On the SpectActor: Janez Janša’s Performative Installation The Wailing Wall

[En anglais]

The importance of bodily participation in performance art is an emancipatory experience for modern spectators, and paramount in the work of Allan Kaprow, the artist now recognized as the main inventor of modern happenings in the late 1950s. Kaprow’s performance The Fluids (1968) is about the perceptions of the voluntary participants (and much more, of course) while they were building the rectangular ice walls. The volunteers’ agency was certainly defined in advance, yet this does not diminish its truth value. Their decision to be personally engaged in the project was a source of their emancipation in an otherwise temporarily set artistic “community” that was not necessarily an act of one individual’s perception. Community, not individuality, was in the forefront of Kaprow’s ice projects.

Almost a half century later, one artist took the individuality of the spectators of the performances deadly seriously. Janez Janša¹ 1 -  The artist’s original name was Emil Hrvatin. He changed his name to Janez Janša together with two other artists, Davide Grasi and Žiga Kariž, as part of the artistic project of joining the Slovenian Democratic Party. Its political leader, Janez Janša, was at that time also the economic liberal-conservative Prime Minister of the Republic of Slovenia. is a leading Slovenian author and director of interdisciplinary performance. His artwork represents one of the ways in which the performing body has been applied in Slovenian theatre in the past two decades: the theatrical spectacle in the body.