Attention: ART / WORLD audience

by Rachel O’Neill, NZLive.com Content Officer


The ART / WORLD symposium, hosted by Wellington’s City Gallery on 20-21 April, was a hot-house of ideas and debate focused on three rounds of panel discussions and a keynote by Artistic Director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Juliana Engberg.
Helen Galbraith, lead curator at the City Gallery, suggested early on in the day that we think of the art world as ‘a seven-headed hydra’. This was reflected in the diversity of contributors at the symposium. Artists, curators, arts programmers, gallery and institutional representatives, writers and critics supplied a plethora of approaches, views and positions to each issue tackled by the various panels.

A key point for both artists and institutions was debated in the panel titled ‘We need you: art / audience co-dependency’. Panellists positioned the contemporary art viewer as both consumer and producer - the ‘pro-sumer’ of contemporary culture. The intimate art experience is also a participatory one.

Introducing the intimacy of interaction is not uncomplicated. Galleries and artists struggle with it for a number of reasons. Examples given were the ethics of engagement between artist, viewer and institution. Multiple audiences, and the mixed agendas of participants, were also mentioned.
However, Juliana said she was positive about the proliferation of forms of interaction emerging around the world and at all levels, including the participation of viewers, artists engaged more strongly with questions of participation, art galleries turning to measures of success beyond visitor quotas, and so on.
A provocative example of participation was available at the City Gallery itself - Liz Allan’s part in the Association of Collaboration’s (TAC) contribution to the Prospect 2007 exhibition. The artist was a key panel voice in the ‘art / audience co-dependency’ debate.
TAC have mobilised an art cart in Prospect. The service provides pens, paper and example diagrams to encourage viewers to write their own messages, images and comments about art in Prospect and experiencing art generally. The cart moves around the gallery spaces and comments are attached to the cart and exhibition walls.

To the credit of TAC, this is not merely a utopian gesture, but a comment on the role of art in service provision to its public, as well as on the role of viewers to provide a service in return - a twist on the capacity of the audience to review their experience too.
Building ways for audiences and art to interact necessarily places constraints or parameters on that engagement. Despite the current emphasis on community and communication, so much participation, as was broadly raised in the symposium, is done in a singular or bounded fashion. As an art participant, we tend to comment, give feedback and interact as individuals; customer feedback forms, blogs and review posts are some examples.
This kind of constructive criticism on current experiments in participation will hopefully see new models emerge in the future.

Thanks to the presence of the ‘art hydra’, the symposium let me see how these issues are being explored on many different fronts within the art community.