Joanna Monks: Intersubjective Encouters

Intersubjective Encounters Joanna Monks Unstable Audiences and the Nature of Interaction

Joanna Monks

Intersubjective Encounters

Joanna Monks

‘… was everyone else really as alive as she was? For example, did her sister really matter to herself, was she as valuable to herself as Briony was? Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave…

If the answer was yes, the social world was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance and everyone’s claim on life as intense… One could drown in irrelevance. …though it offended her sense of order, she knew it was overwhelmingly probable that everyone else had thoughts like hers.’

- Briony Tallis Ian McEwan, Atonement

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Synopsis

The arrival of existentialism over half a century ago turned a spotlight onto the nature of individual understanding, and the location of the self in relation to the surrounding world.

Along the same lines, the latter twentieth century witnessed a change, as the role of the viewer evolved from subject of the object, to being physically present within the work.

The focus, once again, has shifted from embodiment within the work, to active participant. This study seeks to provide insight into how such practice, taking as its focus the viewer, integrates this embodiment with an understanding of the viewer as inherently complex.

Part one of this dissertation will look at the manifestations of intersubjectivity in the visual arts, followed in part two by an examination of debates surrounding the social and political implications of the practice of interaction. To develop an understanding of intersubjectivity, the study interrogates a spectrum of artistic practice rooted in the disjointed subject; placed within the work and brought together with others.

Intersubjective Encounters will explore the complicated aspects of what it means to bring people together.

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Contents

Intersubjective Encounters Synopsis Contents

p. 2

List of Illustrations

p. 3

Introduction The arrival of a concern for intersubjectivity

p. 5

Part 1 Intersubjective Art in Practice: Unstable Audiences

p. 14

1.1 Dan Graham 1.2 Blind Light 1.3 Intersubjectively Experienced, Intersubjectively Produced 1.4 Performance: Direct Engagement

p. 16 p. 23 p. 27 p. 29

Part 2 Interaction and the Intersubjective: Social and Political Implications

p. 33

2.1 Relational Aesthetics and Democracy 2.2 Relations of Conflict 2.3 Critical Challenges

p. 35 p. 40 p. 44

Conclusion

p. 50

Bibliography

p. 54

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List of Illustrations Cover Page: Dan Graham ‘Public Space/ Two Audiences’ (Figure 4) Introduction: Atonement (Figure 1) Part 1: Dan Graham (Figure 4) and Antony Gormley (Figure 7) Part 2: Rirkrit Tiravanija (Figure 11) Conclusion: Slavoj Zizek at Occupy Wall Street (Figure 12)

Figure 1: Atonement by Ian McEwan, two overlaid stills from the film adaptation; director Joe Wright, Universal Pictures, 2007. The fountain scene (an image of Briony Tallis watching, overlaid with her view of Robbie Turner with her sister Cecilia down at the fountain).

Figure 2: Robert Morris, Green Gallery installation, New York, 1964.

From Claire Bishop’s Installation Art, 2005, p. 51.

Figure 3: Dan Graham in the installation of his ‘Present Continuous Past(s)’ at the John Gibsons Gallery, New York in March, 1975. Photograph by Harry Shrunk. From Video, Architecture, Television, published by Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, 1979.

Figure 4: Graham ‘Public Space Two Audiences’ 1976 http://metropolism.com/revoews/dan-graham-in-het-whitney/resources/dangrahampublicspace2audiences1.jpg?version=a64c94baaf368e1840a1324e839230de (12-12-2011)

Figure 5: Graham pictured in one of his pavilions, still taken from a video played at his talk at The Glasgow School of Art, 16-10-2006 http://www.gsa.ac.uk/life/gsa-events/events/dan-graham/#Dan%20Graham%20Video (03-01-12) Figure 6: Antony Gormley ‘Blind Light’ at the Hayward Gallery, 2007 http://www.antonygormley.com/sculpture/item-view/id/241#p1 (20-01-2012) Figure 7: Gormley, ‘Blind Light’, 2007 http://www.antonygormley.com/sculpture/item-view/id/241#p6 (20-01-2012)

Figure 8: Indepen-dance, performance of In Between, photograph courtesy of Gerry Ralston a relative of one of the dancers. With thanks to Karen Anderson, artistic director, Indepen-dance.

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Figure 9: Marina Abramovic and Ulay ‘Imponderabilia’ 1977 Ulay/Abramovic: performances 1976-1988, published by Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 1997 Figure 10: Abramovic and Ulay ‘Imponderabilia’ 1977

http://blogs.cofa.unsw.edu.au/saht1102/files/2010/06/Abramovic.jpg (10-02-12)

Figure 11: Rirkrit Tiravanija, ‘Untitled (Tomorrow is Another Day)’ photographed at installation in Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, 1996 http://db-artmag.de/archiv/2006/e/5/1/465-2.html (05-02-12) Figure 12: Slavoj Zizek speaking at Occupy Wall Street, 2011. http://www.mediaite.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/zizek1.jpg (10-12-11)

Figure 13: Dogville, 2003, director Lars Von Trier, Lions Gate Entertainment. Grace leaves the town meeting as they prepare to take a vote on whether she is to remain in Dogville.

Figure 14: Atonement, McEwan, still from the 2007 film adaptation; director Joe Wright, Universal Pictures. Briony in the fountain scene.

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Introduction The Arrival of a Concern for Intersubjectivity

To discuss intersubjectivity is to become absorbed in a near endless web of gazes. It begins with the consideration of an individual’s viewpoint, their subjectivity, and through the meeting of these disparate positions, their relation to one another. To begin describing this aspect of human interaction from a blank slate risks becoming lost in halls of mirrors, therefore to introduce the idea I turn to contemporary author Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement (2001). During the first half of the book we remain in a single day and the story unfolds through a fusion of characters’ viewpoints. The particular scene of interest is a pivotal moment in the story when Briony, thirteen years old, observes her older sister Cecilia undress and climb in and out of a fountain whilst in the presence of Robbie Turner (see figure 1). Blood connects the sisters, but the distance of their years and separate existences is an obstacle that renders Briony’s accurate interpretation of the scene impossible (which is highlighted by the glass window at once providing a glimpse, and a solid separation).

What happens in the rest of the novel relies on Briony’s total (ultimately fatal) misreading of what she sees here. Through her eyes Robbie commands and dominates Cecilia who is ‘unable to resist him’ (Cecilia removes her clothes ‘at his insistence’ and at the end of the scene he leaves ‘no doubt satisfied’1) but through other accounts of events we soon learn that this is not the case. Briony catastrophically misinterprets what turn out to be frustrated actions, which ultimately lead to Robbie and Cecilia’s realisation of their mutual attraction, as a sinister display of power and sexual aggression on the part of Robbie. At fault is her naïve failure to understand the many things she has not been

1

Atonement (2001) by Ian McEwan, p. 38.

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witness to that lead up to what she sees.2 When interacting, we are never blank slates: to assume a full understanding of another is an impossibility because we are distinct people and a wealth of factors shape us as individuals, so despite empathy and familiarity misunderstandings are inevitable. This is intersubjectivity. We are intersubjective people on the basis that all manner of relationships, exchanges and backgrounds continually inform who we are.

Figure 1. Two overlaid stills from the 2007 Joe Wright film adaptation of McEwan’s Atonement, showing Briony and her view from the window.

Furthermore an encounter with another individual/individuals is an intersubjective experience: the meeting of these distinct viewpoints. An intersubjective encounter employs a simultaneous awareness of self and others, the awareness of oneself being watched and of oneself watching; a back and forth, at once giving and taking.

Staying with McEwan a little longer: immediately before observing her sister, sitting by the window Briony experiences a moment of existential wondering. Holding her finger to

2

As the title Atonement would suggest, fault and blame is somewhat an issue within the book. When analysing the character of Briony, despite the fact that lives change (suffer even) directly due to her actions, she remains somehow blameless. This is because of the understanding that as a child she did not have the capacity to interpret what she witnessed accurately, her response was genuine in its desire to protect those she loved from what she (mis)read as a threat. An understanding of intersubjectivity is therefore required in order to empathise with Briony’s innocent position.

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her face, she considers the fact that this finger moves at her will and her will only, and wonders whether other people have such a keen sense of their own existence: was everyone else really as alive as she was… Was being Cecilia just as vivid an affair as being Briony? Did her sister also have a real self concealed behind a breaking wave?’3

Briony concludes that probably they must, but with unease she notes that this would mean ‘the social world was unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance’. This can be linked to the aforementioned idea; the meeting of people in all their individuality is here seen as distressingly chaotic. Briony is placing her own sense of self in a wider context, within the world, a notion at the very core of existentialism.

Existentialism plays an important role in the definitions and uses of intersubjectivity, and this idea of existing in the world is described by Jean Paul Sartre in his essay ‘Intentionality’ (1939); ‘essentially external to consciousness, the world is essentially nevertheless relative to consciousness… consciousness cannot know itself independent of its relation to things’.4 Rather than consciousness as an isolated phenomenon, we exist ‘outside, in the world, among others’ as ‘consciousness-in-the-world’. Sartre’s notions of consciousness form part of the canon of existentialist discussion and these notions of consciousness as consciousness towards something derive from his predecessors Husserl and Heidegger whose work can be seen as the root of existentialism.

Heidegger uses an analogy of a forest clearing, and describes ‘the primacy of the relation of human existence to things over the things related’ as exemplified by the analogy of a space where the forest opens up and everything becomes visible5. Now consciousness is seen as connected to what surrounds, as opposed to something inward and separate.

Sartre’s analogy of love describes this: ‘if we love a woman, it is because she is lovable.

We are delivered from… the ‘internal life’… everything is finally outside, everything,

3 McEwan, Atonement (2001) p. 36.

4

Jean-Paul Sartre’s essay ‘Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology’, 1939. Sartre cites Husserl’s own words: ‘one cannot dissolve things in consciousness’.

5 Heidegger, ‘On the Essence of Ground’, cited by Robert Bernasconi, How to Read Sartre (2006) p. 24-5.

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even ourselves’6 this focus on the beloved releases love from being self-centered. It is our relation to the world around us that gives our lives meaning (or to be more specific, grounds consciousness). It is worth noting that one can go either way here in terms of this emancipation of selfishness. A simple shifting of emphasis in the earlier quote results in the notion that despite being relative to consciousness, there is no evading the ‘essential’ fact that the world remains an external factor, used solely as a locating mechanism for the individual. Nonetheless, the original positive emphasis provides an invigorating conception, and could be seen as a counter to the chaos of the ‘unbearably complicated’ social sphere of an otherwise meaningless world.

The discussion now turns to the influence of these ideas within the arts. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a shift away from traditional artistic practice was visible in the growing sense of unease towards the object. The presentation of, for example, a framed painting or a sculpture placed upon a pedestal began to resemble an attitude of superiority. The object exists separately to the viewer, the only relationship developed between object and subject is one of acquisition: the viewing of the work of art has a culturally enriching effect, further heightened on purchase of the art. Grant Kester describes this process as ‘physical objects which are understood to possess immanent meaning… then actualized as the object comes into contact with a viewer’7. A core issue for many artists became that of the object-viewer relationship and minimalist artists like Robert Morris (see figure 2) wrote about the necessity of the ‘physical participation’ of the viewer in order to create ‘a more extended situation’.8 In the place of inert objects, exuding meaning through their separation from the viewer, Morris and his contemporaries became dedicated to the idea of a viewer becoming a part of the work. The surrounding environment becomes implicit and meaning is derived from a more back-and-forth process of engaging with an object. In Morris’s words;

6 Sartre, ‘Intentionality’, 1939.

7

Grant Kester, ‘Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for Littoral Art’ (1998), Introduction: ‘Defining Littoral Art’.

8 Robert Morris, cited by Michael Fried in ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) p. 154.

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Figure 2. Robert Morris installation at Green Gallery, New York 1964

the object is but one of the terms in the newer aesthetic. It is in some way more reflexive because one’s awareness of oneself existing in the same space as the work is stronger than in previous work 9.

The notion of reflexivity is important in this discussion, since it betrays the importance of something that is offering but also receptive. The viewer becoming an element in the work is in a way the first step towards intersubjective art; the relationship between the object and viewer becomes a more intersubjective experience through the inclusion of the viewer’s presence. It is through contextualising that meaning is derived: the object in a space, inhabiting a space with the viewer, consciousness in the world.

In ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) Fried analyses the developing concern for ‘an object in a situation [that] includes the beholder’10 and coins the phrase ‘theatricality’. Fried’s notion of theatre is the definition for an object that transcends its own ‘Objecthood’. In Kester’s

9

Morris cited by Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) p. 153.

Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) p. 153.

10

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‘Dialogical Aesthetics’ we find a description of this dismissiveness in relation to the subject/object relationship: Caro’s work was judged to be superior because it refused to incorporate formal cues that would acknowledge the presence of a viewer… Fried insists the artwork is under no obligation whatsoever to acknowledge the viewer’s presence… In its extreme state this can take the form of the position that art is not a mode of communication at all.11

Fried’s notion of the authenticity and therefore value of the object came from a rejection of theatricality, which verges on a rejection of the newfound centrality of the viewer.

Despite Fried’s negative view of theatre, this was to be the beginning of a move towards installations in which the viewer’s presence became integral, and performances in which the viewer plays a complicit, embodied, even participatory role. The American artist Dan Graham has described the need for this change in terms of the escapist nature of an experience of traditional art: In [a] traditional, contemplative mode the observing subject not only loses awareness of his “self”, but also consciousnesss of being part of a present, palpable, and specific group, located in a specific time and social reality and occurring only within the architectural frame where the work is presented.12

The work relates to both subject and surroundings with an appreciation of the distinct individuality of each.

In ‘Intentionality’ Sartre discusses the conception that ‘to know is to eat’, what he describes as ‘digestive philosophy’; You certainly knew that the tree was not you, that you could not make it enter your dark stomach and that knowledge could not, without dishonesty, be compared to possession13.

This concept is another reference to the dated notion of art that the minimalist agenda sought to escape, and is very much comparable to notions of art within a consumerist society. Sartre’s idea of consciousness as related to things shows itself to be directly positioned against the notion of knowledge as consumption, possession and acquisition very much in the same vein as the minimalist concern for the relation of the viewer to a

11

Kester ‘Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for Littoral Art’ (1998) Section 1 ‘The problem of Definition and Indeterminance’ 12 Dan Graham cited by Claire Bishop in Installation Art (2005) ‘Heightened Perception’ p. 73.

13 Sartre, ‘Intentionality’ 1939

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space. When Kester discusses ‘physical objects with immanent meaning’, a fine line of distinction can be drawn. He describes the same thing minimalism sought to reject: the ‘self important’ object as ‘the primary carrier of aesthetic significance’.14 The desire to include the spectator and incorporate the architectural space, so as to deconstruct the importance of the object, walks a theoretical tightrope which other work since then has crossed, seeking to remove the object so that the work becomes dialogue itself. Meaning is derived from the relations between people, rather than through objects: as Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘the in between has taken on all the consistency’.15 It is within this realm of practice that the writing of Kester is encountered. This kind of work seeks to create ‘a relationship that allows the viewer to ‘speak back’ to the artist in certain ways’,16 rather than finding oneself in the space with something akin to ‘the silent presence’ of another person. A wealth of different art work has moved towards a de-structuring of this oneway relationship through performance, situations, installations, interaction, communitybased projects and an expansive body of critical theory.

A fundamental concept of installation art is the centrality of the viewer, seemingly originating with the minimalists, but manifesting since that time in a much broader range of attitudes and approaches to the viewer. In her overview Installation Art, 2005, Claire Bishop once again defines the position this form of art occupies in terms of its attitude towards the object and subject; Rather than imagining the viewer as a pair of disembodied eyes… installation art presupposes an embodied viewer… This insistence on the literal presence is arguably the key characteristic of installation art.17

Bishop speaks about the embodied viewer (as opposed to disembodied eyes), the activated viewer (one who directly affects the work they enter instead of passive observer) and a decentered viewer (one who’s privileged one-way relation to the work

Kester ‘Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for Littoral Art’ (1998) ‘Defining Littoral Art’.

Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari, ‘On Nomadology’ 1980, cited by in Situation (2009) edited by Claire Bishop, ‘Fieldwork’ chapter p. 88.

16 Kester ‘Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for Littoral Art’ (1998) ‘The Problem of Definition and Indeterminance’ 17 Bishop, Installation Art (2005), Introduction p. 6.

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has been destabilized); all of which focus on the integral position of the viewer within art, pitched very much against traditional notions.

There is a long path that can be taken following the idea of the activated viewer through installation art, relevant through the intersubjective relationship formed between the activated viewer and the work, but a focus on intersubjective relationships pushes further still. This study will look towards a wider range of practice, aiming to discover the complexities inherent in viewer engagement. It is within the meeting of people, a challenge to modes of engagement and to social and political structure, and an interest in the gaps, ruptures and differences, that intersubjective soil is richer. These dislocations between people are the essence of understanding intersubjectivity.

Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of Relational Aesthetics provides a central pinpoint on the map of direct engagement and interaction-focused practice.

Bourriaud takes from Guattari the idea that the work of art is, like subjectivity, a process of becoming: it is a collectively produced and open-ended flux that resists fixity and closure… for [Marcel Duchamp, Umberto Eco and Roland Barthes] all works of art are open-ended entities; for Bourriaud, only relational works have this quality. Bourriaud implies that because of this generosity towards the viewer, relational art presents a superior ethical and political model to traditional art forms such as painting.18

This study will necessitate an analysis of the implications of doing away with objects, and engaging audiences in interactions. Theories and practices relating to the meeting of people within the framework of art extend beyond Bourriaud’s text which, first written in French in 1998, has since been challenged and, in light of these critiques, can be considered as limited in its potential for defining and exploring this area.

The road forks in different directions when artists decide whether or not they seek to highlight the complexities involved in bringing people together. Recognition of the complexities and disjunctures within such engagement aligns a work with notions of intersubjectivity, taking on the viewer as distinct and individual with much to offer the work rather than vice versa. This study will encounter works attempting to reconcile or

18

Bishop, Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers (2007) p. 49-50.

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(perhaps more dangerously) overlook these complexities, and those which seek to discover whether something more dynamic can be born out of intersubjective encounters.

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Part One

Intersubjective Art in Practice: Unstable Audiences

To begin to explore the intersubjective encounter within art, this study turns to the notion of the decentered viewer. Prevalent in the concept of installation art, and taking its roots in the minimalist shift of emphasis from content within an object towards the relation of an object to its surrounding environment (in which the viewer is included), the process of decentering consists of the embodiment of the viewer, and the deconstruction of preexistent relationships towards object viewing. This process is deeply rooted in critique of the conventional art object in its self importance: the transference of culture and knowledge through a hierarchy of artist-object-viewer, offering a one-way relationship with the work as the viewer stands before it, soaking up what it has to offer.

In her analysis of installation art Bishop describes the practice of decentering of viewers; ‘By stressing the interdependence of work of art and viewer [Rosalind] Krauss showed that Minimalist work pointed towards a new model of the subject as ‘decentered’’.19 The rise of installation as artistic practice develops the idea of a viewer having a more back and forth relationship to the work, which speaks clearly to the notion of intersubjectivity.

This work itself becomes analogous to another person with whom the viewer can interrelate, whose presence may or may not be silent.20 The work is somehow incomplete until

Rosalind Krauss cited by Bishop, Installation Art (2005) p. 54.

‘Not, I suggest, entirely unlike being distanced, or crowded, by the silent presence of another person’ – Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) p. 155.

19 20

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the viewer arrives in the space, and so their bodily presence is considered to be a part of the work. Thus, ‘everything is finally outside, everything, even ourselves’.21 The object is no longer self important, everything relates and interrelates, everything, even the art under the subject’s gaze. Consequently the work and the viewer share a more balanced relationship of give and take. From this, one can project the idea that the work itself is less concrete and more open to continuous flux and growth, developing an intersubjective relationship between the audience and work.

21 Sartre, ‘Intentionality’ (1939) 1 7

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1.1 Dan Graham Artist Dan Graham defines the relationship between the viewer and the work through a discussion of time. Beginning his artistic career during the Sixties in New York, Graham was closely associated with central artists from the minimalist movement22. Something Graham identified as an essential problem with minimalist art was the theory of the viewer and object sharing the same time and space: A premise of 1960s modern art was to present the present as immediacy – as pure phenomenological consciousness without the contamination of historical or other a priori meaning. The world could be experienced as pure presence, self-sufficient and without memory.23

Whilst the minimalist object insists on a stepping away from an entirely disinterested traditional art-object, existing in a separate time and independent of the viewer, a certain aspect of this idea of self-sufficiency lingers in the minimalist object’s state of pure immediacy. If the work relates to the viewer it does so within a state of utter present-ness which, remains uncomfortably close to connotations of object self importance: the object may have become like the presence of another person, but its silence is the issue.24 Furthermore, the emphasis of the ‘totally unique or new’ experience of the work was, as Bishop phrases it, ‘suspect because it paralleled consumerist amnesia: the way in which the ‘just-past’ commodity is repressed in favour of the new’.25 The location of a pure present tense could be seen as parallel to the location of a pure whole self, and a coherency between individuals.

Graham differentiated himself through a rejection of what could be described as the sense of harmony between the viewer and the work. Despite incorporating aspects of

22

In the Sixties on arrival in New York Graham co-founded and for a time directed the John Daniels Gallery. The Gallery exhibited a long list of artists whose names were to be recognised as some of minimalism’s central figures, including Robert Watts, Robert Smithson, Donald Judd, Jo Baer, Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin.

23 Dan Graham, ‘Performance: End of the ‘60s’ (1989) from Two-Way Mirror Power; Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art, p. 143-4.

24 ‘Silent presence of another person’ – Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) p. 155.

25 Bishop, Installation Art (2005) ‘Heightened Perception’ p. 72.

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minimalist concerns such as ‘foregrounding an awareness of the presence of the viewer’s own perceptual process’ the work more importantly ‘at the same moment [critiques] it by showing the impossibility of locating a pure present tense’.26 Importantly Graham sought to differentiate his practice from the problems he saw in both society and artistic practice.

Instead of feeding into any easily comprehended and consumable norm in the arts, the importance was instead in the dislocation of assumptions. The aim is to confront the viewer with their own disjointed presence rather than allowing them to balance and harmonise with (and within) the work. Erik Hagoort asks ‘shouldn’t we be celebrating the lack of coherency’27 we find in the world around us, and Graham’s installations embrace the chaotic nature of cognition.

The location of work outside the slipstream provided for it in society is a concept which this study will see in the writing of Bourriaud, used to define the change he saw in artistic production in the 1990s, but is a central concern for Graham. Through his work he continually sought to oppose corruption and falseness he identified in society, but rather than providing utopian alternatives (arguably this escape from society is the slipstream provided for art) Graham incorporated the same materials and popular media utilised by the very same institutions he sought to tackle: Graham’s conviction that resistance to the social power of late capitalism remains possible, yet that any form of contestation must unfold upon the terrain of the spectacle itself.28

An example of one of Graham’s time delay installations exploring dislocation of the viewer’s sense of presence is ‘Present Continuous Past(s)’ (1974, figure 3). The viewer enters a space walled by mirrors, a camera films the viewer, and their image is played back to them on a screen. Video technology is used to re-present to the viewer their own image in place of any other object in the gallery, so they find themselves viewing themselves viewing. Time delay on the camera, between the viewer’s actions and what is

Bishop, Installation Art (2005) ‘Heightened Perception’ p. 72.

Erik Hagoort, ‘Good Intentions: Judging the Art of Encounter’ (2005) Section 8.

28 Eric de Bruyn Ready to Shoot: The Expanded Field of Cinema, cited in Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers (2007) p. 11.

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played back on the screen, offsets the experience of being confronted with the very process of viewing, and it is here that Graham dislocates a sense of continuous time. A preoccupation with the notion of the gaze is apparent, with the very perceptual process of the viewer in the gallery playing back to them. Graham refers to Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage29, identifying this as a driving force for his ideas, referred to here alongside Sartre; the small child getting an idea of his ego by seeing himself as seen by another child as he sees the other child, or person… Lacan then picked it up and called it the mirror stage.

These are like two different egos.30

The mirror is central in Lacan’s description of a child understanding itself, applying also to a broader human conception of the self. In his writing on the ‘Mirror Stage’ he explains the process; The relation between the movements assumed in the image and the reflected environment, and between this virtual complex and the reality it reduplicates - the child's

Figure 3. Dan Graham, Present Continuous Past(s), 1974

29

‘This interest [in the socialized and public premise of phenomenological perception]… was partly informed by his reading of Lacan’ –Bishop on Dan Graham, Installation Art (2005), Heightened Perception, p. 73.

30 Dan Graham – ‘Pavilions’ lecture at the Glasgow School of Art, 16-10-2006

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own body, and the persons and things, around him.31

This notion of Lacan’s will be encountered again as it is a core notion for understanding Graham’s interest in the subject of the individual’s sense of self.

‘Present Continuous Past(s)’ is interesting as a response to the problematic minimalist sense of time, however a later work, ‘Public Space/ Two Audiences’ (1976, figure 4) is perhaps a more distilled presentation of the idea of the viewer’s viewing process. The installation has a complete lack of objects. It consists merely of a white gallery space divided by a two way glass mirror, accessed by two doors on either side of the partition.

So, instead of viewing an object, one views only other viewers and a reflected back image of themselves in the process of viewing. The two separate spaces are soundproofed, and Graham describes visitors as having to gesture to communicate with one another.32 Graham describes the two experiences on either side of the glass as both parallel and reversed,33 a duality or multiplicity which reveals Graham’s affinity towards notions of the incomplete (or incomprehensible) subject.

Figure 4. Graham, Public Space/ Two Audiences 1976

One may at this point recall Briony, peering out through the window at her sister. Graham’s glass and mirrored installations position the audience as characters in Atonement, caught up in a futile

31

Jacques Lacan, ‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience’ 1949.

Dan Graham, ‘Pavilions’ lecture at The Glasgow School of Art, 16-10-2006.

‘A parallel, but reverse situation exists for that second audience’ – ‘Notes on Public Space/ Two Audiences’ (1978) from Two-Way Mirror Power; Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art p. 157.

32 33

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attempt to reconcile a divide in understanding. The use of glass links the work to another issue for Graham which is that of consumer culture: the spaces refer to uncomfortable corporate spaces, and we may be reminded of Graham’s criticism of the ‘consumerist amnesia’ he saw within a minimalist emphasis of present-ness. Graham describes the effect this kind of mirroring has within a showcase; ‘you see yourself fractured by mirrors… so your ego is unstable, but then you see an image of yourself on the glass superimposed on the shoes or whatever you’re going to buy, which will make you into a whole person’.34

In Graham’s installations and pavilions it can be taken that in the absence of any objects (other than the fracturing glass and the unstable person), Graham seeks to provide no reconciliation for the fractured self. The glass is the central vehicle for exploring the hall of mirrors process of gazing at Figure 5. Graham pictured within one of his Pavilion structures

each other, and, as previously considered in reference to

Atonement, the glass at once provides a glimpse, and a solid separation.

A large body of Graham’s most latterly work has been the construction of Pavilions; architectural spaces constructed once again from glass and mirrors. ‘Two Adjacent Pavilions’, Graham’s ‘first outdoor two-way mirror pavilion’35 is described by Graham as directly concerned with an intersubjective view; ‘the inside and outside views are both quasi-reflective and quasi-transparent, and they superimpose intersubjective images of inside and outside viewers’ bodies and gazes along with the landscape’36. This is placed

Graham, ‘Pavilions’ lecture at The Glasgow School of Art, 16-10-2006.

Graham, ‘Two-Way Mirror Power’ from ‘Two-Way Mirror Power; Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art’, p. 174.

36 Graham, ‘Pavilions’ lecture at The Glasgow School of Art, 16-10-2006.

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in opposition to the construction of office blocks as constructions of ‘surveillance power’ where the workers see out but the reflective sun on the outside prevents this experience from being two-way. In a sense, this idea on the two-way viewing is set up in order to create endless lines of gazing: what begins as a basic concept of back and forth viewing self-complicates as the gazes and reflections continue to build up. The one-way is not replaced by a two-way, rather by an infinite-way viewing process. This back and forth self-complicating process is an apt metaphor for infinite intersubjective re-shaping of understanding.

Once again Briony’s words are recalled, and we see the social world as ‘unbearably complicated’: as soon as the process is delivered from a one dimensional relationship of viewer and object (which Graham highlights as a power issue of capitalism, corporations and the city), the cacophony of voices instantly fills one’s ears.

The notion of incorporating the surroundings within the reflection is explained by Graham in his criticism of Public Space/Two Audiences (‘it worked because of the white cube’).37 The mirroring back of the viewer’s surroundings within Graham’s pavilions recollects the Sartrean, or Heideggerian notion of consciousness in the world. Not only do the mirror pavilions present viewers with our own viewing process, fluctuating amongst those of others, but pavilions such as ‘Untitled’ 1996 in a large outdoor project in Northern Norway38 place the viewer within sometimes specific contexts. Taking Lacan’s mirror stage as a reference point for his ideas, Graham’s works hark strongly back to the existentialist grounding of consciousness towards something. Of the pavilions in general, Graham claims these spaces through their positioning and ‘semi-reflective’ surfaces ‘help to dissolve the city’s alienation effects’,39 grounding the viewer with a stronger sense of self.

Graham, ‘Pavilions’ lecture at The Glasgow School of Art, 16-10-2006.

Artscape Nordland (Skulpturlandskap Nordland) is a project which aims at bringing a wider demographic into contact with contemporary sculpture; the precise aim of Graham’s pavilion works, many of which are located within public parks, tied in with what he describes as the decentralising of museums (Pavilions lecture at The Glasgow School of Art 16-10-2006).

39 Graham, ‘Two-Way Mirror Power’ in ‘Two-Way Mirror Power; Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art’, p. 175.

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The idea of alienation is a central point of contention in existentialism, pivoting on whether one sees the location of self within the world as a selfless grounding mechanism, or as a lonely (even self centered) dislocation from the external, through this process of self orientation. In Sartre’s play No Exit (1955) three characters find themselves in hell, and are trapped in a second sense. In hell there are no mirrors (referred to in the play as glass) and Estelle tells Inez “when I talked to people I always made sure there was one nearby in which I could see myself… it kept me alert, seeing myself as the others saw me”.40 This desire to have a mirror to locate themselves in is consistently referred to, the male character Garcin later remarking “I’d give a lot to see myself in a glass”.41 Bernasconi describes how this process of assuring oneself of ones existence through the validation of others is termed ‘encrustation’,42 conjuring an image of this process of existence as uncomfortably weighted and self-destructive.

Rather than providing an understanding of self, encrustation gives an idea of obscuring true understanding through cumbersome vanity. Bernasconi elaborates that this ‘effectively imprisons us by persuading us that change is impossible’43, as encrustation locks people in a restrictive mode of interaction, but that the play highlights the possibility of breaking away from this. Unlike the characters in the play we remain on earth with the capacity to alter the way we interact, the final line chiming “Well, well, let’s get on with it”44. It is essential that the glass/mirror viewing works in this study of encounters confront this side of the story. The discussion of endless mirroring is an infinitely applicable metaphor for the process of interpretation between people, but the risk of falling into this area of existential philosophy must be attended to.

40 Sartre, No Exit (1955) p. 20.

41 Sartre, No Exit (1955) p. 29.

42

‘Encrustation refers to the difficulty of changing ourselves since others through their gaze transmit an image of us that constrains us and so restricts our freedom’. Bernasconi, How to Read Sartre (2006) p. 33.

43 Bernasconi, How to Read Sartre (2006) p. 33.

44 Sartre, No Exit (1955) p. 47.

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1.2 Blind Light In 2007 Antony Gormley installed his work ‘Blind Light’ in London’s Southbank Centre (figures 6 and 7). The work consists of a glass box not dissimilar to a Graham pavilion, but the two-way mirror glass is substituted for a transparent glass box filled with water vapor and light, with one doorway by which to enter. The work functions on two separate experiences. Within the construction, it is an experience of almost total disorientation in a space where light becomes an instrument for reducing visual perception to the point of near elimination. The struggle to locate oneself is interjected with moments of crossing paths with another, joining together two separate experiences of confusion with passing moments of sudden clarity. Outside the construction, the second experience of the work is in some ways akin to the traditional viewing of the object. The work combines a decentered perspective and optical perception, but the object of regard is one in constant flux. The bright cloud-filled box is interrupted by ghostly, vague images of figures,

Figure 6. Antony Gormley, Blind Light installed in the Hayward Gallery, London, 2007

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coming in and out of focus as they reach the glass walls. In an interaction with the work, a relationship is drawn between not only the inside and out, but between one’s own experiences.

An experience of ‘Blind Light’ combines both visual and bodily experience, providing an example of the potential for ambitious installation to engage viewers through a combination of the senses. The viewing of the work is an extension of the direct engagement, and so the separation of the glass makes it even more difficult to place oneself in relation to the work. Inside and outside of the structure we perform the roles of both Briony and Cecilia; watching the mystery unfold from behind the glass, and plunging into the fountain. This inability to characterise oneself within the work is an ample description of an intersubjective experience; a viewer may be thought of as developing an intersubjective relationship towards themselves, as they embody both characters of an opposed existential experience. The experience of other people within the glass-encased cloud is ambiguous to define; encountering another person is bizarre and somehow references our discomfort at breaking a social boundary, yet the bright light which has previously been a tool to obscure vision suddenly illuminates, and one is met with a crystal clear perception of another. The Cecilias viewed by the Brionys outside of ‘Blind Light’ are vague and un-readable, and viewing can hence be understood as in sufficient for developing an understanding.

Figure 7. Gormley, Blind Light at the Hayward Gallery, 2007

The sensory engagement of Gormley’s installation links with the work of artists such as James Turrell who focus on the function of our vision. Turrell created disorientating works based on the notion of a ganzfeld; a space where no visual points allow the eye to stabilise the body and locate itself (a natural occurrence of this being Arctic white-outs).

Amelia Groom describes a work at once converse and alike to ‘Blind Light’: Turrell’s

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‘Minamidera: Dark Side of the Moon’; ‘the experience is situated somewhere between the anxiety of not understanding the surroundings and the pleasure of anonymous immersion in infinite space’45. The space entered in Minamidera is dark, but the obscuring over abundance of Gormley’s light and the diminished light of Turrell have similar physical effects on the viewer. Turrell’s work moves into ideas of interstitial spaces, peripheral understanding and sensational limits. This is very much in tune with the idea mentioned previously of Briony’s glimpse: a full view of something is unavailable due to our own limitations as humans, which in some respects is a physical thing.46 The problematic side of this is alluded to in the description Groom gives of the ‘[honing] in on the seer seeing her or himself seeing’ in Minamidera. One is reminded of Graham’s interest in the viewers’ ‘gazes at themselves, their gazes of other spectators gazing back at them’. In ‘Return of the Real’, Hal Foster writes on something reminiscent of this notion: Lacan challenges the old privilege of the subject in sight and self-consciousness (the I see myself seeing myself that grounds the phenomenological subject) as well as the old mastery of the subject in representation “this belong to me aspect of representations, so reminiscent of property” that empowers the Cartesian subject.47

As mentioned, Graham’s interest in Lacan’s theories is shown through his attempt to dislocate and complicate the viewer’s sense of self through the back and forth nature of the viewing processes that occur within his pavilions. His use of technological media is also another way of presenting to the viewer their own viewing process, in works such as ‘Present Continuous Past(s)’ and additional works such as ‘Project for a Local Cable TV’ (1971).48

from the article ‘To be is to be perceived’ by Amelia Groom on the website Big In Japan!

The ways artists engaging with intersubjective interaction approach the inevitable or in-built nature of subject’s disjunctures is an interesting alternative emphasis for discussions on intersubjectivity.

47 Hal Foster, ‘Return of the Real’, chapter 5 Return of the Real, p. 138-9.

48 In turn the participants from a local community sit in front of one another, accompanied by cameras and television screens. Directing the camera at each other’s faces, ‘they take turns defending their respective point of view’. This is then reversed, the participants switching point of view, ‘they are still concentrating 45 46

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The difference between Turrell and Graham’s work is explained by Graham as the distinction between spaces of a meditative nature which explore ‘the perceptive field of the single spectator’ and a socialised experience of public interaction,49 the seeing yourself seeing within a Turrell work is very much of the isolated phenomenological subject. The essential distinction we can draw between this line of experiential, sense focused escapist work and ‘Blind Light’ is the way the latter presents itself as something less easy to define. In other words, the work does not rest on our absorption within the cloud filled glass, and the effect it has on our perceptory processes; it complicates its own experience through the presentation of itself as both an experience and an object (freed from its tethers of inactivity).

their camera eye on the position of the other’. The result is a live broadcast onto a local cable channel, into the community’s homes: a mix of different perspective. Graham, Video Architecture Television (1979) p. 3.

49 Graham ‘Two way mirror power’ quoted by Bishop in Installation art (2005) ‘Heightened Perception’ p.

73.

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1.3 Intersubjectively Experienced, Intersubjectively Produced Up until this point, the ‘in practice’ intersubjectivity in art has been spaces designed to create an intersubjective engagement with the work, and with one another in that space.

The artists construct environments that dislodge the viewer’s sense of position and simultaneously encourage multilayered engagements with other viewers. This functions alongside the notion of decentering and comes from a critique of an easily digested sense of time in relation to the experience of a work. There is, however a wealth of work which seeks to physically engage the viewer in a yet more active way. The works of Graham and Gormley absorb the viewer within a specific environment, but in a sense one is still viewing, therefore the experiential relation of these works to intersubjectivity is restricted to an intersubjective process of viewing. A multitude of names have been applied to art seeking to entirely remove the veil of the object in order to directly engage with the viewer. Relational aesthetics, dialogical aesthetics, Littoral art, the art of the encounter, interaction; these forms of art have come under much discussion over the past decades, and what joins them is an ambition to make the viewer complicit within the work (further than simply embodied and decentered). The viewer should no longer be taken as a mere presence within the space (even if the space adapts to that presence), they must be considered in such a way that the work forms itself around their arrival and interaction. In this sense the work is intersubjectively formed through both the artist and the audience.

The artist’s role too is called into question: the fortuitous position in which the traditional artist resides (wherein the artist embodies the brilliant voice through which an object relays truth to a subject) sits within the same hierarchy of the self-important object. Thus, not only must the object become less self-important, so too must the artist, in order to acknowledge the viewer as something other than a blank canvas awaiting enlightenment.

Another key concept behind these practices is an openness to outcomes; rather than determining an experience (which could arguably be the way Graham and Gormley’s 2 9

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projects function), the aims are left open in order to discover what might emerge. This attitude towards the viewer could in a sense reveal a deeper integrity towards the idea of intersubjectivity. With regards to the writer behind Relational Aesthetics, Bishop relates this idea of open ended aims: ‘Bourriaud takes from Guattari the idea that the work of art is, like subjectivity, a process of becoming: it is a collectively produced and open-ended flux that resists fixity and closure’.50 The viewers on either side of the glass may deal with the hall of mirroring process of understanding ones self in relation to others, and it may also speak to the incoherent and continuously fluxing nature of individuality, yet the existentialists gazing at each other’s gazes remain separated by the solid partition. A work that leaves space for the viewer to create a situation, one not pre-determined by the artist’s hand (particularly a hand which has drawn a screen separating the participant viewers), releases the discussion from this isolated position. Such open ended work is not formed through a transference method of Artist makes Object for Subject51, but rather Artist engages Subjects to explore and discover what may be formed. The artist as creator of the work has transformed the relationship of that creation into one of intersubjectivity. It pivots on the notion that from one individual to another we are unpredictable, our reactions and interactions cannot be formed for us any less than we can expect Briony to be able to interpret the inner workings of her elder sister’s mind.

Bishop, Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers (2007) p. 49-50 In this instance ‘the object is the primary carrier of aesthetic significance’ and ‘immanent meaning’.

Kester, ‘Dialogical Aesthetics’ (1998) Section 1: ‘Defining Littoral Art’.

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1.4 Performance: Direct Engagement Indepen-dance is an inclusive dance company based in Glasgow that exists as a group in which people with (or without) a wide range of disabilities can explore movement and the body; As strong believers in integration rather than segregation, all our activities are offered to people with and without disabilities. Providing everyone with the opportunity to learn from each other and share a creative experience.52

‘In Between’ (figure 8) was performed by Indepen-dance as part of the Merchant City Festival in Glasgow during July 2011. The performance describes itself as; In between invisibility and hypervisibility In between inside and outside In between private and public In between known and unknown In between bodies and stories In between seeing and being seen Or just… in between people53

Figure 8. Indepen-dance perform In Between (Glasgow, 2011, a different performance to the Merchant City Festival)

The festival consisted of market stalls and a range of events such as film screenings, theatre performances, street performances and art exhibitions, both ticketed and free. In amongst this, ‘In Between’ was advertised in the Merchant City Festival brochure, along with a time and location for a handful of performances over the weekend. The performance had no announcement; instead, quiet music began playing on the busy street

52 53

Indepen-dance website; http://indepen-dance.org.uk/performances/ Indepen-dance, http://indepen-dance.org.uk/performances/

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corner that was surrounded by market stalls. At the particular performance I attended, it appeared at first that only a small crowd anticipated some sort of show, but for a time it remained unapparent as to what we were waiting for. Eventually, one realised that more and more people were involved in a slow kind of dance, coming together and apart, moving carefully around each other. No costumes marked them out from the crowd, and the pace of the movements along with the volume of the music made the performance almost imperceptible to the busy streets of market visitors. For myself, the most provoking part of the performance was a group of shoppers who, in conversation, walked straight through the performance, intersecting the path of one of the dancers who was moving backwards. Rather than realising what was going on, that they had in fact walked into a dance performance, a woman shouted at the dancer for getting in her way.

The performance was a moment of calm in the city centre, and made no efforts to separate itself from the surroundings. As a viewer, it made one complicit as it commented on the way we move around and make space for one another: who and what we notice and what we give value to. This performance is included in the study of intersubjectivity for the way it relates to the viewer. A definition of a work taking the intersubjectivity of individuals into account could be that nothing is presupposed in terms of the viewer. In defining very little about how an interaction might develop and remaining open to the outcome, intersubjectivity is not only found in the interaction (or in the work); the actual process of making is intersubjective. In other words, the discussion revolves not only around intersubjective encounters within art works, but intersubjective artistic endeavour, or production.

‘In Between’ makes no concrete judgments or assertions on the viewer, but an engagement with the work provokes subtle commentary on one’s position in relation to it.

Without demanding anything from the audience it pokes at a discomfort in our society: the way in which you are decentered when encountering this work functions on more than a physical level.

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Figure 10. Abramovic and Ulay, Imponderabilia 1977

Marina Abramovic is one of the most well known performance artists, renowned for direct, even confrontational works which do not shy away from the critical position they place themselves in.

Figure 9. Abramovic and Ulay perform Imponderabilia, 1977

‘Imponderabilia’ (1977, figures 9 and 10) is a work in which Abramovic and

her collaborative partner Ulay stand naked, facing one another on either side of the small doorway into the gallery space. The audience on entering the space must brush between the two naked bodies, and in a similar way to ‘In Between’ this draws on our everyday societal/ behavioral discomforts. In both illustrations nine and ten, the participants attempt to distance themselves by avoiding eye contact with the figures, the exact opposite of the typical scrutinisation of art objects. In a similar way to ‘Blind Light’ then, ‘Imponderabilia’ turns the physicality of presence (here of both artist and participant) within the work into the very ‘object’ of viewing.

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Furthermore, the audience is presented with a choice; ‘each person passing has to choose which one of us to face’.54 The female nude has long had a place within art, so could be seen as a more comfortable choice, on the other hand the decision to face the woman could make the viewer complicit with an archaic and objectifying attitude towards the female body. The distance through which one traditionally encounters the nude is here refused. The viewer is critically responsible in Abramovic’s performance, engaged directly (physically) with issues that contemporary art engages with. In choosing to come face to face with the male or female the viewer forms not only the outcome but the experience of the work themselves; thus engaging in an intersubjective relationship with the work.

A further commonality between works that open themselves up to what the interaction of people might offer is a relationship to socio-political issues. Thus the discussion of intersubjectivity may not only be centered around the problem of the traditional conception of the one-way power relationship of art object consumption, but also around the gaps left in a world that requires artists to bring people together. There is however a distinction between the notion of bringing people together versus a bringing together based on an understanding of the intersubjective participants of this interaction. Artists like Abramovic have attempted to show discomforts and ruptures in the ways we engage with one another, with how much we are happy to present and be presented with, whilst others focus on the creation of dialogue through formations of community. There is a line to be drawn, and in order to do so the concept of interaction, dialogue and participation must be placed under the microscope.

54

Ulay/Abramovic: Performances, 1976-1988, ‘Imponderabilia’ p. 350.

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Part Two Interaction and the Intersubjective: Social and Political Implications

There is a risk involved within art that seeks to set up interactive environments, and central to the issue is the core concern of the study of intersubjectivity. As distinct individuals, people have an inherent disjunction between one another. Interaction implies simply that people be brought together, but it is dangerous to presume that interaction is sufficient as a means of exploring the complexities of an intersubjective encounter.55 The core issue is the presumption that people can be brought together on equal grounds, but when discussing intersubjectivity between people it is essential to note the intersubjectivity of a single person. As distinct people we are formed intersubjectively, which is to say that an infinite number of factors shape our individuality. Gender, race and nationality, class, upbringing, sexuality, education: these form a minute section of the framework which shapes us right up to the moment that we are placed together by an artist. Therefore, further to the intersubjective formations that take place during the work, the truly distinct nature of the participants, based on their individual intersubjective natures before and beyond this encounter, must be taken into consideration in order that it be an honest reflection of intersubjective engagement.

The notion of using art (or one’s role as an artist) as a means to create interactions between gallery goers was explored by Joseph Beuys and his conception of Social Sculpture. Attempting to engage the public in a very direct way, Beuys sought a more

55

Though as we have seen, visual installations serve a similar function of providing a rich description of elements of intersubjectivity, whilst neglecting certain aspects such as the direct social interaction on which we now focus.

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direct political activism in his art, bringing discussion and debate into the gallery.56 In addition to the treatment of the subject in relation to the object, the role of the artist is here called into the spotlight, owing to their politically engaged standpoint. When once the artist relayed meaning through physical objects, the new requirement shifted towards a more active and direct role.

Along with artists’ interest in direct interactions and encounters comes a necessity for an allocation of this process of working within the realm of art. Central to this issue is the way in which the concepts and terminology for critique revolve around physical value judgments. The object as carrier of meaning has been rejected by numerous artists who see a direct engagement with the audience as a mode in which a level of integrity can be explored which is not present or achievable in object-oriented visual art.

Despite the incorporation of installation-based practice as an area now rich and developed in history and its rebellion against traditional inactive objects, it remains restricted to the physical object realm, therefore in the eyes of some maintaining a crucial separation and distance that interaction seeks to overcome. This change has lead to pleas for the necessity of a shift in terminology, and a shift in what we assign value to within art. This section will analyse the implications for the subject within this discourse around interaction. Retaining the focus on inter-relations between individuals, a central emphasis in this analysis is the attitude communicated towards the participants of these interaction.

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‘Beuys’s activities fall into two distinct areas: an artistic output comprising sculpture, drawing, installation and performance, and direct political activism (he formed the German Students’ Party in 1967, and was instrumental in founding the Free International University in 1974 and the Green Party). – Claire Bishop, Installation Art (2005) ‘Activated Spectatorship’ p. 102-3.

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2.1 Relational Aesthetics and Democracy Nicolas Bourriaud’s text Relational Aesthetics (1998) can be considered as one of the earliest to attempt a definition of art whose meaning resides not within an object but elsewhere, amidst the interactions of people. An examination of art within the 1990’s is the primary focus of the text, and the chronology of this period in terms of the rise and demise of modernity is foregrounded.57 A way to distinguish the new form of working is to consider the traditional presentation of reality as utopias, which are now replaced by a concern for the reality of our present and how it may best be inhabited: ‘learning to inhabit the world in a better way, instead of trying to construct it based on a preconceived idea of historical evolution’.58 This focus on the present may remind us of Graham’s suspicions towards the minimalist emphasis on a ‘pure present tense’, and this may be worth bearing in mind. For the moment let us focus on the notion of finding a way to inhabit the world; art is here placed in a position of social responsibility, and must therefore be seen as accountable for the aims it sets itself. Transcendence and entertainment are no longer art’s remit, instead it has adapted to show ‘ways of living and models of action within the existing real’, and it is this groundedness in reality that forms the foundations for ‘relational’59 art to take place, since a concern with modes of interaction goes hand in hand with a concern for the construction of society.

Relational art seeks to reject the position it has been assigned, the slipstream provided for it in society described by Bourriaud using Karl Marx’s term ‘interstice’. Art can provide a platform for ‘inter-human commerce’ that sits in contrast to ‘the communication zones that are imposed on us’.60 The day-to-day nature of human interaction is problematised,

57

‘the modern political era… was based on the desire to emancipate individuals and people’, Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, (1998) p. 11.

58 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998) p. 13.

59 Bourriaud describes a relational art as ‘an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space’, Relational Aesthetics (1998) p. 14.

60 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998) p. 15.

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revealing a sympathy towards the idea of intersubjective interaction; open, different, not pre-determined.

Additionally, the focus once more returns to a critique or rebellion against a ‘falsely aristocratic conception of the arrangement of works of art, associated with the feeling of territorial acquisition’61 that the commodified art object falls victim to within the capitalist agenda, Sartre’s digestive philosophy of consuming knowledge. Relational art seeks to present something different from the self-important object with immanent meaning;62 thus to remedy not only social problems but also to right itself within the art world.

Rirkrit Tiravanija is an artist Bourriaud uses to exemplify some of the concepts of Relational Aesthetics. Figure eleven shows a work by Tiravanija where people are joined together in a community created by the artist, or to be more Figure 11. Rirkrit Tiravanija, Untitled (Tomorrow is Another Day) 1996

precise, by the artist’s food. Claire Bishop’s criticism of Bourriaud and the artists presented as

figureheads of Relational Aesthetics focuses on the notion of the community created within these works. Despite the desire to move away from future utopias in order to better inhabit the present, this is precisely the criticism applied to the communities formed. In their experience of ‘togetherness for everybody’63 these ‘temporary’ utopian communities

Bourriaud, ‘Relational Aesthetics (1998) p. 15.

One of the focuses of mainstream art criticism is ‘the formal appearance of objects, which are understood to possess immanent meaning. These meanings are then actualized as the object comes into contact with the viewer’, Kester, ‘Dialogical Aesthetics’ (1998)Section I. ‘Defining Littoral Art’ 63 Udo Kittelmann, ‘Preface’ in Rirkrit Tiravanija: Untitled (tomorrow is another day) Cologne, 1996, cited

by Bishop in Installation Art (2005) ‘Activated Spectatorship’ p. 119.

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have come to be criticised through the original critical position Bourriaud applied to them.

The main issue Bishop finds with the communities is their connection to a discussion of democracy, and it is here that the discussion fuses with ideas of intersubjective encounters. The approach of creating a situation in which people may come in, come together, and create the work themselves is very much an intersubjective formation, however the way in which the artist has provided the set for this interaction is problematic. The aim, or at least the outcome, is for an experience of ‘togetherness’ so we may take this as the way Bourriaud believes we must inhabit our present. The intersubjective nature of people does not allow for this, or rather this method does not allow for people’s intersubjective nature. Bishop uses the notion of democracy to follow up on the political foundations Relational Aesthetics initially applied to itself; ‘inclusiveness does not automatically equate with democracy’. To be truly democratic, difference (not curry) must be brought to the table to be chewed over. Offering togetherness runs the risk of interpreting the subjects as coherent, stable wholes rather than intersubjective complex individuals, and more dangerously it presents a smoothing over of difference. Kester describes the projected danger of a ‘misguided attempt to reconcile art and society into a mythic “organic whole”’: …recent attacks on the teaching of Spanish in Californian public schools (Proposition 227) under the guise of a resurgent one-language Americanism that attempts to define American identity through the negation of the complex cultures that actually constitute that country today. Clearly, any model of discourse or cultural identity that is founded on the violent suppression of difference is oppressive.64 65

Similarly, in his analysis of the decline of capitalism Living in the End Times (2011), Slavoj Zizek speaks about the danger of obfuscating the real problem with weak solutions:

Kester, ‘Dialogical Aesthetics’ (1998) Section 3: Modern Aesthetics and the Problem of Universality.

The inclusion of Kester at this point is problematic, since the statement that follows is; ‘At the same time the vehemently anti-discursive tradition within the modernist avant-garde has led to another kind of negation – an indifference and in some cases an outright contempt towards the viewer’. This is a more in depth regard of the situation, and one that will soon be returned to.

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Why is the proposed remedy [to inequality, exploitation, injustice] tolerance, rather than emancipation, political struggle, or even armed struggle? ... ideology is, in this precise sense, a notion which, while designating a real problem, blurs a crucial line of separation.66

The crucial line of separation is the nature of encounters and the nature of communities.

It is as if the gallery goer requires a Hollywood ending to the experience, people coming together solves problems: a disappointing summary of an artistic practice with its roots in a challenging dialogue.

Relational Aesthetics refers to a specific group of artists and their approach, as opposed to providing a manifesto for the methods of art making and encountering it speaks about.

Another criticism of the selection and focus of Relational artists comes once again from Bishop; ‘Most of the artists cited in Relational Aesthetics seem to be relational primarily through their working process; their interest in ‘intersubjective’ relations takes place before being presented to viewers in the gallery’.67 The previously discussed approach to an intersubjective making process is seen here as falling significantly short. What is aimed at in the creation of the art and what is experienced when coming into contact with it jar, and this would appear to be the issue. The artist is hazily (almost contradictorily) positioned; on the one hand engaging in critically heightened discussions concerning subjects and objects, whilst inhabiting a realm of open ended outcomes. Culpability is clouded by the moral requirement to keep one’s hands out.

The criticism Bourriaud has come under can be seen as being directly generated from the political and social claims he makes for the works, with such definitions of relational practice as ‘an art that takes as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interactions and its social context, rather than an assertion of an autonomous and private public space.’68 Seeking out a different way to inhabit the world, art creates ‘free spaces and periods of time whose rhythms are not the same as those that organize everyday life’69 but the concept of using art to bring people together in such a manner, in order to create an

Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times (2011) chapter 1: ‘Denial’ p. 4-5 Bishop, Art Key Contemporary Thinkers (2007) p. 49.

68 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998) p. 14.

69 Everyday life is something that will be revisited through the writing of Richard Shusterman.

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improved present has limited scope for a socially aware interaction. Perhaps here one might recall Graham’s criticism of modernist pure presence, and the linking of this notion to ‘consumerist amnesia’.70 Aligning itself with such aims as ‘relaunching the modern project of emancipation’71 leaves little room for such a retreat. The dishonesty, or failure, of a politically engaged artist or critic to present these kinds of false solutions is something Zizek would term ‘easy moralism’. In terms of this study’s focus it is the smoothing over of difference occurring as a result of ignoring the issues the work itself presents that push Relational Aesthetics outside of the discussion.

70 71

Bishop, Installation Art (2005) ‘Heightened Perception’ p. 72.

Bourriaud Relational Aesthetics (1998) p. 15.

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2.2 Relations of Conflict The consistent applicability of the concept of intersubjectivity to socially and politically energised practice reveals something of its integrity towards the subject. The attention to community as a political act in itself has been interrogated, in Bishop’s terms the communities ‘founded on harmonious identification of full subjects’ pale into naïve simplicity compared to ‘dis-identified, partial and ‘antagonistic’’72 subjects. This analysis has encountered a persistent desire for art that in some way relates more closely to the viewer as a complex individual, and debates have risen around the capacity for art focused on intersubjective encounters to function as a yet more direct tool in society.

As a significant voice in discussions on capitalism and its economic crisis, Zizek spoke to crowds during the Occupy Wall Street protests in late 2011 (figure 12). His urgent advice was a warning of the dangers posed by the 'carnival' when it comes to protesting for political and economic change. Coming together in large numbers to protest provides us with 'the language to articulate our non-freedom', but 'what matters is the day after’.73 What comes rushing back to mind is Bishop’s startlingly similar warning: ‘inclusiveness does not automatically equate with democracy'.74 In her critique of Relational Aesthetics, Bishop discusses Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s arguments in Hegemony a Socialist Strategy; …a fully functioning democracy is not one in which friction and antagonisms between people have disappeared; rather, democracy occurs when the frontiers between different positions continue to be drawn up and brought into debate.75

Could art seeking to create a community of togetherness be equated with a group of protesters celebrating in unified disagreement? Disjunctures and antagonism are the anticipated effect of an intersubjective encounter, as opposed to an ‘experience of

Bishop, Art Key Contemporary Thinkers (2007) p. 50.

Slavoj Zizek at Occupy Wall Street, online transcript of video footage from 9 October 2011 74 Bishop, Installation Art (2005) Chapter 4: ‘Activated Spectatorship’ p. 119.

75 Bishop, Installation Art (2005) p. 119.

72 73

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togetherness for everybody’76. An eradication of difference is what is risked by such unification within a collective. Bishop’s words can be directly applied as a plea to the protestors: …relations of conflict are erased rather than sustained, because the work speaks only to a community whose members have something in common.77

That crowds assemble to unite in a cause they collectively see as unjust is indubitably a positive thing, but Zizek makes the worthy point that this coming together of the protest is not a success in itself unless the next steps, the next day, are taken.

Figure 12. Slavoj Zizek speaks to crowds at the Occupy Wall Street protest, New York, October 2011

The danger here is for the crowd to feel they have achieved something solely through coming together en masse, without following through with meaningful action. This is not to negate the protestors’ feelings of unity in favour of an objective, distanced critique.

76

Udo Kittelmann, ‘Preface’ in Rirkrit Tiravanija: Untitled (tomorrow is another day) Cologne, 1996, cited

by Bishop in Installation Art (2005) ‘Activated Spectatorship’ p. 119.

77 Bishop, Installation Art (2005) p. 119.

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The success of uniting as a collective is surely an achievement, yet it is a dangerous dilutionistic distraction to consider it as sufficient. This would be an acceptance to inhabit the existing slipstream for debate that society provides; a meeting without urgency, a protest decaffeinated.78 Coming together is essential in order to effect actual action but there is a tendency towards seeing the coming together as enough, and as this study argues this applies not only to political protest but to a realm of art burgeoning with possibility. Therefore togetherness alone not only signifies a false attitude to a collective of subjects, but to a distraction away from meaningful action: the dilution of politically outraged energy through a premature celebration of togetherness.

When artists bring people together, they position themselves in an intensely problematic area. The analogy of the political protest fits only if it relates to interactions which aim only at bringing people together, with big aims on this as a statement and an example, yet interactions happen in all shapes and sizes and this is not always the case. The desire to directly engage people in encounters comes from a now historical move away from object and artist superiority, but, given the somewhat established element of this practice, it is not possible to rely on open endedness and exploration into the possibilities without entangling with much critical debate. This mystification of the artist’s intentions is, however, perhaps one of the most relevant notions towards ideas of intersubjectivity. If the structure of an encounter is not set by the artist, this posits art, subjects and artist on an equal playing field, grounded in an expectation of the unpredictability of the distinct individuals involved. The answer is not easy, so the artist and participants shape their own conclusion, a conclusion dependent on the way in which diversity and separations are tackled.

The futility experienced by McEwan’s characters in attempting to reconcile their divide in understanding could resonate some meaning in this study and the difficulties it faces interpreting various methods and motives. The limitations which manifest in the hands of

78

Zizek speaks in various films and texts, including the Occupy Wall Street speech, about decaffeination – specifically in his wall street speech he aligns this with the idea of false friends and a downplaying of the protest. To allow the protest to be portrayed as a harmless affair is to negate the energy with which it was formed.

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an intersubjective understanding of people can lead to a consideration of the positive possibilities of an acceptance of such discord. Just as Hagoort encourages a celebration in the ‘lack of coherency’, Zizek brings us back to an analogy of love; Love is not idealisation. Every true lover knows that if you really love a woman or a man, that you don’t idealise him or her. Love means that you accept a person with all its failures, stupidities, ugly points, and nonetheless the person’s absolute for you, everything that makes life worth living but you see perfection in imperfection itself, that’s how we should learn to love the world.79

In comparison with Sartre’s use of love as a means to describe our location to things, Zizek challenges our presumptions of what we choose to derive meaning and beauty from. This is in many ways the route that this study has taken, moving into discussions of how to change our approach to the making and experience of art, continuing to push further along the move away from disinterested objects. Perhaps inhabiting the world in a ‘better’ way ought to involve an appreciation of the incoherency involved in attempted togetherness, rather than a reliance on dilutionistic over simplifications of community and participation, and attempted cohering of groups through unifying notions such as love. A desire for change through cohesion cannot suffice. The aim of ‘better inhabiting of the world’ could be improved through renewed appreciation of the failures and ‘ugly points’ of difference, in order to see the imperfection, laid bare, as full of potential.

79

Slavoj Zizek in The Examined Life (2009), filmed walking around a rubbish dump arguing for a reworking of how we consider nature and what we take as beauty.

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2.3 Critical Challenges Hagoort’s essay ‘Good Intentions; Judging the Art of Encounter’ (2005) is another attempt at a definition for the seemingly elusive practice of interaction. Hagoort’s discussion moves into how an art form residing in the non-object may be ‘judged’.

Despite a prevalent necessity for mystification in artistic intent in order to remain open to what the participants can bring, Hagoort argues that many artists have ‘voiced their objectives in plain language’ of which he lists; Solidarity, perseverance, loyalty, responsibility, susceptibility, submission, curiosity, courage, friendship, intimacy, sometimes even love.80

For him this shows that despite strategies being ‘the deathblow’81 (once again revealing the necessity for open ended interaction), the plainly stated objectives allow for these works to be taken in for criticism, leveling and justifying them with other artistic practices. Hagoort takes a close look at the integrity of the artists, emphasizing the ‘disposition’ of the artist, analysing the morality involved and exemplifying many artists as being deeply engaged and integrated with the participants of their work. The objectives listed demonstrate a rather different view of what intersubjectivity can lead to.

What differentiates this line of practice from the criticised relational ideology is the aligning of a work’s manifestations with its aims. Relational practice is problematic because of the uneasy relationship between the political assertions made and the manifestations of radical energy within the encounter. The artists and encounters Hagoort exemplifies make assertions of a different nature, they are not politically driven in the sense that they present themselves as possibilities for overcoming current issues, rather they attempt to push the outer limits of art’s potential for developing closer relationships.

A key distinction Hagoort makes is the idea of prolonged relationships between artists

80 81

Hagoort ‘Judging the Art of Encounter’ (2005), Introduction Hagoort ‘Judging the Art of Encounter’ (2005), Part 6

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and the ‘communities’ they work alongside. Dismissing this along with Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics presents a risk of over-simplification, thereby neglecting a new element of the discussion. As opposed to attempting to create a community and assign political meaning to this act, Hagoort argues in favour of artists who attempt to create one-on-one meaningful encounters. Despite the criticisms this essay has made of utopian communities and naïve togetherness, there have over the years been artists such as Hélio Oiticica whose comforting and immersive installations such as his Penetrables (for example, Tropicalia installed in Rio de Janeiro, 1967) have an escapist quality but argue that this in itself is a politicised practice. Oiticica was working in Brazil under the rule of a military dictatorship, and in this context his work provides a ‘political and ethical’ statement: this particular brand of ‘activated spectatorship’ was a matter of ‘existential urgency’.82 Artists and writers consistently debate the positive oppositional side of interaction. The sticking point here is whether or not this attitude to the subject is reflective of an intersubjective understanding. This use of intersubjectivity is not aimed at designing a criterion for art which does and does not qualify, but to establish a firmer understanding of attitudes to the embodied subject.

The commitment to moral relationships with the viewer displayed in Hagoort’s essay can also be described as a commitment to living with a certain attitude to others, or at least earnestly performing an attitude and morality within artistic endeavour. This concept finds sustenance in writings on the everyday, the injunction to practice what you preach.

The ‘art of living’ is described by Richard Shusterman as invigorated through pragmatism, the practical application of ideas and concepts for a ‘greater integration of art and life’.83 Inherent is a critique of purely theoretical philosophy, and once again this notion finds itself in opposition to the artist/philosopher who relays truth through mediating objects, pointing to an arrogant lack of integrity in ‘speech… doctrines… books’, and ‘masterpieces’.84 The injunction is for a genuine meeting and coexistence of art, or theory, and life. The connotation of this philosophy is for an active practical role, directly opposed to the distanced critique of books and masterpieces. Shusterman

82 Bishop, Installation Art (2005) p. 63.

83 84

Richard Shusterman Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philisophical Life (1997) p. 6.

Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philisophical Life (1997) p. 3.

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elaborates further, that ‘pragmatism has always displayed different views and interests, while regarding plurality as an advantage more than a weakness’.85 This provides another tenable link to both intersubjectivity and interaction. Kester asserts that interdisciplinarity is a key concept for this realm of practice; a way of working which ‘operates between discourses… and between institutions’. There can be seen a consistent desire for a method of working which inhabits a critical interstice, comparable to notions of meeting and merging.

Kester’s paper ‘Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for Defining Littoral Art’ (1998) leads the discussion of interaction and socially engaged art into a highly rigorous self critique, a bringing to account for a manner of working which pitches itself towards social melioration. For Kester, the move into community-based and socially-engaged practice must be assessed in terms of the relationship it has with economic and political pressure and influence.

A further issue posed is that, not only is the notion of interaction weighted with its political tethers, but the concept of social improvement through art is patronizing and problematic, a presumptuousness akin once more to the artist’s elevation in a sociocultural hierarchy. Kester adds yet another dimension to the discussion of open endedness, discussing ‘anti-discursivity’ arising in modernism and postmodernism as further reasoning behind suspicious attitudes towards interaction; I would contend that the anti-discursive tendency in modern art hypostizes discourse and communication as inherently oppressive… the anti-discursive orientation of the avantgarde artwork, its inscrutability and resistance to interpretation, is juxtaposed to a cultural form that is perceived as easy or facile. 86

This provides cultural background into why notions of communication are seen as dirty, in cahoots with the system, and is a warning this study of intersubjectivity must heed in its valuing of disjuncture and antagonism over cohesion.

85 86

Shusterman, Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the Philosophical Life (1997) p. 7.

Kester, ‘Dialogical Aesthetics’ (1998) Section 3, ‘Modern and Postmodern Anti-Discursivity’

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‘Dialogical Aesthetics’ is an insightful backdrop for the possible reasons behind this attitude. Nevertheless, it is essential not to become too highly focused on the idea of successfully political work, since this study’s focus resides on the treatment of the participants. The idea of a retreat remains, despite any successful political stance, an opposition to the antagonistic complexity of intersubjectivity. Clearly it is not an easily reconcilable debate, discussion moves into notions of community and togetherness, but is essentially pitched against such an idea of unity.

The direction of the discussion (with the removal of the object so troublesome for an easy assignment of critique) continually turns towards artist’s intentions. In terms of what social comment is made through the practice, the judgments falls back heavily on the head of the artist. Without the object, criticism becomes far more personal. The assertions and presumptions that the work makes relate directly from one person to another and so (especially apparent in Hagoort’s writing) art becomes valued, in the words of Bishop, for ‘truthfulness and educational efficacy’.87 Not only is this limiting in possible interpretations and attitudes towards the subjects of the encounter, who are reduced to carefully handled pawns as opposed to truly embodied participants, it is also limiting in creative potential and stifling to the individual artist’s voice.

There is an undeniable earnestness to both Hagoort and Shusterman and the desire for integration and connection, but at this point an example Bishop uses in another study of encounters (‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its discontents’, 2006) comes to mind.

Bishop cites the film Dogville88 (figure 13), amongst other works which tread controversial lines in their use of participants. Her consistent stance is in favour of antagonism, and is in some ways the very opposite line of thought to Hagoort. Dogville is the ideal reference for Bishop’s argument, since she compares the artist’s need to move as far back in the equation as possible in aid of the open ended encounter to triumphant ‘self-sacrifice’,89 a central problem in the film through the character Grace.

Bishop ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents’ (2006) Dogville, 2003, directed by Lars Von Trier.

89 The discursive criteria of socially engaged art are, at present, drawn from a tacit analogy between anticapitalism and the Christian “good soul.” In this schema, self-sacrifice is triumphant: The artist should 87 88

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There is still further relevance to this discussion in the example of Dogville. Grace enters the township of Dogville, and throughout the film the town negotiates the way it functions as a community and their sense of ‘togetherness’. Grace forgives the inhabitants of Dogville their every wrong towards her until, at the end, beyond endurance, her faith comes crashing down, with violent repercussions for the inhabitants of the town.

Figure 13. Dogville, Von Trier (2003). Grace leaves the town meeting, the people of Dogville prepare to vote on whether Grace is to remain in the community.

The outcome is true tragedy, since the catastrophic conclusion is an irresolvable moral presentation. The film represents the dangers inherent in notions of unity. The character Tom attempts to lead the townspeople towards acceptance through various mechanisms such as mutual hard work, but the presumption that a community can be guided towards coherence and specific aims is smashed to pieces by the complicated processes of personal interpretation. Tom’s meliorating efforts are ultimately futile.

As with Atonement, there can be no real assignation of blame, save for the failure to

renounce authorial presence in favor of allowing participants to speak through him or her’, Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents’ (2006)

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recognise the inevitability of difference and rupture. Dogville can be criticised for nihilism and violent ideals, but the subtle depiction of the utter imbalance and separateness of different perspectives within a community is shocking in its realism. The dark portrayal of humanity in Dogville is, I would argue, a highly humanist stance, favouring an analysis of truth over positivity; ‘inviting us… to confront darker, more painfully complicated considerations of our predicament’.90 There is much theorizing on the art of the encounter, examining intentions, roles and outcomes, but Dogville presents a theory put into practice, somewhat more provocative food for thought than morsels of ‘togetherness for everybody’.91

Bishop, ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents’ (2006) Udo Kittelmann, ‘Preface’ in Rirkrit Tiravanija: Untitled (tomorrow is another day) Cologne, 1996, cited

by Bishop in Installation Art (2005) ‘Activated Spectatorship’ p. 119.

90 91

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Conclusion

I have repeatedly referred back to the moment with which we opened this discussion; in which Briony watches her sister from behind the window. It was used as a way to introduce and refer back to an existential framework. This kind of existential thought has come to be seen as an isolating process, whilst a study of intersubjectivity moves down a necessarily more socialised path, through an interest in the meeting and crossing over of individuals.

Nonetheless this does not leave Briony’s moment negated. It remains applicable because it speaks of the universal nature of this kind of thought, and sets the discussion quite firmly within notions of the intersubjective. To disregard the utter difference and separation Briony experiences is to cast this wondering aside as purely existential isolation. So let us now return to that moment. When Briony considers ‘the social world… unbearably complicated, with two billion voices, and everyone’s thoughts striving in equal importance’ the concept of everybody having such a strong sense of self – isolated self – has an almost deafening effect. The actual moment Briony inhabits is one of pure existentialism, yet the moment she envisions is a far more socialised experience.

What needs to be overcome is no more a dismissal of separateness than it is a dismissal of the social, something that in this moment Briony reconciles.

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world purely as a means to locate oneself. On the other is found a glorifying of community and unity: an eradication of difference through togetherness.

In their focus on a socialised experience, interactions find themselves in position heavily weighted with political connotations and run the risk of therefore having a lot to answer to. In the instance that they fall short, failing to have an impact, what then becomes of the exploration they began: what may develop through the coming together of people? One of the greatest risks artists are faced with is a patronising attitude of melioration, and, in a sense, this ability to perceive a problem and assert a solution risks re-establishing the artist (and therefore their work) on a pedestal which they have long sought to reject. Self importance in the artist and their endeavour would hint at a return of self important art, whether object-based or not. Making ambitious institutional, social and political statement through perceiving issues and undertaking direct engagement with them, without the means to effect change, is problematic. It is worth noting that this emphasis on the work’s and thus the artist’s culpability leads to a distraction from the analysis of how these works approach the individual, which is the focus of this study.

More physically grounded environments like Graham’s pavilions and Gormley’s ‘Blind Light’ may be seen as focusing more on the individual’s experience-of and reaction-to a space, but in a constructed environment there is a limit to how much the works ‘speak back’ to the viewer. In the examples this study encounters, the experience remains relatively solitary, losing a certain amount of force in the intersubjectivity of the experience through the isolated way in which the viewer is treated. This line of thought could lead to a criticism of such works as a retreat from fuller possibilities for interaction between subjects, holding this depth of interaction at arms length and maintaining an essential separation.

Both social and solitary experiences therefore pose dangers, and the spectrum is thus formed. Her moment of imagining the infinite loud voices is for Briony her actual glimpse of the adult realm (which she falsely attributes to her glimpsing of the fountain scene) since what she imagines is a meeting of these opposing sides of the spectrum. This

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paradoxical meeting is not as contradictory as it may seem, and is in fact a necessary attitude for an intersubjective encounter.

In order to be taken as distinct individuals, people must be understood as intersubjectively formed in a continuous and infinite sense. One recalls Bishop’s argument against community ‘founded on harmonious identification of full subjects’ in order to avoid negating the essential ‘dis-identified, partial and ‘antagonistic’ subject position’92. In order to be brought together (which is necessary within ideas of intersubjectivity since inter concerns itself with relations between), this intersubjectivity of the individual must be acknowledged through the manner in which subjects interact.

The nature of the interaction must provide room for individual difference, an attitude of integrity towards the singular reflected in the bringing together of multiple.

A reworking of the notion of community away from an idea of togetherness and towards an idea of an intersubjective group would provide a platform for a bringing together without eradicating difference; a fundamental message of intersubjective understanding.

A more realistic understanding of people and how they function together can be realised within this intersubjective framework. Furthermore this can provide a backdrop for artistic endeavour which does not separate the issue out into a spectrum, thereby losing the work to moral and ethical debate on either side.

Zizek’s ‘parallax view’ could help to sustain this conclusion. A parallax view is a way to hold two separate ideas together, which laterally could never be resolved as such. In this manner, we can see solitude and unity as ‘two sides of the same phenomenon which, precisely as two sides, can never meet’93. For Zizek, this ‘insurmountable gap’ demonstrates the Real94 and for the purposes of this study it illustrates a positive approach to the contradiction. Zizek’s definition of;

Bishop, Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers (2007) p. 50.

Zizek, Interrogating the Real (2005) p. 10.

94 Zizek describes his alignment with Lacanian theory on the matter: ‘my entire work circulates around this gap that separates the One from itself, for which the Lacanian designation is the Real.’ – Interrogating the Real (2005) p. 10.

92 93

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phenomena that are mutually untranslatable… [which] can only be grasped by a kind of parallax view, constantly shifting between two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible,95

can be seen as describing both a method for understanding the individual and community alongside each other, and a description of the way in which subjects interrelate.

Within the interstitial realm of a parallax view, isolation and togetherness develop a more genuine intersubjective encounter, rather than illustrating two distant ends of a spectrum.

Intersubjectivity can thus be seen as providing vigour for discussions which might otherwise lose themselves to either side of the dichotomy which has appeared, distracting the topic away from an understanding of inherent separation and multiplicity, and towards moralistic definitions.

Briony’s imagining of a deafening world of infinite individuality (figure 14) is not only a universally understood thought, but one of the Figure 14. Briony Tallis, Atonement 2007 Joe Wright film adaptation

more realistic demonstrations of how we interact. A chaotic

challenge to the need to derive meaning from human interaction. The aim is not prescribed by morals or clarity. The answer is not written in stone. Artists and participants battle through, attempting to interact with recognition of an honesty towards the diversity and irreconcilability of both the subjects and possibilities of the encounter.

95

Zizek, Interrogating the Real (2005) p. 9-10.

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Bibliography Alberro, Alexander (editor); Two-Way Mirror Power, Selected Writings by Dan Graham on His Art Published by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Cambridge MA, 1999 Berger, John; Ways of Seeing Published by the British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, London, 2008 Bernasconi, Robert; How to Read Sartre Published by Granta Books, London, 2006 Bishop, Claire; ‘Art of the encounter: Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’ Published by Circa Art Magazine, Dublin, Winter 2005 Bishop, Claire; Installation Art Published by Tate Publishing, London, 2010 Bishop, Claire; ‘The Social Turn: Collaboration and its discontents’ Published by Artforum, New York, February 2006 Bourriaud, Nicolas; Relational Aesthetics Translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with participation of Mathieu Copeland Published by Les Presses du Réel, Dijon, 1998 Costello, Diarmuid and Vickery, Jonathan (editors); Art: Key Contemporary Thinkers Published by Berg Publishers, 2007 Debord, Guy; ‘Society of the Spectacle’ Translated by Ken Knabb Written 1967 Published by Rebel Press, London, 1983 Doherty, Claire (editor); Participation from Documents of Contemporary Art series Published by Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2006 De Certeau, Michel; The Practice of Everyday Life Translated by Steven Rendall Published by University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California, 1984 Doherty, Claire (editor); Situation from Documents of Contemporary Art series Published by Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 2009 Foster, Hal; ‘The Return of the Real’ from The Return of the Real - the avant-garde at the end of the century Published by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Cambridge MA, 1996

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Fried, Michael; ‘Art and Objecthood’, author Michael Fried (essay) from Art and Objecthood Published by The University of Chicago press Ltd. London, 1998 Gillick, Liam; ‘Letters and Responses: A Response to Claire Bishop’s “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics”’, and Claire Bishop’s response.

Published in October Magazine, by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Cambridge MA, issue 115, Winter 2006 Graham, Dan; Video, Architecture, Television Published by Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, 1979 Hagoort, Erik; Good Intentions, Judging the Art of Encounter Published by Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, Amsterdam, 2005 Hesse, Herman; The Steppenwolf Published by Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1965 Kester, Grant H; Conversation Pieces; Community and Communication in Modern Art Published by University of California Press Ltd., London, England, 2004 Krauss, Rosalind; ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ Published in 'October' Vol. 8. (Spring, 1979), pp. 30-44, by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Cambridge MA Lacan, Jacques; ‘The Mirror Stage, as Formative of the Function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience’ Delivered at the 16th International Congress of Psychoanalysis, Zurich, July 17, 1949 McEwan, Ian; Atonement Published by Jonathan Cape, London, 2001 Rancière, Jacques; ‘The Emancipated Spectator’ Published by Artforum, New York, March 2007 Sartre, Jean-Paul; Being and Nothingness Published by Routledge, 1989

Sartre, Jean-Paul; Nausea Published by Penguin, London, 2000 Sartre, Jean-Paul; No Exit (Huis Clos) and Three Other Plays Published by Random House Inc., New York, September 1955 Shusterman, Richard; Practicing Philosophy: Pragmatism and the philosophical life Published by Routledge, New York, 1997

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Suchin, Peter; ‘Reeling in the Real’ Review of Hal Foster’s Return of the Real Published in Variant, by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, Cambridge MA, October 1996 Ulay/Abramovic: Performances 1976-1988 Published by Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 1997

Zizek, Slavoj; Living in The End Times Published by Verso, London, 2011 Zizek, Slavoj; Interrogating the Real Published by Continuum International Publishing Group, London, 2006

Websites Gormley, Antony; artist’s website http://www.antonygormley.com/sculpture/item-view/id/241#p0 (14-01-12) Graham, Dan; Pavilions Lecture at the Glasgow School of Art, 16-10-2006 http://www.gsa.ac.uk/life/gsa-events/events/dan-graham/#Dan%20Graham%20Video (03-01-12) Groom, Amelia; ‘To Be is To Be Perceived’ http://biginjapan.com.au/2011/01/to-be-is-to-be-perceived/ (07-01-12) Indepen-dance, Glasgow based dance company http://indepen-dance.org.uk/performances/ (25-01-12) Kester, Grant H; ‘Dialogical Aesthetics: A Critical Framework for Littoral Art’ Presented at ‘Critical Sites: Issues in Critical Art Practice and Pedagogy’ conference, Dublin, September 1998 http://www.variant.org.uk/9texts/KesterSupplement.html (24-10-11) Sartre, Jean-Paul; ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, lecture given in 1946.

Taken from Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, edited by Walter Kaufman Published by Meridian Publishing Company, 1989 http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm (01-11-11) Sartre, Jean-Paul; ‘Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology’ 1939 http://www.scribd.com/doc/67574719/sartre (02-02-12)

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Situations website for Bristol based research group http://www.situations.org.uk/ (09-02-12) Skulpurlandskap Nordland (Artscape Nordland) http://www.skulpturlandskap.no/Skulpturlandskap/ (10-01-12) Van Heeswijk, Jeanne; ‘Het Blauwe Huis, The Housing Association for the Mind’ http://www.hkcmp.org/socially_yours/d1_01.html (28-10-11) Van Heeswijk, Jeanne; ‘Blue House’ presentation for the Socially Yours, Alternative Design Networking Seminar http://www.hkcmp.org/socially_yours/d1_01.html (10-11-11) Zizek, Slavoj; Occupy Wall Street speech.

Video footage and transcript from 9 October 2011 http://occupywallst.org/article/today-liberty-plaza-had-visit-slavoj-zizek/ (20-10-11)

Films Atonement, 2007, Director Joe Wright, Universal Pictures Dogville, 2003, Director Lars Von Trier, Lions Gate Entertainment The Examined Life, 2009, Director Astra Taylor, Zeitgeist Films

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