Claire Bishop’s book ‘Disordered Attention: How to Rethink Contemporary Spectatorship’ talks about how shifting forms of audience attention have shaped contemporary art.
The opening chapter on ‘research-based art’ considers how the trend for information-overloaded archival and document-driven work, welcome during the 1990s for its potential to enable counter-histories and the use of fiction has been overtaken by the internet’s calamitous blurring of fact and fiction, leading to a more brittle, activist form of research-fetishising art – such as in that of Forensic Architecture – and a more anxious need to reclaim a verifiable truth from the glut of information (or disinformation).
She talks about how Wolfgang Tillmans’s Truth Study Center arranges articles and photographs in vitrines, all absent a grand narrative, or even an obvious theme.
She describes how the Internet has changed art and its reception. Viewers no longer watch in reverent silence or follow a linear narrative.
Their attention is ‘ radically dispersed between elements across a ‘free-flowing structure’ that blurs into the world beyond ‘. Bishop “identifies trends in contemporary practice – research-based installations, performance exhibitions, interventions, and invocations of modernist architecture – and their challenges to traditional modes of attention. Charting a critical path through the last three decades, Bishop pinpoints how spectatorship and visual literacy are evolving under the pressures of digital technology.”
In terms of my ‘grids’ – I often see them as mind dumps or screen shots of my mind at a particular moment. I’m well aware of the lack of linear narrative present, particularly as the works have a comic feel about them, with their panel to panel format a sequential narrative is expected. For sure my attention and thoughts are radically dispersed, and perhaps I dont need a linear narrative, I’m not looking to provide one. Perhaps I’m being influenced by social media feeds, which present stand alone items without a grand narrative or obvious theme? Maybe my work is heavily influenced by the internet and networked media, and how I expect people to view (or consume) work? In the past I have thought of this work partly as a flattened Twitter …
