In 2010, the octogenarian kinetic artist Julio Le Parc found himself in Venice, wandering about the different levels of the Palazzo Grassi. ‘Keep your ticket,’ said the Argentinian-born artist to his companion. ‘Why?’ asked his friend. ‘You’ll see,’ Le Parc replied. Then he proposed a deal to the gallery attendant: if he and his friend did not like the exhibition they should be given a full refund; if they liked only half the works on show, they would ask for just half their entrance fee back. After all, reasoned Le Parc, ‘this collector is a millionaire. Such an amount of money is nothing to him. And, as an intelligent man, he will no doubt want to know what the public thinks of his taste and his arrangement of the show.’ Upon arriving back at the ground floor of the Palazzo, however, they could no longer find the attendant. ‘This collector has no need of the public,’ Le Parc concluded. ‘We pay and we leave and that is all.’1
Le Parc himself could scarcely be accused of having such a cavalier attitude towards his audience. Ever since the earliest exhibitions of the collective he convened in the early 1960s, the Groupe de recherche d’art visuel (GRAV), he has been in the habit of providing brief questionnaires for the public, soliciting their opinions and preferences. His large solo show earlier this year at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris – the first survey of the artist’s career in France, which began with his arrival in Paris from Argentina in the late 1950s – was no exception. At the exit of the salle de jeux(Games Room), which displayed Le Parc’s interactive ‘game’ works such as Faites tomber les mythes (Knock Down the Myths, 1969), Choissisez vos enemis (Choose Your Enemies, 1970) andFrappez les gradés (Strike the Officers, 1971), Le Parc left a stack of A4 sheets pertaining to the latter piece, asking us to indicate which of the various authority figures the artist had illustrated on punching bags we would strike first: the policeman, the priest, the MP? Or, perhaps, the artist?
Sitting with Le Parc three days before the show’s opening, amidst all the noise and bustle of a major exhibition under construction, the artist described to me what he perceives as a significant shift in power in the art world between the conception of this work and the present. The power of the critic, he says, ‘has diminished. Back then, nobody knew the names of curators and museum directors, but little by little they grew in importance,’ and the balance swung increasingly in favour of star curators and collectors. In recent times, however, Le Parc has noted a further change. The public, who he says were once no more than ‘spectators’, now exert ‘a much greater influence’ over the exhibitions they see. This role for the audience – less passive, more active – was anticipated in no small degree by Le Parc himself, in works he made nearly half a century ago.
Read the rest of my interview with Julio Le Parc in Frieze.