C92 Article

Audience to Ourselves¹

For many, both producers of art and funders alike, the audience is a sine qua non. But, as Brian Hand argues here, audience is not a given, but rather a mutable construction in the service of changing forces.

Discourse analysis is always in a sense unfair to authors. It is not interested in what they have to say or feel as subjects, but is concerned merely with statements as related to other statements in a field.
James Clifford²

'When for fuck's sake are you going to write
Something for us?' 'If I do write something,
Whatever it is, I'll be writing for myself.'
Seamus Heaney³

 In the first essay of this series I suggested that a possible model for understanding audiences is afforded by conceiving an audience as a discursive construct. 'Discourse' is a very wide concept as it encompasses the 'totality of relationships' between speaker and listener. The construction of this dialogue is neither uniform, linear or one-dimensional. Indeed discourses evolve through history and are shaped by ideology, politics, economics, race, class and gender; these are discursive patterns which pre-exist our entry into them. In other words, discourse is not a value in and of itself. We can see all too clearly in the arts how a discourse may exist for only a privileged few and that discursive engagement with the arts can be predicated on exclusions, distinctions and power. However, what makes discourse theory of value is that it includes an understanding of the listener or audience as co-producer of meaning; a discursive understanding of art of necessity presupposes an understanding of the interaction with an audience.

In his book Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary hypothesises a "history of vision." This history, he argues, would be unconcerned with prioritising the value of vision in and of itself, but would attempt to define the discursive fields in which vision occurs.⁴ He writes:

what determines vision at any given historical moment is not some deep structure, economic base, or worldview, but rather the functioning of a collective assemblage of disparate parts on a single social surface. [...] There never was or will be a self-present beholder to whom the world is transparently evident. Instead there are more or less powerful arrangements of forces out of which the capacities of an observer are possible.⁵

By examining some broad discourses of reception which form the capacity of observers to be observers and by extension audiences to be audiences, my intention is not to present a linear progression from one discourse to another but rather to see the contested and agonistic play of these plural forces which are coexistent, if in different ways, within the historical construction of contemporary audiences. My aim is a mapping of other texts and artworks that I feel relate to this project, some directly and some more obliquely. Art audiences are an elusive presence in history, observing what they desire while rarely seeing themselves (to paraphrase Nietzsche). Discourse seems to be the best structure, I believe, for denoting these shifting and contrary positions that only cohere in terms of a plurality of overlapping and undercutting positions, drives, subjectivities and constellations. For Barthes discourse, and discursivity,

moves in its historical impetus, by clashes. A new discourse can only emerge as a paradox which goes against (and often for) the surrounding or preceding doxa.⁶

By concentrating on the historical construction of audience and reception, I hope to challenge the seductive illusion that there is only one model of reception and that this model presupposes a theory of subjectivity that is solely dominated by the scopic tradition of Renaissance monocular perspective which gave rise to the modern individual. My argument is borrowed from Crary's writings but also from Paul Willemen's essay Regimes of Subjectivity and Looking where Willemen writes:

what I do wish to question is the assumption that one scopic regime, Cartesian Perspectivalism, definitively replaced whatever scopic regimes preceded it, and that consequently, a theory of cinema or, more broadly, a theory of subjectivity in representation, can content itself with starting from the premise that the only relevant scopic regime to be taken into consideration is Cartesian Perspectivalism. [...] It is my hypothesis that films operate with more than one scopic regime simultaneously, which should lead us [to take] a new look, so to speak , at the study of the cinematic institution [and] the relations between audiences and films.⁷

Taking Willemen's warning, that there are likely to be as limitless a number of scopic regimes or discourses as there are social-historical forms of subjectivity, I propose to look generally at three broad regimes--the feudal, the perspectival and the public sphere--that in part articulate the composite nature of audience as discourse.

 

 The feudal signtlines of power

For an audience, feudalism is characterised by the absolute privilege of the prince, monarch or cardinal as the sole gaze of power in an audience. The audience at a command performance was the religious or regal authority positioned at a particular location, sometimes even on the stage with the performers. Sovereignty was the public visual control; the eyes and face of the monarch ruled the perspectival boundaries of the spectacle. The remaining attendees at the performance were onlookers, their roles clearly set and obeyed, with transgression afforded to only the fool and jester. The monarch was the embodiment of an absolute deity, the all-seeing eye of god. A contemporary analogy of the persistence of such feudal power is evident in Paul Mercier's observation that when putting on a production "one influential member of the Arts Council is worth a thousand Joe Bloggs."⁸ Another is that recounted by Willemen on the observations of the critic Serge Daney who

speculated on the reasons why people who normally do not set foot in galleries and have no discernible interest in modern art themselves nevertheless flock to an exhibition of Picasso's paintings. His reply [...] was that people went there to be seen by the paintings which, over time, have come to symbolize cultural authority. It is not the viewing of Picasso's paintings which makes the viewer into a suitably cultured subject, it is the exposure to the authority represented by the paintings.⁹

The word audience is still used today in an archaic feudal fashion when one speaks of a face-to-face meeting with a monarch or pope. It is an encounter which is auditory or intended to exclude spectatorship (for example, the requirement of women to wear a black veil or the practice of the curtsy). Within a feudal construction of the audience the separation of the senses was significant; for example the sacred power of relics was usually accessible through the sense of touch. Where the sense of sight or the scopic drive was dominant over other senses was in the art of memory. Memory was considered as powerful in the Middle Ages for creativity as our contemporary notions of imagination and intuition. The art of memory was often a public performance achieved after long hours of concentration in darkened solitude.¹⁰ The written word was translated into a visuo-spatial system of icons which could be placed at the service of the future power of recall of the inner eye. Visuality allowed for a bridge between the learned culture and popular culture; as Umberto Eco writes, "the Middle Ages were the civilisation of vision,"¹¹ where picturing and writing were considered identical. For an audience at such performances it would have been very difficult to distinguish between the original text and the recital or memorisation of the text if one did not share a common cultural or civic bond with the speaker--as Mary Carruthers observed, "a bond forged by memories of the people and their texts."¹² Precapitalist society had a very different concept of self and individual; as Caruthers writes, "instead of 'self' or even 'individual' we might better speak of a 'subject-who-remembers' and in remembering also feels and thinks and judges".¹³

There are modern parallels here to the creativity or trauma of memory within psychoanalysis or in the film Muriel (1963) by Alain Resnais. Memory in this sense also has a political/ethical function, where artists seek to acknowledge the different forces that affect reception. Barbara Kruger writes,

In the hope of coupling the ingratiation of wishful thinking with the criticality of knowing better, I replicate certain words and pictures and watch them stray from or coincide with your notions of fact and fiction. I see my work as a series of attempts to ruin certain representations and to welcome a female spectator into the audience of men.¹⁴

Within the work of James Coleman, there is clearly a preference for a medieval aesthetic taste, as with his banquet performance Guaire (1985) which, as Seán McCrum commented, succeeded as a performance for the community of Kinvara who were thoroughly familiar with the Guaire tale through communal memory whereas the separate performance for the visiting art audience was in his opinion less successful or coherent as "the finished product gave the uninitiated no clue as to why the work should take place in Dún Guaire. Indeed the legend impeded understanding of Coleman's references."¹⁵

^{Cartesian Perspectivalism}

Perspective is an invented method for mapping space to conjure the illusion of sight. The fixed viewpoint under which this illusion operates has come to be seen as a model of the ideology of individual self-control and neutral scientific observation from beyond the frame of representation. The unblinking singular eye of the observer permitted the individual to transcend to a level of subjectivity that prioritised the geometric mental image over carnal binocular perception. The transition or translation to a Renaissance and Cartesian perspective was not a reversal of feudal precapitalist perspectives but an equation of the sovereign position of the monarch with the sovereign eye of the beholder. Perspective preserved sovereignty, sustaining, as Herbert Blau writes, "a ratio of repression with the ancestral past [which] we tend to forget."¹⁶ As Foucault puts it in his analysis of Velázquez's Las Meninas (1665), the spectator within the classical episteme for whom representation exists, who ties together all the elaborate interplays of visible and invisible within the scene of the painting, cannot be allowed to exist within the representational form. Velázquez's royal portrait presents the absence of the king as a painterly artifice but as Foucault writes, "this artifice both conceals and indicates another vacancy which is, on the contrary, immediate: that of the painter and the spectator when they are looking at or composing the picture."¹⁷ The compositional interplay of Las Meninas is performed to such a high degree of skill or sleight of hand that the painting becomes for Foucault a paradoxical reminder that the "profound invisibility of what one sees is inseparable from the invisibility of the person seeing."¹⁸

It has been argued by Martin Jay that the disembodied monocular symmetrical vision of perspective diminished if not entirely supressed the participatory modes of feudal art and as he writes,

the gap between spectator and spectacle widened [while] the moment of erotic projection in vision [...] was lost as the bodies of the painter and viewer were forgotten in the name of an allegedly disincarnated, absolute eye.¹⁹

There was also a diminution of the discursive function of the image, a move towards autonomy and away from the communal stories of the unlettered audience. In his book, Absorption and Depiction: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Michael Fried valorises such paintings that seal themselves off from the viewer. He agrees with Foucault and Jay that the convention of perspective disestablishes the presence of the spectator, but this is for Fried a point of entry not exclusion to the work--it is the only means by which the "enthrallment by the picture is assured."²⁰ In contrast to Jay, Fried's model can reveal a new eroticism to the act of looking in the peephole of perspective from the point of self-forgetting. As Margaret Iversen writes,

the similarity of Fried's ideal of the spectator/depiction relationship to the structure of voyeuristic fascination is striking. The spectator intently gazes at someone or some group of people who are unaware that they are being observed. Absorbtive painting is like [Laura] Mulvey's description of Hollywood cinema, "a hermetically sealed world that unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the spectator."²¹

The modern darkened cinema auditorium explicitly reflects such voyeuristic desire as the premium-priced seats are the ones that are not overlooked by others in the audience. This in contrast to the feudal spectacle auditoriums where the cheapest seats are at the back and where the principal aim of attending is precisely to be seen, to be on display. A similar feudal scene operates at art openings, where the exhibition is often the least important visual stimulus and where playing the part of an audience is to play the part of not playing a part.²²

Marcel Duchamp's work is possibly the most acclaimed at examining the perspectival erotic (and traumatic) equation of the 'I' with the sovereign 'eye' of the gaze. Duchamp acknowledged that "it is the viewers who make the pictures" and works like Small Glass To Be Looked at (from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (1918), and the Large Glass aka La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (the Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even ) (1915-23) aimed to express the paradoxical inclusion of the viewer in the "transparent interworld of an encounter that is moreover, necessarily missed."²³ In such a perspectival matrix there no 'outside the picture frame'; instead Duchamp's work attempts to show this delay in looking at seeing (relevant here is also the fact that when more than one viewer encircles the work successive looks are 'trapped' by the glass). His posthumous public installation Étant donnés: 1. la chute d'eau, 2. le gaz d'éclairage (Given: 1. the waterfall, 2. the illuminating gas) (1969), with its peep holes and peep show of a spread-eagled corpse-like naked woman, inverts the transparency of the glass works and establishes the discomfort that a viewer experiences when 'caught looking' by another gallery visitor. The public fear "having been watched watching."²⁴ The inscription of sexuality in the isotropic regime of perspective can appear blatant or inconspicuous; either way the anxiety effect of repression is similar (that is, given): as our being is fused with representation, there is always something that cannot be seen. The discourse of perspective (Cartesian or other) is then always a double scene, its vanishing point the double vision of being and representation.

In 1977 Dan Graham made a work, Performer /Audience/ Mirror, on the following premise:

A performer faces a seated audience. Behind the performer, covering the back wall (parallel to the frontal view of the seated audience), is a mirror reflecting the audience.

In a work that minutely recorded the historical moment, Graham made two observations:

1. Through the use of the mirror the audience is able to instantaneously perceive itself as a public body (as a unity), offsetting its definition by the performer. This gives it a power within the performance equivalent to that of the performer.

2. In Stage 2, the audience sees itself reflected by the mirror instantaneously, while the performer's comments are slightly delayed and following, as they are verbal discourse, continuous temporal flow. This cause and effect interpretation for the audience. First a person in the audience sees himself 'objectively' ('subjectively') perceived by himself, next he hears himself described 'objectively' ('subjectively') in terms of the performer's perception. The slightly delayed verbal description by the performer overlaps/undercuts the present (fully present) mirror view an audience member has of himself and of the collective audience; it may influence his further interpretation of what he sees. Cause and effect relations are further complicated when members of the audience (because they can see and be seen on the mirror by other members of the audience) attempt to influence (through eye contact, gestures, etc.) the behaviour of other audience members, which thereby influences the performer's description (of the audience's behaviour.)²⁵

The bourgeois public sphere

The emergence of the modern absolutist state in the Baroque era after the Thirty Years War precipitated the separation of moral from political decision-making in order for, in Reinhart Koselleck's opinion, the stability of the political order to be guaranteed. As Peter Uwe Hohendahl explains,

for Koselleck, the project of the Enlightenment, on the other hand, consisted of an attempt by intellectuals (philosophers and critics) to undermine the authority of the state not so much through actions but through public discussion.²⁶

By the eighteenth century the claim of the rising bourgeois class to represent private citizenry necessitated an intermediary space between the private individual and the sovereign state. From a negative view, the public sphere which emerged was a screen which afforded privacy to the bourgeoisie "to pursue financial gain unimpeded by society or state," a screen which divided economics from civil society.²⁷ Or in a more positive perspective the public sphere was a place of rational political debate that, according to Jürgen Habermas, was "precisely the space where critical discussion of cultural and political matters can take place."²⁸ The public sphere, when established, begins to provide a normative function regulating public communication between citizens about culture and politics. Indeed the very concept of the public and of the public debate and public consensus can be seen to unfold from a dialogue between cultural freedom and political development. For Habermas the demise and depoliticisation of the public sphere in the last century has been at the expense at the rise of publicity, clearly visible in today's culture of national politics as marketing and spin-doctoring. The demise of the public sphere was also met with counter or oppositional public spheres, for example with the emergence of the labour movement, the suffragist struggle and national self-determination movements at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The bourgeois public sphere also gave rise to a host of civil institutions that sought to rationalise public space and police norms of social interaction. Sanitation was a concern, given the cramped overcrowding in urban slums, but so also was the 'moral contagion' of communal living. The unreformed gaols were seen as dungeons that afforded the free play of one's passions, whereas the new perspectival surveillance prison isolated the inmate and banned communal exchange. The audience of prisoners at weekly religious services viewed the proceedings from isolated boxes; anonymity was policed as knowledge of other prisoners was seen as a potential source of profit through blackmail. Thus we can see within the emergence of the bourgeois capitalist state the historical emergence of autonomous formations such as the nuclear family, the prisoner, and, most importantly (with the destruction of guilds), waged labourers cut adrift from the means of production and, as Marx saw it, from themselves. The bourgeois public sphere is a world of negotiation and compromise, especially for weaker and excluded members of the society.

The rise of the bourgeois social class acknowledges a fissure between audience and public: the pleasure of art was often viewed as antithetical to the regulated world of codes and norms. The increasing insecurity, created by the advancement of empirical science in the nineteenth century, about the human subject's distance from the 'real world' was matched by both a vigorous pursuit of 'objective knowledge' through the invention of new technologies and a paradoxical valorising of the freedom of the mythic artistic genius. Genius, in this way of thinking, marks a distinction from the majority of other human beings. It is an identity whose mobility and range is bound by an unlimited capacity to experience. As Peter Bürger writes, "genius succeeds in combining irregularity with sublimity"--in the late eighteenth century sublimity was a characterised as a specifically masculine attribute, just as beauty was a feminine one. Bürger presents the emergence of genius as a shift away from an emphasis on public reception as a decisive component in aesthetic merit; the "elevation of the artistic creator to the status of genius simultaneously loosens the connection which binds him to the needs of the public."²⁹

Bürger explains how, although it is tempting to see the valorising of genius as a coded endorsement for the freedom of capitalist entrepreneurs and for free trade, such easy analogies can be quickly contradicted. An alternative view might be that the rise of the aesthetics of genius can be seen with the context of the sociology of the bourgeois intellectual--that the vicarious freedom implicit in an aesthetic of genius was aimed at the confinement and self-sufficiency of bourgeois-capitalist civil society with its lack of aspirations to demolish feudalism, rather than feudalism itself. This argument is constituted on contradiction in that the struggle against feudal conventions of literature by Romantic poets in Germany and Britain (amongst others) paradoxically represents a struggle against the 'progressive' bourgeois elements which sought to overturn the feudal and absolutist institution of literature, i.e. that the bourgeois rationality was of necessity against certain rules but not the principle of rules in and of themselves. Bürger argues that the concept of genius survives in bourgeois society because its formation was paradoxically split in attacking both feudal and capitalist forms of production. He writes,

it is precisely because the concept of genius is opposed to social conditions in which bourgeois 'content' has been developed beneath a feudal 'husk' that it is able to continue functioning as an exemplary concept once the bourgeois form of life has successfully established itself in a dominant position.³⁰

The significance of Bürger's analysis lies in its understanding of both feudal and bourgeois registers within the aesthetics of genius. As such it contributes to a discursive understanding of parallel spatial and temporal forces that coexist at particular historical moments. The creation of the genius artist hero (divine creator and/or social outcast) is mediated by a contradictory dynamic of resistance to historicism or developmental history, with the belief in the progressive accomplishment of vanguardism. The bourgeois revolution was not a new beginning but a conscious carrying into effect of an older agenda. The ascription of artistic genius further fulfils the compartmentalising agenda of the bourgeois public sphere. The construction of the 'masses' separated from the specialised artist, scientist, educator constitutes a powerful strategy of divide and rule. In discourse analysis the knowledge of when, where and how such terms as 'genius' are employed tells us more than does analysis of the content of the products of genius. For example, Linda Nochlin argues that:

it was institutionally made impossible for women to achieve artistic excellence, or success, on the same footing as men, no matter what the potency of their so-called talent or genius.³¹

Today the very idea of a public sphere is threatened not by political agonism but by private appropriation. The film-maker and writer Alexander Kluge asserts that the loss of a public sphere would be

as grave today as the loss of common land was for the farmer in the Middle Ages. In that period the economy was based on the three-acre system: one acre belonged to everyone, one acre to the lord, and one belonged to the farmer. This system can only function as long as there is this common land, the public ground, which is the first thing that the lord appropriates. If he owns both the common land and his own acre, then he has superiority. No longer dependent on fighting with the sword, the lord can now also control the third acre and will soon have serfs. The loss of land also means a loss of community because if there is no land on which the farmers may assemble, it is no longer possible to develop a community. The same thing is happening again, on a historically higher plane, in people's heads when they are deprived of the public sphere.³²

This collapse of public and private is evident throughout contemporary society where anonymity is one of the last resistances to advanced consumer capitalism. Anonymity is a position shared by both the highly privileged and underprivileged. Credit-card-carrying middle classes now bear the full brunt (in the E.U. and U.S. at least) of

computer purchasing, toll-free numbers, the overload of personally addressed junk mail, appeals over the telephone from perfect strangers who start with your first name.³³

The surveillance society is unrivalled in many parts of Ireland. Paradoxically in this contemporary moment, not being observed has almost become as much an anxiety as fears over the power and scope of 'Big Brother'--see for example the popularity of internet domestic-surveillance sites and TV shows based on this format of continual observation. Beyond the military apparatus, Dublin's Temple Bar with its 24-hour cameras has become an open-air panopticon that makes visitors to the medieval area at once inmates and jailers, subjects and objects. Before entering a gallery or theatre such groups and individuals are already audiences to their own performances.

 

¹This title is borrowed from a sentence in Herbert Blau, The Audience, London, 1990, p. 55.
²James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art , Cambridge, 1988, p. 270.
³Seamus Heaney's response to a republican activist and former hunger striker in his poem The Flight Path in The Spirit Level, London, 1996, p. 25.
⁴Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1998, p. 6.
⁵Ibid., p. 6.
⁶Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath, London, 1977, p. 200.
⁷Paul Willemen, Regimes of Subjectivity and Looking, The UTS Review Vol. 1 No 2, 1995, p. 101.
⁸Paul Mercier quoted in Dialogues 1996--Proceedings of the Arts Council Theatre Review Consultations, ed. Declan Gorman, Dublin: An Chomhairle Ealaíon, 1996, p. 56.
⁹Quoted in Paul Willemen, op.cit., p. 102
¹⁰Thomas Aquinas's mnemonic power allowed him to perform texts from memory but also to say the text backwards or skip around it in a systematic way without ever becoming confused; see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A study of Memory in Medieval Culture, Cambridge, 1990, p. 56.
¹¹Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver, London, 1989, p. 81.
¹²Carruthers, op. cit., p. 24
¹³Ibid. p. 182.
¹⁴Quoted in Blau, op. cit., p. 326.
¹⁵Seán McCrum, Lost Legends, The Sunday Tribune, April 21, 1985, p. 18; my thanks to Maeve Connolly for this reference.
¹⁶Blau, op.cit. p. 340.
¹⁷Michel Foucault, The Order of Things An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, London, 1997, p. 16.
¹⁸Margaret Iversen, in her book on Alois Riegl, contrasts Foucault's position with that of Leo Steinberg. Steinberg in stark contrast to Foucault finds Las Meninas an inclusive representation allowing the spectator to enter upon the scene as if they were part of the family. For Steinberg there is a reciprocity based on absorbing presence not absence. See Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl : art history and theory, Cambridge, 1993, p. 145.
¹⁹Martin Jay, Scopic Regimes of Modernity, in Vision and Visuality, ed. Hal Foster, Seattle, 1988, p. 8.
²⁰Michael Fried, Absorption and Depiction: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, London, 1980, p. 503.
²¹Margaret Iversen, op. cit. p. 133
²²Blau, op. cit., p. 298.
²³Quoted in Thierry De Duve, Echoes of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Modernism, October, No. 70, 1994, pp. 77, 79.
²⁴Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the Engendering of Marcel Duchamp, Cambridge , 1994,p. 191.
²⁵Quoted in Gloria Moure, ed., Dan Graham, Barcelona, 1988, p. 98-99.
²⁶Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Recasting the Public Sphere, October, No. 73, 1995, p. 31.
²⁷Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions Art and Spatial Politics, London, 1996, p. 287.
²⁸Quoted in Peter Uwe Hohendahl, op. cit. p. 31.
²⁹P. Bürger, 'Aesthetics of Genius in the Eighteenth Century', The Decline of Modernism, p. 61
³⁰Ibid. p. 69.
³¹Linda Nochlin, Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays, New York, 1988, p. 176.
³²Alexander Kluge, The Public Sphere, in If You Lived Here: The City in Art, Theory and Social Activism, A Project by Martha Rosler, ed. Brian Wallis, Seattle, 1991, p. 69.
³³Herbert Blau, op. cit., p. 357.