MEASURING THE EXPERIENCE #21
This [audiences approach] suggests that neighbours and people from the community who already knew the artists may have used the opportunity to develop their relationship with local artists further.[1] The case studies also show that the definition of audiences for the work of artist-led organisations also extends beyond a specific geographical location to what might be described as ‘interest groups’. For example, these may be people whose common link may be a particular building or who are brought together through concern for a social or environmental issue.
The work of groups such as TEA is crucially concerned with audience development, although this is not a term which the artists themselves would use to describe the interchange. The TEA case study describes the projects as “process-based investigations which involve reseeing and re-presentation” almost always involving multiple forms of public participation through which art making is demystified and critical perspectives encouraged. Projects are shaped by the experiences and perspectives of all those who participate in them. Other people are engaged with the work not because they are provided with interpretative material nor with educational opportunities, but because the structure of TEA’s projects is intrinsically concerned with involving people in a project’s visible manifestations. The interest groups have, for example, included people with memories and views of the ‘30s who contributed to Anxiety and Escapism at the Royal Festival Hall and users and tenants of the Liver building in Liverpool for Looking Both Ways.
TEA’s work is part of a growing field of work which has variously been described as ‘process-based art’ and ‘new genre public art’ and which is concerned with an engagement with life issues rather than the making of artworks per se, and within which the relationship with other people creates the artistic aesthetic. It is an area of visual arts practice which offers a way of thinking about art “not primarily as a product but as a process of value-finding, as a set of philosophies, as ethical action, and an aspect of a larger socio-cultural agenda”.[2]
Such an ideology, for example, underpins the work of the London-based group Platform, an interdisciplinary team comprising artists, writers, ecologists, green economists, scientists and community activists. For this group, “Art is not primarily about an aesthetic – it is creatively applied to real situations: initiating a 168-hour forum of international dialogue; setting up a support fund for striking hospital workers; creating a ten-week performance in a tent that crossed a city; installing a turbine in a river to generate light for a school”. The group’s projects have included activating a campaign to re-locate and celebrate London’s lost rivers and setting up a mobile discussion space and information centre to highlight the relationship between “our consumption of the everyday commodity of light with the people and lands who make it possible for us to have it”.[3]
[1] From a conversation with Colin Robson on analysis of survey forms for this event.
[2] From ‘Bridging Extremities, an article arising from a symposium at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art which led to publication of Mapping the Terrain, edited Suzanne Lacy, Bay Press, Seattle, 1995.
[3] From Platform documents 1992-1996
[4] See transcripts from the ‘Littoral: new zones in critical art practice’ conference held in September 1994 and ‘The End of the Trail’, Ian Hunter, Mailout, November 1995 for discussion of work by these artists and others from the UK and elsewhere who employ similar strategies.
