The ‘Open Empire’: Communication Satellite Fictions in Three Country Happening (1966)

Abstract

This paper examines Three Country Happening (1966), a collaboration between artists Marta Minujín in Buenos Aires, Allan Kaprow in New York, and Wolf Vostell in West Berlin. Each of the artists’ contributions was supposedly coordinated using a state-of-the-art communication satellite. The artists did not end up connecting to the satellite, though they led their audience to believe that they had. This paper first links this project to the development of the transnational satellite system itself, locating the total work’s constitutive glitch at the limits of the desire for American communication satellites to foment world peace during the Cold War. Then, it examines the differences between each artist’s local situation, contrasting the foundational ambitions of the satellite program in the United States to the realities of long-range transmission in Germany and Argentina. In doing so, it rereads the work’s supposed failure as a critical counternarrative against the belief that sociopolitical problems have technological solutions.