It used to be said of experimental art that it didn’t really need an audience to view it. (Lucky really, because it didn’t have a large audience anyway.) Experimentation for its own sake was to be sufficient; undertaken in isolation and stored in physical remnants such as a painting or sculpture which may or may not be viewed later. Of course this was before — or despite — some people reckoning that the value of art was actually something produced in the exchange between artists and audience, in between the work being made and being received. So, they argued, there really isn’t a work until that happens, since the work of art is that happening.
It’s like that proverbial tree which falls in a forest and which nobody hears. Does it fall at all? Do we believe in the essential value of nature, even without us? It’s a topical question, as much for government art funders, as for artists who exhibit their work in tiny, out of the way galleries. It’s produced some extraordinary artworks too, such as Hans Haacke’s Framed and Being Framed (surveys of audiences in the 70s not just to prove an audience for experimental art but to define one) but more recently it’s led to a preoccupation (even a distraction) with ‘marketing the arts’ by various advocacy groups.
Gail Hastings’ work frames similar questions but in terms of our own agency in looking and interacting with art; her work provides a structure — or really, as she says it ‘sets a scene’ — for generating a kind of self-consciousness about looking at art (or our desire for something). Hastings proposes two hypothetical scenarios. In one, mission: untitled (blue), we’re invited to seek out a small blue abstract painting, what the artist calls — in terms redolent of psychoanalysis — ‘the lost object’. Just like the film Mission Impossible, we receive instructions about where to go, what to do, and the video plays out the scenario like a game in front of us, the point of view is ours. As if searching for the painting, we get on and off trains, walk underground, collect clues on the way, before finally reaching the painting in question, only to see a hand — but not our own — reach into the frame and take the painting.
The clues we identify within the film (the blue painting, the purple shoulder bag, the art magazine) are exhibited in the same space. It’s as if our experience as a viewer has — even before we view the work — already determined the work of art. Our own participation has been preceded by some vague, shadowy proxy; someone who plays us (the viewer) in the film. And since we identify with them, we’re caught in this strange overlap of time and space, déjà vu, revealed in the moment where, along with another, we reach for the painting.
In another work setting the scene for nobody, we are invited to complete a checklist regarding the components of an art exhibition: paintings, catalogue, gallery furniture, watercolours. Yet it’s already been checked and the exhibition set up accordingly. It seems that the same phantom has intervened here too, on all our behalves.
Literally, ‘nobody’ has already visited and sorted things out (just as there’s a telephone ringing in the room that ‘nobody’ can answer). Indeed, as we read the checklist, we come to understand that we are in fact standing in the middle of the scenario which ‘nobody’ has set; we are in the middle of the art work, caught up in its dynamic. Sure, these are games at one level, playing with semantics, dramatic narrative, the power of suggestion, point of view, and other tropes in order to construct a conundrum in which we distinguish between a phantom persona and real people such as the artist, you and me. But that distinction between people is crucial since in pursuing the work of art — in playing these games — we also define ourselves in relation to others in the matter of what we are looking at and what we are looking for.
This may be too fine a point for those who want to see art as a fixed, rigid thing beyond their own fluctuating desires and expectations (like a blue monochrome painting). But for those who recognise art in the exchange between artist and viewer, that blue painting is merely incidental to our complex relationship with an artist in looking at their work, trying to understand their intentions and our own reactions. Hastings’ work enacts the passive spectatorship inherent in looking at art. And it’s no surprise that Hastings has borrowed from classic film narratives like love stories, spy thrillers, and mysteries for the purpose. Her work is melodramatic in this best sense of the word.
related articles:
there contemporary art magazine by Gail Hastings (with slide show of mission: untitled (blue) )