My practice is principally focused on the relationship between contemporary artists and audiences. This connection is currently being renegotiated, and due to this a new model is emerging that merits investigation. I suggest that this new model positions the artist as a conduit (or conductor) as opposed to an originator. By this I define ‘the artist’ as one who conducts ideas, as copper wire conducts electrical current, and the ‘active audience’ as someone who makes use of the energy of those ideas to bring about their own creation. Thus they are offered, as Boris Groys suggests, ‘an opportunity to exhibit themselves to themselves’.[1]

There are many metaphors advanced for the contemporary artist: artist as shaman, revolutionary, teacher or sage, even artist as proxy who experiences on behalf of the audience. In each of these models the artist is central to an act of creation, whereby she or he in some way transmutes a quality of existence into a quantity of meaning for a spectator. The audience, on the other hand, is often characterised as being in a one-way relationship with the artist, alienated, mute, isolated from connection and incapable of an unaided experience. Being an audience in this manner can equate to being a passive consumer of the artist’s labour.

My practice as a contemporary artist has been to a large extent an instinctual reaction against these grandiose conceptions of the artist and the equally desultory views of the audience. If there is an imbalance of power between artist and audience I believe it is not something that is natural to either role but rather a condition that has been brought about by institutions, fostered by curators and dealers, and readily subscribed to by some artists.

 

[1] Boris Groys, “Politics of Installation.” e-flux journal (2009), accessed 22 June 2015.