{"id":11493,"date":"2022-02-07T18:06:52","date_gmt":"2022-02-07T18:06:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/?p=11493"},"modified":"2022-09-20T15:59:54","modified_gmt":"2022-09-20T14:59:54","slug":"feedback-loop-on-art-and-audiences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/feedback-loop-on-art-and-audiences\/","title":{"rendered":"Feedback Loop: On Art And Audiences"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ond\u00e1k\u2019s rejection of the conventional gallery \u201cpedestal\u201d – specifically his idea that the queue should be integrated and not isolated from the audience – demonstrated the potential for everyday interactions and visitor behaviour to be a performance in and of itself. By sidestepping the conventions of traditional spectatorship, the subtle nature of <\/span>Good Feelings in Good Times<\/span><\/i> is a far cry from the theatrics of the performance art made in the early 1970s, by Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, and Marina Abramovi\u0107, among others. Abramovi\u0107 has said she was drawn to performance due to the potential to exploit the \u201cenergy\u201d between herself and the audience. In 2010, some members of the public who participated in <\/span>The Artist is Present<\/span><\/i> performance at MoMA in New York were emotionally overwhelmed and reduced to tears, commenting that \u201ctime had stopped\u201d or that they had felt \u201ctransformed\u201d by sitting opposite her.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 1974, Abramovi\u0107 initiated the six-hour performance <\/span>Rhythm 0 <\/span><\/i>at Studio Morra in Naples.<\/span> The wall text read: \u201cThere are seventy-two objects on the table that one can use on me as desired.\u201d The items included soap, feathers, lipstick, an axe, a candle, grapes, and a gun loaded with a single bullet. Her clothes were sliced off her body with razor blades. She was crowned with thorns. Others cut her, painted her, cleaned her. Fights broke out between the more protective and the more aggressive audience members. It was only when someone pressed the gun to her head that the crowd were spurred to finally halt the event. Abramovi\u0107 later commented, \u201cIn your own performances you can go very far, if you leave decisions to the public, you can be killed\u2019\u2019. A decade earlier, Yoko Ono\u2019s <\/span>Cut Piece <\/span><\/i>(1964)<\/span>, <\/span><\/i>enacted in venues in Kyoto, Tokyo, London, and New York, similarly staged victimisation through the act of spectacle, presenting a situation in which the audience would be implicated through participating in an act of violence. Ono knelt silently on stage while spectators were invited to cut away pieces of her clothing with a pair of scissors. As with <\/span>Rhythm 0<\/span><\/i>, the intensity of the violation accelerated over the duration of the performance.<\/span><\/p>\n

content is being captured and circulated at rapid speed<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These types of performances are dependent on the actions of the viewers. The audience is an intrinsic part of how the artwork functions, simulating a sort of feedback loop. As Catherine Wood, Tate\u2019s curator of performance, wrote in <\/span>Performance in Contemporary Art <\/span><\/i>(2018)<\/span>,<\/span><\/i> \u201cIf art, in its broadest sense, offers a way for us to look at ourselves and reflect on our time – a kind of symbolic mirror – then performance within art stages us in the act of observing ourselves: it produces a two-way mirror.\u201d Her remark is particularly salient in the context of the digital era, where content is being captured and circulated at rapid speed, in addition to platforms like Instagram or TikTok providing the ideal environment in which to enact a performed persona to an audience of followers. <\/span><\/p>\n

In her book <\/span>Performing Image <\/span><\/i>(2019), the art historian Isobel Harbison cited a statement made by Mark Leckey around 2008, in which he identified with the economic dynamic of \u2018prosumerism\u2019: \u201cI think of myself as a kind of \u2018prosumer,\u2019 where you produce and consume at the same time \u2026 [As a prosumer] you\u2019re consuming it \u2026 sending it out and it\u2019s coming back to you \u2026 a kind of loop or cycle.\u201d Harbison<\/span> argues that both artists and audiences exist within these circuits of image production, consumption, and exchange: a \u201chighly regulated and homogenizing sphere of visibility\u201d where the \u201cinstinct to perform images is so vigorously inscribed, or encouraged, by technology capital\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

A ‘prosumer,’ where you produce and consume at the same time<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Comprised of choreographed sequences and tableaux vivant, Anne Imhof\u2019s performances have a highly stylised aesthetic and are therefore extremely photogenic. Typically, both during and in the aftermath of an Imhof performance, one can expect the images and videos captured by the crowd to flood through social media. This has inevitably led some individuals to critique Imhof\u2019s work for being shallow and narcissistic, rather than perceiving this particular act of witnessing as being embedded in the intent of the performance, a dynamic which has been dialled up in recent years. Writing <\/span>for the Summer \u201819 issue of <\/span>Artforum<\/span><\/i><\/a> on Imhof\u2019s four-hour performance <\/span>Sex <\/span><\/i>(2019), which took place in London, Chicago, and Turin, Jonah Westerman noted that \u201cgiven the frequency with which commentators have noted the \u2018grammability\u2019 of Imhof\u2019s work, it is remarkable that [they] rarely invoke the internet.\u201d Technological mediation has continued to accelerate in the years between <\/span>Sex <\/span><\/i>and Imhof\u2019s recent <\/span>Nature Mortes <\/span><\/i>(2021) at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. In their review, also for <\/span>Artforum<\/span><\/i>, Caroline Busta and Lil Internet mentioned the \u201cfour-hundred-plus outraged commenters\u201d on the magazine\u2019s<\/span> Instagram video of the performance who were armed with \u201cangry accusations that Imhof had \u2018lazily\u2019 leaned on fashion and youth culture\u201d. Instead, the authors perceived themselves, the audience, as the ones who are \u201chelplessly programmed to respond to charismatic stimuli with the botlike command of \u2018capture, post, distill\u2019.\u201d As someone who attended <\/span>Sex<\/span><\/i>: same.<\/span><\/p>\n

The spoken-word performances given by the contemporary artist Nora Turato offer an interesting linguistic, rather than image-based, example of the prosumer analogy. Her fragmented texts are mixed up with advertising slogans, viral Twitter posts, articles, popular clickbait, newspaper headlines, and quotes from TV shows, celebrities, or politicians, feeding into the production of an uncanny, overwhelming diatribe. Usually performed in the style of a rapid-fire tirade or as if possessed, Toratu\u2019s delivery can range from high-pitched singing, to shrieks, stutters, and whispers. The impact on the audience is one of intense saturation, unable to fully interpret or decipher these statements, which is complicated further if they trigger some familiarity. It can feel like experiencing a form of perpetual d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu. Toratu\u2019s work perhaps presents the culmination of the dissolution of the boundaries between audience and performer, fact and fiction. Rather than participate directly in the work, this onslaught of everyday media is being regurgitated and served back to them. <\/span><\/p>\n

Read More: Introducing Our 2022 Artists to Watch<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Philomena Epps probes the relationship between performance art and audiences in the digital age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":11526,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[139],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11493"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11493"}],"version-history":[{"count":38,"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11493\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12967,"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11493\/revisions\/12967"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11493"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11493"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/everpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11493"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}