How to Do Things with Art. Dorothea von Hantelmann

artists in the 20th century—not only as a primordial form of spectacle but also as a fundamental metaphor for general social relations.” ⁶⁰ The concept of the archaeological introduced by Buchloh can be given greater precision through the thought of Michel Foucault. ⁶¹ Coleman’s approach is “archaeological” precisely in the sense that it does not involve a linear concept of history, but, in a radically discontinuous way, forges links between subjective experience and specific historical events, relating in turn to general cultural phe­nomena in the history of modernity.

       When Guy Debord, who published his opus magnum The Society of the Spectacle in 1967, was asked 21 years later when he would date the beginning of the culture of the spectacle, he answered that the spectacle was hardly 40 years old when his book first came out. ⁶² In other words, its historical beginning can be dated to the late 1920s, even to around 1927, the year of the rematch between Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey. It was the first boxing match to be broadcast live on radio and transmitted by 79 stations in Africa, Latin America, Europe and Australia. It was thus one of the first global mass sports events, a linking of the body with the abstractions of international transmission. ⁶³ Likewise Joyce Carol Oates describes its character as an event for the masses. “Photographs of these events,” she writes, “show jammed arenas with boxing rings like postage-sized altars at their centers, the boxers themselves no more than tiny, heraldic figures. To attend a Dempsey match was not to have seen a Dempsey match, but perhaps that was not the issue.” ⁶⁴