From Fritz Teufel to Leo Bassi : Happening and provocation. Just a History of Overbidding and Inflation?

Ludico-symbolic coups and assassination attempts, make-believe funerals and degeneration of trials into grotesque rhetorical jousting : everywhere throughout Europe and the United States in the mid sixties, political happenings thrived. The acts/performances, which were for the most part carried out by groups or individuals close to the Marxist and pacifist student protest movement, can’t be dissociated from a situationnist understanding of the urban milieu, transformed into one large stage for militant theatre. Founded on the principal of diversion and provocation, these actions quickly led to inflation and overbidding. Caught in a hectic whirl which forced them to always push the limit further in order to evade, if only temporarily, a process of institutionalisation that threatens any act of provocation, they soon begin to loose their political effectiveness.

Born from a common political and artistic origin as the leaders of the student left movement, several “terrorist” groups harden their tone at the beginning of the seventies and perpetrate acts of violence with a revolutionary intention. Breaking away from the theatrical and ludic student activity while also retaining their situationnist obedience and a certain theatrical conception of the urban place, these armed groups think up actions in the beginning of the seventies which induce a rupture in the performative and theatrical tradition of the end of the sixties. These acts have been the subject of in depths studies by authors who, however conscious of the theatrical origins of the actions of the extreme left terrorists, refer to a terminology which imposes a distinction between action (or happening/performance) and “terrorist” acts. On the basis of this terminological distinction, we will demonstrate not only that these actions of the beginning of the seventies must be considered in a direct lineage with the political-theatrical creation of the end of the sixties, but that they also offer a first escape route, politically efficient, to the inflation which threatens any act of provocation.

If the actions of the RAF, the Red Brigades or the Weathermen evade institutionalisation which threatens any act of provocation, they nevertheless remain politically unsustainable and condemn those who imagine them as well as those who execute them to an inevitably tragic ending, incompatible with the pursuit of creative practice. This paradigm will guide us in identifying some more recent creative processes (fake conferences of the Yes Men, shows/performances of Leo Bassi) which try to overcome in turn the political precariousness of their predecessors in endowing themselves with an (auto)reflexive dimension. Beyond their heterogeneity, these actions/shows shall thus be perceived as objects which surpass the act of provocation, inevitably destined to wear out. Because, in actively implicating the spectator to a point where he becomes a full fledge component of an engaged and reflexive creative process, these practices reinstate the politico-theatrical performance in its indispensable efficiency.