Art - Site - Audience

In September 2008, I curated and organised an inter-disciplinary symposium at Tramway, marking the end of my three years as an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts, during which I was based at the Glasgow School of Art.

Titled ‘Art – Site – Audience’, the one-day symposium was intended to explore shifting relationships between, and definitions of, ‘artwork’, ‘site’ and ‘audience’. Although I was tentative about choosing these three terms (the word ‘site’ in particular) given their much-debated meanings and uses, and the alternatives I could have selected, I believed that they would provide a provocative point of departure or, as one symposium delegate later put it, ‘a generative friction’, for the day’s discussions.

Top

Primary Questions

My starting position was the contention that all art – from an intervention in the ‘public’ realm of a civic square, to wall-based work in the exclusive territory of a ‘private’ gallery, or from site-specific performance to new media art disseminated through the Internet – can be considered as site-related.

In this context, the symposium asked the questions:

What choices govern decisions about where we ‘place’ art?

How does its location affect our readings of a work? And how does the work affect our readings of its location?

What are the issues of power, access and ownership that the locus of a work determines?

What kinds of relationships between ‘artwork’, ‘site’ and ‘audience’ should contemporary practice be generating?*

My intention was to address these questions and provocations by inviting speakers and workshop leaders from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds to contribute to the symposium, and to encourage them to deliver and facilitate a range of encounters and presentations in different spaces in Tramway. My hope was that the form of the symposium would reflect its content, that presenters would not only bring their own expertise to the event, but that their presentations would respond to the varied spaces within Tramway and to the specific context of the symposium – that they would enact and critique notions of ‘sited-ness’.

Top

Overview of Presentations

The symposium proved extremely popular, with places booking up in a matter of days, suggesting the timeliness and pertinence of the issues it aimed to debate. The diversity and quality of the presenters also appeared to prove attractive to delegates from a wide spectrum of practices and backgrounds.

Irit Rogoff, Professor of Visual Culture at Goldsmiths, University of London opened the event with a dense and thought-provoking paper, ‘The Where of Now’. Presented as a ‘conventional’ academic lecture, her material was compelling. Through her delivery and command of her subject she conveyed a sense of the immediacy of her arguments, their malleability and new-minted-ness. In her paper, she proposed the notion of ‘singularity’, arguing that it was a more useful and appropriate alternative to ‘specificity’ as a mode of considering the location and context of our encounters with artworks, and that it might be used to productively challenge assumptions about the linkage between positionality and identity. Drawing on examples such as Raqs Media Collective’s Age Sex Location, Irit argued that recent years have seen a proliferation of artworks that ‘don’t rely on context for their embedded meaning’. Her title, ‘The Where of Now’, referred to what she saw as a new notion of located-ness in contemporary art practice: location as fluid coalescence between the material, the virtual and a mutable flow of signifiers. This new reading, she suggested, unsettled our ability to position ourselves in relation to a work of art, usefully destabilising assumed connections between identity and location.

Stephen Hodge, artist and lecturer in Performance at the University of Exeter, followed with a talk/demonstration on artworks ‘sited’ in virtual worlds, considering in particular architectural installations and performative artworks in Second Life. His ‘mixed-reality’ presentation entertainingly acknowledged the ambiguities in his identity as presenter – at once ‘forty year-old academic and artist’, Stephen Hodge, in the ‘real’, or ‘meat’, world and on-line avatar, Drifter Rhode. He concluded by showing clips from some of the mixed-reality experimentation that he has begun with Wrights and Sites (www.mis-guide.com), a group of artist-researchers to which he belongs and who describe themselves as ‘having a special relationship to site, city/landscape and walking’.

The third presentation, from Mike Pearson, theatre artist and Professor of Performance Studies at Aberystwyth, University of Wales, with John Anzani, brought the temporality of located-ness prominently into the discussion. Mike and John described their presentation as a ‘re-imagining’ of Gododdin, an acclaimed and influential performance staged in Tramway in 1989 by Brith Gof, the experimental company of which Mike was a founding member. Using documentation from the original production – video footage, photographs, drawings and plans – the presentation was anecdotal and conversational, with Mike and John evoking, or re-performing, the event through personal recollections and fragmented memories. Theirs was not an attempt to recreate or reconstruct an ‘authentic’ moment in history, but to convey a sense of the multiple, over-lapping interpretations that cluster around a specific location and a particular event.

In the next session, delegates at the symposium were invited to choose between a participatory workshop, led by Oren Lieberman, Professor of Architecture at the University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury and a performance by artist, Ruth Barker.

Ruth’s interpretation of my brief for the symposium was to make a new artwork, Octagon Upon Octagon, for the particular context of the symposium and the ‘site’ of Tramway’s recently opened, small-scale gallery space. The work took the form of a written text, memorised and performed by Ruth in an overtly ‘theatrical’ setting – using theatre lights, a raised platform and microphone. The focused intensity and pacing of her delivery, for me, served to emphasise the structural, spatial quality of the spoken text, an interpretation reinforced by its book-ending with the powerful, poetic assertion that ‘art breathes physical space, in the same way that we do, even when it is only an idea’.

The notion of ‘figure/ground’, a dominant paradigm in visual and spatial representations in painting, sculpture and architecture, was the point of departure for Oren Lieberman’s workshop. Using paper stickers of different sizes, marked with the words ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ (or abbreviated forms of those words), Oren encouraged workshop participants to explore Tramway’s large gallery space. Working in pairs, he asked them to use the stickers to assign either attribute (figure, or ground) to the fabric of the space – including their own and their partners’ bodies – as they moved around it. The exercise was intended to mobilise the figure/ground relationship, reacting against it as a fixed binary, and promoting it as fluid interplay between two constantly shifting and alternating terms.

The final presentation, titled ‘Glimmers and Limbo: following the path of reverie and locating the ghosts of the everyday’, was given by Karen Lury, Reader in Film and Television studies at the University of Glasgow. Karen, a close friend of mine, presented a paper reflecting on the glimmers in limbo project: the work that I carried out during my three-year Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship (www.glimmersinlimbo.co.uk). I am accustomed to speaking about my own practice in situations like the symposium, but, given the theme and title of the event (‘Art – Site – Audience’) I wanted to include a contribution from an ‘audience’ member’s point of view. Both Karen and I were acutely aware of the implications of her speaking as my friend, and as someone who had privileged access to the ideas informing my work and to the process of its creation. In her opening remarks, she made it clear that she was commenting as both invested ‘insider’ and as ‘outsider’ from the field of film scholarship. Her presentation attempted to use what she described as the state of ‘distracted attention’ in which this placed her ‘as a way into the different artworks’. She spoke about this allowing her to appreciate ‘how effectively they articulated a relation between the contingent (the co-incidence, the accident, the almost missed moment), with personal memory and the everyday’. As in Mike and John’s presentation earlier in the day, the intertwining of the here-and-now of Karen’s performance at the symposium with the there-and-then of her encounters with the art works was foregrounded, highlighting again the temporality of ‘sited-ness’ and its link to personal memory.

Top

Conclusions, Questions, and Further Discussions

The symposium concluded with a panel discussion involving all seven presenters, and me. Questions arose concerning the choice of the term ‘site’, as opposed to ‘place’, ‘space’, ‘location’ or ‘context’, for the title of the event. While the arguments around the various terminologies covered some old ground, it was useful to articulate the connotations of the labels within different disciplines and approaches. It became apparent that all terms carried with them sets of assumptions, negative or positive. The discussion was also valuable, to me certainly, in re-affirming a notion of ‘sited-ness’ that is not bound to a specific physical location, or, particularly, to a sense of ‘uncovering’ that location’s unified, ‘authentic’ identity. It was valuable in proposing a notion of ‘sited-ness’ that is temporal and expansive, which embraces the individual tactile and emotional encounters we can have with physical locations, but which recognises ‘site’ as subject to overlapping and competing interpretations. It offered a definition of ‘site’ as an unstable weave of interrelated cultural, geographical and historical contexts that is always in flux – a space of potentiality.

Top