Who is your Audience

8. 18th April 2011. Caroline Wright.
Professional Context. Synchronous Seminar.

The notion and nature of the audience and exhibition sites.
People/audiences tend to conform to accepted behaviour & ritualistic patterns, to retain traditions of culture. Largely people respect convention and behave appropriately, following unwritten codes of behaviour.
The instinct is to behave as a group rather than an individual.
Crowds / sport / communal action / church / religious ceremony - the common understandings of expectations and behaviour.
So how does an art audience behave - enquiring? well behaved?
Use knowledge of their behaviours to make and position work better.


Spencer Tunick nudes - participation. boundaries between artwork and audience - the audience is the work. Duality of position and perception.


Phyllida Barlow - big sculptures - recycled from previous sculptures. For the audience, where is the link to fabricated inanimate work?
She is now within gallery system - Hauser and Wirth, so more representation = more distance from audience. It positions work into product / commodity, and makes the artist more hidden. The shift of expectation is away from the audience. 

Industry moves work away from the artist. The range of art employees representing and mediating work - more layer in between the artist and audience. Everyone adds their difference opinion and view, adding to the matrix of the work.


The paying audience - how does that alter expectations and pressures. Brings in judgements of what is acceptable or not. Commissioning fees - 50% up front and 50% on completion - where is the power relationship.


Wood. Nelson and Shift 1996.
The need for exchange itself arises very early in human societies wherever there is some division of labour or specialism of productive processes.


Interactive work. Live tattoo parlour. The relationship between the practitioner and the recipient - a shared experience.


Gypsy and the Cat. electro pop duo. music videos. Target incidental audiences - outside Tate Modern. Live art. Clearly planned showing strategy.


Yoko Ono the cut away clothes piece. The apparent violence, the place and discomfort of the audience. Reminds me of the Stanford human experiment where people are placed as either the prisoner or the warder, and how behaviour ensues.

 

Does the artist have a responsibility to the audience.


Yes of course, but only if the artist wants a certain response. You could say that the artist is also the audience for the work, and makes art to fulfil that self audience. Again, being more than an audience of one, the artist can imagine or empathise with other responses, and guide the effect they wish. I think the artist has a responsibility to appeal to the intelligence and sensibilities of the audience, but not to pander. It's so subjective - it all depends - it depends on the artist, the exhibition, the brief, the funding, and so on, but I think it's certainly true that artists tend to work hard and be rigorous in their intent. I think artist could currently consider more what would be of interest to the audience, rather than a contemporary feel of what the audience ought to be interested in.



How does the artist diversify and widen audiences.


A certain amount of trying things out and random promotion after targeted efforts. Allied or fringe audiences could be brought in, so rather than just artistic networks, one can try cafes, nightclubs, passing trade.
Within the exhibition, the presentation and labelling can be as clear as possible. The most complex and abstract ideas can be simply conveyed with thought, to capture the attention of all sorts of people.



Does an audience need interpretation of a work.


It certainly can help, but I would say for my own work that I would hope to incorporate the interpretation within the work itself, by way of the title or accompanying directions, which will signal the chapter headings of my intent, in a poetic form. I would hope to have the title of the exhibition rather say what it does on the tin, even if that is rather abstract. For example, my own exhibition, entitled Viewer, was subtitled Blunt Edge Technology, Contemporary Art on Vintage Equipment.
In films and novels, much can be inferred between the lines, ambiguities can be clearly signalled, and the audience understands these because of life experience and knowledge of the genre. I think this is possible within visual art also, and is something I will think about more.



Who are the performers, the artists or the audiences.

Or, does art really exist, does it really have any power if it is not regarded or interacted with. James Elkins has some wonderful insights into this in The Object Stares Back. I think of this as a philosophical point. Art certainly is dependent on an audience's willingness to participate at least by looking. Therefore there must be something to see, something to think of, and the more eloquent and unending the better, surely.

These points in relation to my own work and audience.
rules of engagement for my audience - extend, exchange, maintain, subvert, etc.

Reflection

There are questions raised and things to ponder over time about the artist relationship with the audience, or indeed my relationship with my audience. These are things to think over and evolve forever really. In considering my own audience I hope to give many values and fulfil as many aspects as possible. I mean to draw in, to open doors, to ...ask questions is not quite the right point. I am not asking questions of the viewer, but answering their question with another door, another possibility, another way of looking - a further conversation.

Have I made that work yet? Does my body of work make up something like this? To myself, it does, and I have more and more and more to make. Amen

19th April 2011