Performance art response: Audience interacting with art

        Both “Art as a Performative Act” and “The Fantasy Beyond Control” are about the inclusive, participatory nature of intermedia, which I thought was a lovely way of thinking about that type of art. The first reading explains that intermedia focuses upon the interpretation of the audience, since a piece is immediately experienced – that is, you don’t just contemplate it afterwards, or on your own time, like you would a still painting. With an intermedia piece, the audience is directly a part of it. It plays on the audience’s power of interpretation to make the art. That is why Gadamer’s three elements of performative art are relevant:  play, symbol, and festival all have to do with how the audience perceives and treats a work of art. As Klemm says, “What do you we recognize in the work of art? We recognize the meaning of our being in the world.” Art and especially intermedia work depend upon the participation of an audience to unearth the meaning of a work and make it their own. In “The Fantasy Beyond Control”, Hershman talks about how 24/7 media exposure has caused a “sense of cultural time displacement”, where it feels like history and time just pass by in front of us and we, as individuals in a media-saturated society, feel alienated because we see them pass but don’t get the opportunity to participate in them anymore (since all they see is information presented to them). Similar to Klemm’s discussion of intermedia, Hershman suggests that interactive media lets individuals join in “in the discovery of values that affect and order their lives.” That is, intermedia work lets people feel like they can participate in the world.

        Reading both of these pieces made me wonder about how at the same time we’re reading about the importance of interactive media, we’re making videos that are inherently one-sided. Theoretically, as Klemm would say, audiences of video art could create their own interpretation of the work and identify with it – this is clearly true given the existence of cult movies and Rocky Horror festivals, for example. But it feels like Hershman wouldn’t be as comfortable with video art, since there’s no way to add to it in an objective sense. It is what it is. So I thought, what if there were a performance video piece that took the form of a one-sided conversation, like a more intellectual version of Dora the Explorer talking at the screen, asking the audience to participate? Even more compelling to me is the idea of art that is directly constructed by the audience – one-sided but from the side of the audience rather than the artist. For example, like Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974), in which she presented herself and a variety of objects, and invited the audience to do whatever they liked to her, and she wouldn’t react. This six-hour performance was certainly interactive in that the audience was allowed to affect the piece but it went to the extreme that the audience made the piece – their actions give us an opportunity to interpret “the meaning of our being in the world” (Klemm) and the nature of the art audience. While I couldn’t find video of the actual piece, I did find a video of Abramović talking about the piece:

Marina Abramovic on Rhythm 0 (1974) from Marina Abramovic Institute on Vimeo.