, time–can in this way be integrated,” Kaprow
concluded in 1959.
24
The two groups constituting a Happening–audience and performers–would
thus mirror each other, the reality of one being bound up in the other.
Of course this symbiosis would have occurred in Young’s Happening.
However, given the absence of any ostensible
critique, this
imbrication of positions–which by 1966 had become quite conventional–was
left unexamined, which meant the chiasmic relation between self and
other wasn’t really
seen. Rather, the participants
passively reenacted these positions, with Young seated in the privileged location of conductor.
Brochure for Acerca de: Happenings (About: Happenings),
a series of lectures and happenings organized by Oscar Masotta at the
Instituto Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1966. Reproduced
in Listen Here Now! Argentine Art of the 1960s: Writings of the Avant-Garde. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004). Used with permission of the Estate of Oscar Masotta.
In Masotta’s Happening, by contrast, the rules of the game were explicitly established
as
a critique, such that the artist (investigator) would also be blind in
the sense that what would happen between the two groups, vis-a-vis the
investigator’s action (in situ), was unknown by all. The only thing
known in advance was that all the players–the two groups and the
artist–would be positioned in a triangulation of inter-subjective gazes.
“The old people were rigid, ready
to let themselves be looked at for an hour. The electronic sound lent greater immobility to the scene. I looked toward the audience: they too, in stillness
looked at the old people.” We might ask what they all were looking at? Or rather,
who was given to be seen, and by
whom?
Within this galaxy of signifiers–the elderly, their weathered clothes,
the Argentine flags, the spectator-audience, the artist- conductor, the
Instituto Di Tella–an Imaginary field of multiple, fractured
identifications were played out via each person’s relation to the Other.
This recalled Sartre’s observation that in the look “I am possessed by
the Other; the Other’s look fashions my body in its nakedness, causes it
to be born, sculptures it, produces it as it
is, sees it as I shall never see it. The Other holds a secret–the secret of who I am.”
25 Like a double-blind study, a
secret thus structured the Happening, embedded, as it were, in the various discursive fields mentioned above.
Meanwhile, the
Happenist who wrote the score–“You will stand here for an hour and be looked at”–initiated the scene with an implicit “declaration”–
I am a sadist. In this way, Masotta self-reflexively radicalized the Sartrean theory of the look, because the
subject–as Lacan would have put it–was
hiding in plain view.
Which brings us back to the unconscious, a concept Sartre soundly
rejected. From a Lacanian point of view, we might conjecture that the
entire point of Masotta “committing a Happening” was to call attention
to the subject’s unconscious relationship to the Symbolic register, in
which the participants were embedded, and through which they were
determined. Moreover, given the particular signs he mobilized–the
people, the clothes, the weapon-ness of the fire extinguisher, the
exchange of capital, and the
look–this point was explicitly
political (to the chagrin of Klimovsky, who implicitly conflated the
Happenist with the criminal). Masotta’s point was, however, made
performatively, not didactically, which confused many on the Left. As
Masotta explained: “When my friends on the Left…asked me, troubled,
about the meaning of the Happening, I answered them using a phrase which
I repeated using exactly the same order of words each time I was asked
the same question: My Happening, I now repeat, was nothing other than
‘an act of social sadism made explicit.'”
26
Basically, Masotta transformed Young’s Happening into a
Sartrean “situation.” But what confused those on the Left was not that
Masotta had done this–the Left was squarely behind Sartre–but that he
did it in order to interrogate those on the Left
and the Right, artist
and
politician, a move that made a critical demand upon all the
participants. According to Sartre, a situation is the position from
which a person engages with the world–where one is presented with a set
of conditions that he or she can passively accept or actively
interrogate. The active position entails recognizing that the quotidian
choices we make–between this or that action–is an affirmation of a given
“image” of humanity as a whole. As Sartre put it, in making a choice,
“I am creating a certain image of man as I would have him to be.In
fashioning myself I fashion man.”
27
As a means of interrogation, the committed artist might repeat these
situations. In so doing, the artist would visualize the conventional
choices subjects make in life, ones that could be made differently
through art
as a critique of life. Accordingly, when scoring
his Happening, Masotta made several choices that implicated his fellow
practitioners of art, some of which have already been mentioned. For
instance, he did
not accept the pseudo-scientific notion of
dematerialism as defined by Lippard. Nor did he choose, in his
Happening, to maintain the Orientalist components of Young’s original
event. Rather, Masotta chose to visualize what was hiding in plain view:
the truth of the subject within the double fields of Argentine politics
and the International avant-garde, which is to say, to visualize a
certain strain of social sadism among artists
and politicians alike.
28
For most, this collapsed dialectic was understandably
counterintuitive. Certainly the psychedelic yogi scene staged by La
Monte Young and his collaborators defined the “zeitgeist” of many
artists, which, like the Left, protested an American right-wing
administration that would back Argentina’s Dirty War. But in reality,
when it came to each group’s ethnocentrism–an attitude that often
entailed a sadistic relationship to the Other–there was little
difference between the two groups, even though this connection remained
in the register of
unconscious thoughts. The issue of this
unconscious reality, no doubt, formed the basis for Masotta’s disgust
with the American social phenomenon of Zen as he encountered it within
Young’s Happening.
29
Another of Masotta’s descriptions illuminates the Happening’s
underlying sadism in physiological terms, and we should note how readily
Masotta discounts the
conscious intentions of the participants’ Orientalism:
[I]n this sum of deafening sounds, in this exasperating
electronic endlessness, in this mix of high-pitched noise and sound that
penetrated one’s bones and pummeled one’s temples, there was something
that had very little to do with Zen…. I felt isolated, as though nailed
to the floor, the auditory reality now “inside” my body…. How long would
this last? I was not resolved to pursue the experience to the end: I
didn’t believe in it. After no more than twenty minutes I left.30
By leaving the Happening, Masotta made a
choice.
Not only did he refuse to participate in Young’s so-called Zen
mise-en-scene, he further resolved to commit another Happening at the
conceptual margins of Young’s event as a means of critique, a situation
about a situation. However, Masotta’s situation disregarded Sartre’s
imperative for a committed art
opposed to the avant-garde,
31
in that the Happening wasn’t a wholesale rejection of the avant-garde.
Instead, in a move that foretold the aesthetic theories put forth by
Jacques Ranciere–and read by so many artists today–Masotta used the
Happening to demonstrate (in real time) the extent to which aesthetics
and politics were bound up in a reciprocal relationship–neither being
pure in and of itself. He thus gave us another axiom:
There’s a politics to aesthetics and an aesthetics to politics.
Further anticipating Ranciere, and departing from Sartre, Masotta knew
that underscoring the role of the unconscious was central in
demonstrating this reciprocity. Here, again, Lacan enters the picture.
Oscar Masotta’s Ensayos Lacanianos (Barcelona: Anagrama, 1976).
The Purloined Avant-Garde
In his 1955 seminar on “The Purloined Letter,” Lacan declared, “a letter always arrives at its destination.”
32
In saying this, he wasn’t claiming that a letter always arrives at the
address typed on its envelope. Rather, the implication is that the
letter’s rightful addressee is
by definition the person who
receives it. This idea relates to Louis Althusser’s notion of
interpellation, whereby a subject (of gender, nation, class, etc.)
becomes defined ideologically the moment s/he answers a “hail” or call
from the Other (be it a parent, politician, or artist). This call and
response happens every time we (unconsciously) recognize a hail and know
that it is I
who has been hailed. If a hail always reaches its
rightful destination, it’s because someone is always there–as if by
chance–to receive it. Likewise in the case of the purloined letter, the
receiver is merely the
holder of the letter, not the “rightful”
possessor
of it in any prescriptive way. We can think of a purloined letter as an
anonymous message placed in a bottle and cast out to sea. When it lands
and a subject recognizes it and picks it up, s/he has answered its
call. The artist is one such subject, as was Masotta.
In 1966, Masotta answered a Lacanian hail, initiated by
his mentor, after which he considered the role that unconscious thought
played in the Symbolic field and paid it forward to his colleagues at
the ITDT. In the context of Sartrean situations, this was an ethical
act. For if Masotta intended to expose a secret that was hiding in plain
view within the aesthetic and political fields–social sadism–then
making this secret explicit entailed confronting participants with a
repressed reality and a series of concomitant choices. Moreover, by
simultaneously inducing a Sartrean situation, the Happening’s overall
“event” was extended to include the sites of prior production and
subsequent discursive representation, including this one. And in each
site–production, exhibition, and distribution–the question remained: Who would receive what hail?
Returning to Masotta’s description of the event in “I
Committed a Happening,” the production entailed hiring twenty actors to
“work” for four hundred pesos. He explains that he wanted them to evoke
those people whose normal job was to be “hawkers of cheap jewelry,
leather goods and variety material” that were sold in “those shops that
are always on the verge of closing along Corrientes Street.” He
speculated that at their usual work they must earn less than what he was
going to pay them. The event thus began with a negotiation between the
artist and his “workers”:
I gathered them together and explained what they were to
do. I told them that instead of four hundred I would pay them six
hundred pesos: from that point on they gave me their full attention. I
felt a bit cynical: but neither did I wish to have too many illusions. I
wasn’t going to demonize myself for this social act of manipulation,
which in real society happens everyday. I then explained…that they had
nothing to do other than to remain still for an hour…I also told them
that…during this hour there would be a very high-pitched sound, at very
high volume, and very deafening. And they had to put up with it, there
was no alternative. And I asked whether they accepted and they were in
agreement…. As I began to feel vaguely guilty, I considered offering
them cotton plugs for their ears. I did so and they accepted.33
In this situation, the performers received the hail of
“worker” once they negotiated with Masotta, who, in doing so, received
the hail of “management.” The repressed fact that returns here–afforded
by the exchange of money that Masotta later reveals to the audience as
part of the performance–is what Brecht claimed to be the (masked) reality of theatre: the non-distinction
between actor and worker, and, by extension, the stage and the world.
It’s not a matter of “all the world’s a stage,” but rather that the
stage is the real world, with all the social acts of manipulation that
accord it. One doesn’t leave the world for the theatre, which
“represents” reality. Rather, in theatre–and in art–one enters another situation where real choices have to be made.
In Masotta’s case, a
public situation was
established once he announced the agreed upon exchange of money at the
beginning of the performance. But this utterance didn’t begin or end
with the Marxist intent to expose the circulation of capital in art.
Rather, the exchange of money–establishing the purchase of a
scene–set
the stage for the transparent exchange of looks, something that
producers of conventional theatre and performance take great efforts to
mask. As Brecht noted in
The Messingkauf Dialogues, in theatre
“the audience sees quite intimate episodes without itself being seen,”
or so they believe. “It’s just like somebody looking through a keyhole
and seeing a scene involving people who’ve no idea they are not alone.”
But in reality, this is an imaginary arrangement that theatre
simultaneously sets up and conceals.
34 In Masotta’s Happening, however, there was an attempt to establish a situation whereby participants were not just
seeing the performers. To the contrary, they were
looking at the circuit of gazes in which they, themselves, were self-consciously caught.
Herein lay the potentiality of critique. In Masotta’s mise-en-scene, the participants were hailed to acknowledge the ethics of the look, which they had either sold or purchased, within the circuit of the gaze. The question of who looks at whom,
and for what purpose, could not be ignored. Absolutely central to this
scene–to the critical act of looking–was the stark difference it
conjured up in the art viewer in respect to the normative circuit of
exhibitionism/voyeurism that characterized events such as Young’s,
events that laid a claim for a cutting edge aesthetic. Certainly, this
consciousness would have indeed been the case among those attending art
events at the ITDT–recall Kaprow’s announcement that Buenos Aires was a
“city of Happenists,” a claim the mass media ran with. In this way,
Masotta’s commitment to avant-garde practice as a strategy of social
critique relied upon his tactic of repetition being recognized by the
viewer. However, even without consciousness of the first event, there
was critical potential in Masotta’s iteration. For what was grounded
here was the unabashed, naked act of evaluative looking–an act
in which we regularly and problematically engage in our quotidian
affairs and one, moreover, that is masked by conventional realist art
and theatre.
Which brings us back to why the work of Oscar Masotta
matters today. For this tactic of repetition is to be found everywhere
in the best instances of contemporary critical aesthetics. Witness
Andrea Geyer’s Comrades of Time (2011) project, in which the
artist videotapes young women repeating the speeches and writings of
historical avant-garde thinkers and collectives–Rosa Luxemburg, the
November Group Manifesto, Heinrich Mann, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch,
and Margarete Susman–as a means of critiquing the amnesic nature of
contemporary art and politics. Or Constanze Ruhm’s Crash Site: My_Never_Ending_Burial_ Plot
(2010), in which the artist-as-filmmaker revives and re-scripts the
identities of iconic female film characters–in this case, Hari of Andrej
Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972), Nana of Jean-Luc Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie (1962), and Giuliana of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Il Deserto Rosso
(1964)–as a means of putting the legacies of neo-avant-garde “auteur”
filmmaking and Postmodernist feminism in dialogue with each other and
contemporary filmmaking. There’s also Kerry Tribe’s 2010 re-performance
of Hollis Frampton’s 1971 film Critical Mass, in which a couple
improvises a break-up that Frampton edited into a series of stutters
and repetitions. In Tribe’s redux, her actors re-perform Frampton’s
script–both in its improvisation and final edit–whereupon the actors, given to be seen, are objects of the audience’s simultaneous identification and disidentification
with a spectacle that’s both real and reconstructed–a performative
metaphor for gender identification in the public sphere.
These are but three examples in which a
purloined
avant-garde tactic gives rise to critical art production, to the
chagrin of such contemporary thinkers as Peter Burger, who continues to
argue, as he did in 1974, that repetition of these tactics
“institutionalizes the
avant-garde as art and thus negates genuinely avant-gardiste intentions.”
35 Many excellent critiques have been made of Burger’s claims,
36 but suffice it to say that Burger squarely adheres to the belief that one can be
in step with one’s times. That, indeed, we
can
step in the same river twice–the first time being real, the second
being false. This myth of authentic origin versus fraudulent repetition
is a notion that tenaciously plagues a conservative facet of
contemporary art production. It is against this myth of origin that I
revive–no,
repeat–Masotta’s call for a dematerialist practice
that utilizes the detourned signifier–be it the word, the image, or the
look–to interrogate the
limits of representation in which we
are both caught and split. And, in repeating Masotta’s own repetition of
an event, it is my hope that Masotta’s legacy will continue, after the
fact, to bear fruit in the work of those artists today committed to the
politics and aesthetics of repetition.
Juli Carson is Associate Professor in the
Studio Art Department of the Claire Trevor School of the Arts at the
University of California, Irvine, where she directs the Critical and
Curatorial MFA Program and the University Art Galleries. She is author
of Exile of the Imaginary: Politics, Aesthetics, Love (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2007) and The Limits of Representation: Psychoanalysis and Critical Aesthetics (Buenos Aires: Letra Viva Press, 2011). Her forthcoming book, entitled The Conceptual Unconscious: A Poetics of Critique, will be published by PoLYpeN.
