Getting started....

Tom, thanks for these questions, and thanks everyone for participating. I'm sorry to be a little slow off the blocks; I just returned from three weeks out of the country working on another exhibition and have been settling back into the swing of being home.

I'm looking forward to our discussion. I'll start with a few things now and follow up shortly.

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Q: Here in the Pacific Northwest, and really all over, so many artists are adopting a relationship to place as part of their work. Is it enough to call it a “movement?”

A: Place has been a factor in art for a long, long time, so no I don't think it's fair to use it, alone, as a defining term. I'd be more interested in thinking about the particular ways that specific places inflect content, and more importantly, whether there's something in the air right now that makes attention to local territories compelling in different ways than it has been in the past. Attending to the local has a different urgency now than it did a few years ago, but it has to be done in a sophisticated way, as part of a critical dialogue with other places/practices. This hooks into another project I'm working on, a show called Heartland that looks at art produced in and about the middle part of the country. We've been talking about redefining old notions of center and periphery, and new ways of thinking about interactions between the two.


Q: How do you view audience participation in the artistic process? When does that work, and when doesn’t it, and how do you know?

A: I'm not sure exactly what you mean by audience participation. Since you say "audience" I'm assuming you mean interaction with a finished piece rather than participation in the development of the work, but let's talk about both.

An example of the latter would be Michael Rakowitz's PARASite shelter/sculptures. He designs each portable inflatable tent in collaboration with the specific homeless person who will use it: the one in the show was designed for a man named Bill Stone, who returned his shelter to Michael when he no longer needed it. A tool that I still find useful in analyzing the complexities of this kind of socially enaged, participatory work is a diagram from Suzanne Lacy's essay in Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art (1992) in which she visualizes the different audiences who will encounter the work and notes the need to assess quality in relation to those different audiences. In Michael's case, you'd use one set of criteria in relation to the experience of Bill Stone as a co-creator and "real-world" user, another for the people who saw the actual object in use on the streets, another for those who encounter the work in Portland in the galleries at Lewis and Clark, another for what Lacy calls "the audience of myth and memory"---those who encounter the work through documentation and media reports.

It doesn't get any simpler in relation to audience participation with finished works in a gallery setting. We train people not to touch, so it can be confusing when they encounter works that require physical interaction. I haven't figured out the right way to handle this yet. We experiment with labels, training guards to invite people to interact, etc. but every strategy has its problems. I also suspect that very few people actually follow up on the actions that artists propose in connection with museum projects. I have no idea how many people have used the orange wrappers that Free Soil created as takeaways. I'd love to think that as Beyond Green has traveled, visitors to the exhibition have taken Free Soil's fliers out into the world, wrapping adorable graphics and thought-provoking statements around oranges in their local grocery stores and leaving them for unsuspecting customers. You'll have to keep your eyes peeled in Portland!

To step back a bit from the show: usually, physical interaction is limited to moving through a gallery, seeing work from different angles, comparing and contrasting with other works on view. We ask viewers to make meaning by looking closely, assessing what they see, and making connections to their own knowledge. This is certainly a form of audience participation. At its best, such a process of choosing to look and think about works of art can yield an incredibly satisfying and powerful form of engaged spectatorship. It's not too much of a stretch to say that when viewers intentionally open themselves up to complex art—whether or not that art has any political content or intent—they fire up mental and experiential processes that feed their capacity to be more critically engaged and discerning citizens. I believe this even though I'm sure that it doesn't happen as often as it could or should ... but that's another conversation.