Beyond the visual: The Body in Contemporary Art
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When we think of the Body in Contemporary Art we could consider a number of different and relevant aspects. For instance, the body - the human form - is central in art, traditionally the body was often used to explore allegory, beauty and sexuality and so on. But in the twentieth century there was a significant shift in both how the body was perceived, and how it was used to create art across a range of media, from painting and sculpture to installation, photography, video art, performance and participatory art. By considering the different roles played by the body in art, we can identify that there has been a shift from being the subject, for example, in a portraiture, to becoming an active presence in live and participatory events. Alongside this there has also been a significant transformation of the role of the audience, broadly speaking, from passive viewer to active participant.
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Beyond the visual: The Body in Contemporary Art
- 1. Beyond the Visual: The Body in Contemporary Art deborah.jackson@ed.ac.uk David Sherry Looking through Tom Cruise’s eyes (2005)
- 2. The Activated Viewer Vanessa Beecroft. VB35 (1998) A shift from being the subject, for example, in a portraiture, to becoming an active presence in live and participatory events. Alongside this there has also been a significant transformation of the role of the audience, broadly speaking, from passive viewer to active participant.
- 3. Visual Culture: ocular-centric cultures Barbara Kruger. Your gaze hits the side of my face (1981) Participatory art is a term used to describe art that favours an audience composed of active contributors rather than detached viewers. These are artworks that encourage moments of physical as well as visual engagement by an audience.
- 4. Detached Spectatorship to Active Participant Contemporary art that: • attempts to collapse the relationship between art and audience • breaks from the conventions of object making and sees artists adopting a performative, process based approach, where they become ‘context providers’ rather than ‘content providers’ • turns the spectator into an active participant, rather than the traditional passive receiver • values the experience of art over the art object
- 5. The Relationship of the Artwork to the Audience The artist: • uses participation as medium • creates the conditions
- 6. Carsten Höller. Test Site. (2006)
- 7. Aesthetic experience is embodied in Participatory Art
- 9. “A slide is a sculpture you can travel inside.” Carsten Höller
- 10. The Experiential Turn: From spectator to Participant Participatory art challenges this idea and openly invites the audience to interact physically as well as conceptually
- 11. From Self-expression to Intersubjective Engagement Tino Sehgal These Associations (2012) The shift from the authority of the artist to the viewer (or rather participant)
- 12. Changing notions of audience How could ‘experiences’ become something like an artistic medium in contemporary art? Jeremy Deller. Sacrilege (2012)
- 13. Audience, Participation, Spectatorship Allan Kaprow. Yard (1967) Fluxus: • rejected traditional principles of craftsmanship, the permanency of the art object and the notion of the artist as specialist • viewed art not as a finite object but as a time-based experience • were interested in the transformative potential of art through collaboration • encouraged spectators to interact
- 14. Emancipating the Spectator Yoko Ono. Cut Piece (1965) In this performance Ono sat on a stage and invited the audience to approach her and cut away her clothing, so it gradually fell away from her body. Challenging the neutrality of the relationship between viewer and art object. Ono presented a situation in which the viewer was implicated in the potentially aggressive act of unveiling the female body, which served historically as one such ‘neutral’ and anonymous subject for art.
- 15. The ‘eye’ of Greenbergian Formalism Opticality- the idea that modernist art is apprehended through ‘eyesight alone Greenbergian Formalism focuses on the visual elements and principles (privileging aesthetic response as mediated through sight alone), disregarding politics, historical context, content and the artist Greenberg Studies a Kenneth Noland painting
- 16. Art and Objecthood “Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre”. Michael Fried Robert Morris Bodyspacemotionthings (1971)
- 18. Ocularcentrism: the domination by vision “The frenzy of the visible” (Jean-Louis Comolli) “The society of the spectacle” (Guy Debord) “The tyranny of the eye” (Roland Barthes) Felix Gonzalez-Torres "Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991)
- 19. Robert Morris “I’d rather break my arm falling off a platform than spend an hour in detached contemplation of a Matisse”
- 20. Disrupting the dominance of vision Marcel Duchamp Fountain (1917) Dan Flavin. Untitled (to Barnett Newman) (1971) Jeff Koons. New Hoover Convertibles, Green, Blue; New Hoover Convertibles, Green, Blue; Double-Decker (1981–87)
- 21. Relational Aesthetics Work that forces viewers to interact with one another instead of having a solitary experience with the piece
- 22. Participation? The artist remains in a position of authority Tom Marioni The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art (1970 on-going)
- 23. The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents Experience economy
- 24. ‘Space of experience’ rather than a ‘space of representation’ Olafur Eliasson The Weather Project (2003)
Editor's Notes
- When we think of the Body in Contemporary Art we could consider a number of different and relevant aspects. For instance, the body - the human form - is central in art, traditionally the body was often used to explore allegory, beauty and sexuality and so on. But in the twentieth century there was a significant shift in both how the body was perceived, and how it was used to create art across a range of media, from painting and sculpture to installation, photography, video art, performance and participatory art. By considering the different roles played by the body in art, we can identify that there has been a shift from being the subject, for example, in a portraiture, to becoming an active presence in live and participatory events. Alongside this there has also been a significant transformation of the role of the audience, broadly speaking, from passive viewer to active participant.
- Whilst we live in an undeniably ocular-centric culture the discipline of Visual Culture examines how art can be engaged with beyond the visual paradigm. Visual Culture as a discipline is concerned with issues of spectatorship, such as the look, the gaze, the glance, the practices of observation, surveillance, power, visual pleasure and so on. In doing so Visual Culture pushes beyond the question of what we see and asks how various cultural and ideological systems determine why, what, and how we see. Visual Culture also contends that to study visuality in relationship to art is to examine visual form alongside what could be termed as extra-aesthetic determinants. So we can identify that in contemporary art practice and theory there is less emphasis on aesthetic experience and there is a tendency to suggest that background knowledge and interpretation are equally as significant as perception in the experience of art. In relation to experiencing artworks, it also considered that it is important not to isolate the sense of sight from the rest of embodied experience, embodied meaning how we experience the world in and through our own bodies and interaction with others. In contemporary criticism participatory art is a term used to describe art that favours an audience composed of active contributors rather than detached viewers. These are artworks that encourage moments of physical as well as visual engagement by an audience.
- So today’s lecture is going to talk about contemporary art that: - attempts to collapse the relationship between art and audience breaks from the conventions of object making and sees artists adopting a performative, process based approach, where they become ‘context providers’ rather than ‘content providers - turns the spectator into an active participant, rather than the traditional passive receiver values the experience of art over the art object
- The demotion of the passive, receptive viewer and a critique of opticality—has given rise to participatory artistic practices that seek to blur the boundaries between artist and audience, producer and consumer, actor and subject. This kind of active participation is found in the work of the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija who has developed art projects using participation as medium. In his work the artist creates the conditions for the gathering of participants and documents the meeting or event as it unfold. Tiravanija is often a participant himself and this brings a further dimension to participative art through the blurring of the line between the participants and the artist.
- Show Carsten Höller. Test Site. (2006) https://youtu.be/3xC53y2DQGc I’m going to show a short clip of Carsten Höller’s work Test Site that was exhibited in the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern, London from October 2006 to April 2007 (some of you may have visited it). As you’ll see Test Site is a series of chutes that extended from the second, third, fourth and fifth floors to the ground floor of the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern. Participants were invited to slide down a chute on their backs. The drop took five to ten seconds.
- The first thing you notice about Test Site is its sculptural appearance. It is a sculptural object that can be contemplated. Its architectural scale and its use of plastics and metal present the observer with numerous opportunities to evaluate its aesthetic properties. As you stand there surveying the work’s appearance, you become distracted by other activities, like queuing, talking, and sliding. From this perspective an observer can also witness the crowds who participate in the work. As you queue, you are part of a large crowd of people who all have the same goal, that of a participant who has an opportunity to travel inside Test Site at high speed. You can then descent inside the chute, plunging down at a high-speed force that leaves you unsteady as you stand up after sliding. In this sense the work offers both a practical experience that helps you to travel efficiently and provides you with a physical and emotional experience because you drop at such an unnerving rate. Indeed, it’s noticeable how many experiences the work seems to offer. Participation, looking, talking, anticipating, waiting, descending, recollecting and so on.
- Significantly, the experience of Test Site doesn’t rest on direct participation because during participation there are opportunities to observe the whole experience as a detached spectator. However, it also cannot be said that the experience was solely aesthetic because participants also have to think practically and socially whilst taking part in the work. So to recap, in Test Site you could stand back and survey the work as a whole, or as a participant you could become involved in all sorts of other behaviour. As a viewer your role seemed relatively simple but as a participant you actually entered the work and took part in other practical and social experiences.
- This description by Höller himself highlights how Test Site has two main aspects. These two aspects are the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the inner spectacle experienced by the sliders themselves. Höller’s work is an example of an ongoing tendency in contemporary art whereby the creation and shaping of experiences have increasingly become an integral part of the artwork’s conception. When Höller installed this giant slide in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, the object—although clearly one with a sculptural quality—functions like a tool for producing an experience of oneself. With this kind of participatory work, artists such as Höller propose a notion of reflection that is inseparably bound to a lived, felt, and situated dimension of experience. They address a subject for whom looking is as much the body as the eyes, a subject whose body engages in an active encounter with the physical world.
- Now we know that traditionally visitors to galleries have been conditioned to look but not touch the artwork, however participatory art challenges this idea and openly invites the audience to interact physically as well as conceptually. By activating the viewer, we are given a role within the artwork, as opposed to ‘just looking at’ the artwork.
- There has been a shift away from the idea that the meaning and pleasure in the artwork resides in a supposed unmediated understanding of the specific work or in the artist’s intention. In other words, participatory art is a prime reflection of the shift from the authority of the artist to the viewer (or rather participant), as foretold by theorist Michel Foucault - the idea is that the viewer/participant becomes a co-author, since it is their engagement that completes the artwork.
- This recent trend in participatory art is informed by earlier avant-garde movements, which sought to challenge traditional assumptions about the passive viewer and questioned notions of authorship and originality. This kind of art, which values the experience of art over the art object, has its roots in Dada in the 1920s and became prevalent in the 1960s with a resurgence in the 1990s through for example Relation Art. Significantly though, we can identify that since the 1960s there has been a shift in art from what an artwork depicts and represents to the effects and experiences that it produces. So how did this shift happen? How could ‘experiences’ become something like an artistic medium in contemporary art?
- To understand why artists aimed to break the boundaries between artist and viewer, and art and the everyday it is useful to look back at the artist Alan Kaprow’s writings about the Fluxus movement that emerged in New York in the 1960. Artists who were associated with the Fluxus idiom shared some key ideas in their work, they: -rejected traditional principles of craftsmanship, of the permanency of the art object and the notion of the artist as specialist -viewed art not as a finite object but as a time-based experience, employing performance and theatrical experiments -were interested in the transformative potential of art through collaboration -encouraged spectators to interact with the artist/performer -operated as facilitators, engaging the audience in philosophical discussions about the meaning of art Artworks often took the form of meetings and public demonstrations, happenings, or social sculpture whereby the meaning of the work was derived from the collective engagement of the participants. In Alan Kaprow’s essay the Notes on the Elimination of the Audience (1966) he writes that if a work of art becomes truly participatory there won’t be a spectator anymore and words such as viewer and audience will become defunct.
- It is argued that the prevalence of participatory art, during the 1960s and 1970s, was due to the social, cultural and political upheavals artists were witnessing at the time. In the late 60s and early 70s Europe and America were surging with protest, first against the Vietnam War and then against racism, sexism, ecological ruin and so on. Many artists in this period favoured the dematerialisation of the art object, making artwork that was not reliant on the creation of an object that could be purchased and traded on the market, instead they no longer made the kind of art that could be displayed in a conventional gallery setting, art that was no longer something that could be described in conventional terms. Many artists, in the midst of the politics of the time aligned themselves with the idea that capitalism was the root cause of racism, war, and oppression. And through their art practices these artists were criticising the artworld’s economic dependence on capital, the ‘commodification’ of art. Artists who were critiquing art’s commodification were faced with considering what form artworks should take at a time when the idea of the art object as a commercially viable product was being discredited. As a consequence, they also began to address issue of how such artworks should be presented to the public. In doing so they began to subvert the conventional viewing conditions of art institutions because the relation between artists and the public profoundly changed as the public became a component of the creative process and participation became a new territory to explore. In this performance Ono sat on a stage and invited the audience to approach her and cut away her clothing, so it gradually fell away from her body. - Challenging the neutrality of the relationship between viewer and art object. - Ono presented a situation in which the viewer was implicated in the potentially aggressive act of unveiling the female body, which served historically as one such ‘neutral’ and anonymous subject for art.
- As well as discussing the development of participatory art in relation to the social, cultural and political backdrop of the 1960s and 70s, it should also be considered in terms of its expansion of the limitations of Greenbergian Formalism which preceded it. Greenbergian Formalism is a phrase used to describe the critic Clement Greenberg’s influential ideas about high Modernism in art in the 1950s and 60s. For Greenberg, the eye was paramount, and his ideas about modernist art were based on a fundamental rule of ‘opticality’- the idea that modernist art is apprehended through ‘eyesight alone’. According to Greenbegian-thought the modernist aesthetic was concerned primarily with formal optical values such as light, colour, space, and form. This is known as the principle of formalism, which valorized or values an artwork based on the purely aesthetic experience. Since, according to Greenberg, art was to be discussed in formal terms — colour, line, shape, space, composition — this removed the question of meaning and purpose from consideration and allowed whatever social, political, or progressive statements the artist had hoped to make in their work to be conveniently ignored or played down. This was part of a broader movement in the arts called Aestheticism, whereby the emphasis of aesthetic values more than social-political themes. So the Greenbergian position is that the aesthetic viewpoint is distinct from social, practical or historical viewpoints. In defence of this attitude, it was argued that the function of art is to preserve and enhance the values and sensibilities of civilized human beings, and so art should attempt to remain separate from the harmful influences of contemporary culture. And so there emerged the idea that modernist art was to be practiced entirely within a closed formalist sphere that was separated from the real world, so as not to become contaminated it. As well as art being being distinct and separate from everyday life and mass-culture the Greenbergian aim for art towards purity and the autonomy of art extended toward the idea that each art form should share no characteristics of its work with any other art form. In other words, purity id predicated on medium specificity (spec-i-fi-city). To recap then, Greenbergian Formalism refers to a way of creating, viewing and interpreting art that focuses on the visual elements and principles (privileging aesthetic response as mediated through sight alone), disregarding politics, historical context, content and the artist. The most important aspect of a work of art is its medium specific form, that is, the way it is made and its purely visual aspects, rather than its narrative content or its relationship to the visible world.
- These ideas about medium specificity (spec-i-fi-city) are also central to the critic Michael Fried’s essay ‘Art and Objecthood’. Fried proposes in this essay that art should be experienced in a specific way and he argued that: “Art degenerates as it approaches the condition of theatre”. In this statement he is responding to Minimalism, which during the 1960s fundamentally changed the relationship between the object and its viewer, between art and its venue, by completely shifting the meaning of the object to the experience had with and through it. These artists suggested a situational focus in the visual arts through the way in which they introduced a consciousness of the space and the bodily situatedness of the viewer. The key artistic figure in this context is Robert Morris, whose artworks and writings most explicitly question the traditional notion of both art object and viewer in favour of what the theorist Rosalind Krauss has called a “lived bodily perspective.”
- In Fried’s text he is critical of the way that Robert Morris’ work became “an object in a situation – one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder.” (Fried, M. 1967). In other words, the beholder/the viewer, becomes integral to the work. Fried claimed that modernist/formalist work was authentic whereas minimalism was theatrical because of how the work is experienced, based on how you perceive time in an encounter with these works. For Fried, in your experience with the authentic modernist work your encounter has a marked sense of totality and directness that differs from more ordinary encounters. You are led to disregard your surroundings and your perceptions are forcefully sharpened. An experience of the theatrical minimalist work on the other hand has “duration”. Your encounter with the work accumulates through time. You notice the context of the work and your presence in that context and begin to assemble meanings in much the same way that you build up an understanding of a plot when you read a novel.
- “The frenzy of the visible” (Jean-Louis Comolli) “The society of the spectacle” (Guy Debord) “The tyranny of the eye” (Roland Barthes) These are just a few of the terms and phrases coined or deployed by theorists in recent decades to define (Modern) art in relation to visibility, visuality, and perception. Whilst aesthetic experience is generally taken to be one the foundations of art aesthetic experience may have a role in an experience of participatory art but aesthetic experience may no longer have such a privileged position.
- By and large the features defining the audience of the modernity were abandoned due to its inoperability. The spectator was no longer defined as being abstracted from their immediate surroundings and immersed in an aesthetic experience which the contemplation of the work had made possible. Robert Morris is an example of artists whose work was significant in forging these changes through aiming to produce an experience in the way that the art relates to the space and to the viewer’s body. In 1971 he demonstrated the frustration with conventional viewing experiences by stating “I’d rather break my arm falling off a platform than spend an hour in detached contemplation of a Matisse”. Morris wanted to provide a situation where people can become more aware of themselves and their own experience rather than more aware of some version of his experience. Traditionally, any artwork is seen as a representation of the artist’s intentions, so Morris’ work is an important indication of the crucial shift of focus from the artist’s intention to the viewer’s aesthetic and non-aesthetic experience. What is significant here is that whilst the visual remains an important factor in art, these works dismiss an automatic spectator-object relationship in which meaning is determined only by the optical exchange across the visual field, in favour of a felt and lived experience of the body as it encounters the physical world.
- We could of course argue that every artwork produces some kind of (aesthetic) experience. And we could also argue that all forms of arts require participation to some extend. After all, experiencing art (observing, listening, watching and so on) is also a kind of participation. Artworks have very rarely been created not to be experienced by a public. But, as I already outlined, from the 1960s onward a dominant feature of contemporary art has been the effects on the viewer and with the situation in which it takes place. And it is recognised that participatory art changes the conditions in which aesthetic experience arises It is also worth mentioning that the aesthetic experience was of course tested by earlier generations of artists such as Marcel Duchamp and his readymades. Since the ‘readymade’ contemporary artworks have often exhibited properties that are identical to the exhibited properties of an ordinary object. These objects of art are frequently the same as objects that can be bought in shops or found on the street. (IMAGES: Andy Warhol, Dan Flavin, Jeff Koons etc.) In these examples aesthetic status is granted to mass-produced objects that were then in turn presented as art. When removed from their everyday context and put into the gallery, these objects were granted artistic value via their new context. In this sense we these artworks attempt to criticize the dominance of vision and aesthetics. This challenge to the dominance of vision was described as a philosophical revolution in art and was analysed by Arthur C. Danto in his publication After the End of Art, where he concludes that you can’t tell art just by looking. He states that the difference between art and non-art is no longer visible (even though it is still there), and so the difference must be conceptual, not visible.
- In the late 1990s participatory concepts were expanded upon by a new generation of artists identified under the heading of Relational Aesthetics. This is a term coined by the French curator Nicolas Bourriaud to describe a range of art practices that are concerned with the network of human relations and the social context in which such relations arise. In practice this means artworks in which an artist creates work that forces viewers to interact with one another instead of having a solitary experience with the piece. In his book Relational Aesthetics, first published in 1998, Bourriaud’s main claim is that the social interactions created between the viewing audience and a work of art hold the true meaning of art. Again the focus is on human relations and their social context, rather than the autonomous physical art object, and of the meaning of the work being collectively produced rather than privately consumed.
- Relational or participatory art - whereby contemporary artists work with live events and people as a kind of privileged material - has its critics. These were summarised by the artist and critic Dave Beech in Art Monthly (April 2008). Beech suggests that all too frequently the nature of the participation on offer is 'convivial' and only convivial: taking the form of friendly, but rather bland social discourse. He notes that the participant is generally powerless to question or critique the art or the art-idea, nor are they - in any real sense - a collaborator within it. He points out that the art doesn't ask to be judged; rather the public - as participants - are instead asked to complete the work through their participation. Beech also finds it problematic that the artist's presence is elusive, and as they are no longer the sole author they are no longer accountable or answerable for the work in the same way. Nonetheless the artist remains in a position of authority. Furthermore, there is also the question of whether participatory art can really live up to the claims that are made for it. Is it inclusive and democratic or does it merely replace the observer, audience, or viewer with another set of unequal relations?
- The critic Claire Bishop also criticises participatory art practices and identifies the upsurge in participatory art as a symptom of broader economic concerns that have seen art collapse into entertainment as part of an ‘experience economy’. She points out that the production and reception of the arts is constantly being reshaped to maintain, increase and broaden art audiences and gallery attendance figures. Due to a substantial decrease in funding these audience figures and marketing statistics have become essential to secure public funding (Bishop 2012). Thus, a gallery’s success is no longer measured by its collections, staff and facilities, but by the number of visitors it attracts; insinuating that high attendance figures translate into a successful exhibition, in turn, boosting revenue. Consequently, we could also consider the increase in participatory art exhibitions to be a response to the decrease in art funding.
- Throughout art history artists have continually challenged not only their audience who view the art, but also the institutions that display, collect and preserve it. It attempts to disorient the viewer and heighten their experience; where not only is the art on view but those who view the art are too. Participatory art reinvents the gallery as a space of experience rather than a space of representation art object is no longer necessarily the primary focus of the encounter with art.