ABSTRACT
This chapter considers a moment when burgeoning interests in phenomenal experience in art were given explicitly political meanings. It focuses on a work by artist Gérard Fromanger installed on a Paris street corner in October 1968, months after a mass insurrection and general strike swept across France. The so-called Souffles, transparent hemispheres of colored plastic, mark a key moment in the genealogy of phenomenal art because of the convergence they proposed between two models of politics that temporarily overlapped in 1968. Presented as an expression of the workers’ movement, the sculptures also offered an experience of phenomenological immediacy to viewers. Overlooked in the history of political, phenomenal, or relational art, the Souffles cast into relief the incompatibility of different forms of agency in a manner that continues to haunt the critical claims for more recent phenomenal and relational art.
