To the Future Audienceby Adnan YıldızAfter a long research process, this exhibition is possible thanks to the cultural policy of Montehermoso and the Basque country of Spain. “There is no audience” was born reflexively as a critical statement about how contemporary art practice is circulated today, the result of two years collaboration with the curatorial research program Curatorlab at Konstfack (Stockholm). It has also functioned as the starting point for many further collaborative projects (www.bigfamilybusiness.net, www.goodgangsters.com, www.you2best.blogspot.com, Muhtelif and Hot Desking for Manifesta 7 etc.), which are all designed to investigate practical and alternative forms of exhibition making and to question the role of the audience in the “game”. At the outset of my research, this exhibition proposal sought its inspiration in the transformation of the audience from a receiver into a performer and in the exhibition space, miserably empty after opening parties, as well as in the self-referential art community, traveling around the world from one biennial to another with a “network fever”. As a curator, one of my interests in the field is to investigate why and when we need to exhibit, and for whom we do produce. Now, over the course of my research, my proposal’s position has become “an exhibition about public imagination”, taking into the consideration its manifestation in a public institution and its selection from an open call that received 370 proposals, sent from 35 countries. The precious responsibility of being selected through a transparent process –rather than a closed competition- has motivated me to invest in a potential discussion I find crucial in the field in order to reformulate our roles and positions as well as our strategies and approaches.
The exhibition proposal is based on a set of urgent questions intended for collaborative development, such as: Who is our audience today and who will they be tomorrow? How do we contribute to the construction of a public imagination? What is the balance between media and content in art practice today? How do history, identity and culture operate through the circulation, promotion, presentation and discussion of contemporary artistic practice? How does the transformation of audience profiles –from receivers into users/performers- shape artistic production in terms of participation, contribution and reflection? And most significantly, how do we reproduce ourselves through these practices and through the different channels of contemporary art in order to make ‘things’ public (as a direct reference to Bruno Latour)?
As the creative team of the project, we are increasingly interested in how these questions can possibly penetrate the everyday life of its audience, the everyday politics of the citizens of the city that hosts the exhibition, and the everyday reality of the institution that produces it. Considering the impossibility of denying the impact of the local context on contemporary artistic production, “There is no audience, an exhibition about public imagination” is conceptually designed through the approach of integrating proactive elements derived from its local context in order to build a globally relevant structure. It is connected to the seminar program of Montehermoso with a discussion session as well as to the library of Montehermoso through the side-project “Open Table”, a temporary installation of printed matter (books, periodicals, etc.) during the show, alongside the fact that the public agencies, NGOs and local media have been asked to exchange ideas and information. Repeating Paul Virilio’s provocative question, “contemporary art, sure, but contemporary with what?”, “There is no audience, an exhibition about public imagination” proposes in this context a possible answer – “contemporary with the audience” – in an attempt to produce new perspectives and refreshing, additional questions…
“There is no audience, an exhibition about public imagination” departs from the continuously changing position of the audience (as a user, profile, citizen, reader, passenger, party-animal, fashion victim, performer etc.) and its local and global connection to artistic research and production. The project examines how public imagination, social criticism and collective creativity are perceived today in diverse cultural political and social contexts, seeking to understand how artistic research and knowledge respond to these transformations. A quote from Louis Althusser may theoretically anchor the proposed questions: "Capital appeared a century ago (in 1867). It retains all its freshness and is more relevant and actual than ever." Briefly understood, contemporary forms of capitalism have been undergoing massive changes in the previous decades as a result of digitalization, mobility and internationalism, introducing new forms of self-organization and “everyday politics”. Apart from national economic borders and the a territorial international consensus that has controlled the markets, their value and accessibility, since the beginning of the 20th century, there are currently new virtual societies and communities that share, exchange, shape and circulate information, knowledge, experience and products like e-bay or Youtube. For instance, the shift in the form of encyclopedias, considered the traditional form of information production since the Enlightenment, to today’s open sources such as Wikipedia produces a reflexive and collective process for the exchange of information.
One can also conclude that the conditions of image production have been democratized, making it much more easier and cheaper through new technological developments, digitalization and the Internet to exchange images. Nevertheless, human imagination and critical creativity continue to be manipulated and controlled by the codes and systems of the State, Army and media-reproducing mediocracy. Western Europe and North America are expanding the borders of public control and capitalizing on the channels of information processing for the sake of security, as opposed to the increasing demands for free information, education and knowledge by many activists and intellectuals. India, China, and Russia are, in this case, rising stars, yet their repressive policies of censorship are notoriously well-known. On the other hand, US President Barack Obama is the first elected president who campaigned with a CNN debate, a Facebook page and a YouTube channel, using the Internet to communicate directly with Americans in a way unknown to previous presidents. In his article "What makes mainstream media mainstream?" Noam Chomsky, whose work has analyzed the forms of this medial transformation and produced an extensive, critical discourse of anti-globalization, writes: "What are the elite media, the agenda-setting ones? The New York Times and CBS, for example. Well, first of all, they are major, very profitable, corporations. Furthermore, most of them are either linked to, or outright owned by, much bigger corporations, like General Electric, Westinghouse, and so on. They are way up at the top of the power structure of the private economy, which is a very tyrannical structure. Corporations are basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controlled from above. If you don't like what they are doing you get out. The major media are just part of that system. What has it to do with our consumer behavior?”
According to Slavoj Žižek, the only universal hegemony is global capitalism; without opposition, all other struggles will be easily incorporated into its logic. Even progressive multiculturalism in its form of radical, (deconstructive) particularism, has been taken over by global power operates, as analyzed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in “Empire”. This was completely visible during the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, in the spectacle of the 2008 Olympic Games opening ceremonies in Beijing, etc. In his“Time for Revolution” Antonio Negri proposes a term, the “reconstruction of hope”, in order to posit the questions “how can a revolutionary subjectivity form itself within the multitude of producers? How can this multitude make a decision of resistance and rebellion? How can it develop a strategy of re-appropriation? How can the multitude lead a struggle for the self-government of itself?” He responds to these questions with a socio-cognitive approach: “In the bio-political postmodern, in this phase that sees the transformation and productive enrichment of labour-power, but on the other hand sees the capitalist exploitation of society as a whole, we thus pose these questions. As for the answers, I certainly do not possess them. But… probably a few bricks toward the reconstruction of hope.”
Through displaying examples of artistic research & practice, "There is no audience, an exhibition about public imagination" aims to reconstruct survival values and produce a multifaceted hope for future audiences by converting the reader into a viewer, injecting performative, sonic and narrative intelligence into contemporary vision, while questioning the role of access, value and the media in the contemporary image politics. Opening a critical panorama of today’s visual tendencies, it investigates the possibilities of a ‘spacetime’ for the research, production and discussion of a fundamental question;“who is our audience today?” The exhibition starts with a commissioned sound piece from Olof Dreijer & Mamori, who responded in this work to the question “how do we live with and remember exhibitions?” Reminding us of the natural habitat we share with other living organisms on Earth, the soundtrack is composed of animal sound recordings from the Amazon rainforest, performed for the opening program and installed during the show, as well as distributed to local radio stations and clubs and produced as a CD for the audience who wants to “keep the rhythm”. The artist duo, Hadley +Maxwell contribute to this statement with drawings of fictional studio and stage environments. The depicted scenes show equipment and furnishings in the studios, such as sound baffles, microphones, and stage lights, with the absence of performers. The absence of performers provides an ambiguity for us to speculate how performance is fictionalized through the mechanisms of the music and entertainment industry and imagine a conceptually naked mise en scène for the audience. Christian Hillesoe and Johan Tiren exhibit letters sent to the CEOs of global corporations with the responses they received to the questions they posed. This long-term research project (2000-2009) ironically questions the role of the audience as a buyer and seller and the representation of ”culture branding”. Fikret Atay’s video “Theorists” challenges the curious gaze, spying on a dormitory in southern Anatolia. The video defines a psychological territory of a community that is composed of young ‘hafiz’ candidates who practice memorizing the Quran, creating a thin red line between the image codes of theorists and that of “terrorists”. Borrowing the language of encyclopedic representation, Elmas Deniz shows a drawing of an astronaut figure that also looks like a fetus, referring to the euphoria of birth as well as celebrating the 40th anniversary of the first human step on the moon (1969), an unforgettable moment in the world’s history of images. Johanna Billing’s videos deal with diverse forms of participation and contribution, providing possible spontaneous scenarios to the construction of contemporary performance.
For the exhibition, Can Altay proposes a spatial design for the viewer, who can also be considered as a passenger in the space. This architectural gesture creates a possibility of imagining the absence/presence of the audience and their encounters, passages, and static instances, bringing the term "spacetime", which combines space and time into a single construct – the “spacetime continuum” – to the table as the fourth dimension of the exhibition. Filmed at a real TV studio in Berlin, Lynne Marsh’s “Camera Opera” is composed of a series of choreographed movements from different cameras around an anchorwoman, creating a Brechtian stage for the viewer as a performative critic of mass media broadcasts. As a locally sensitive statement, Ming Wong duplicates a scene from the movie, “Welcome Mr. Marshall!” a Spanish comedy film from 1953, directed by Luis García Berlanga and considered one of the masterpieces of Spanish cinema.
For the video installation, “ZAN - *T185…” Byrne reconstructed interviews done with peripheral ‘celebrities’ from early issues of “Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine by finding them in archival microfilm records and re-shooting the interviews with contemporary, New York-based actors. Converting the form of magazine into a video language and the documentation into a fiction, he delicately plays with the history of a ‘scene.’ Alikidd, in collaboration with Jade Sou, presents an installation made of a vintage dress, designed by Scherrer for Isabella Adjani alongside a series of drawings that fictionalize a stalker. This collaboration successfully reflects how fashion recreates itself again and again through a history of images and how performativity in its culture operates through the personal internalization of the image and obsessive identification with the icon. Parallel to the show, there will be a screening program of the film “La Commune” by Peter Watkins, including the video interview with Ulus Baker, entitled "What is Opinion?", in order to create political discussions through the invitation of local activists and political organizations.
Thanks to the participating artists who made this exhibition and the discussion around it possible through their dedication, effort and patience; to Noam Chomsky who has provided a great opportunity to me to reconsider his text here within the project’s conceptual framework; to Ulus Baker for his eternal presence; to the creative professionals, partners and collaborators who have worked with us; to my family, friends and colleagues for their inspiration and finally to the dream team of Montehermoso. After a very long process of trial and error, plus risk and challenge, here is “There is no audience, an exhibition about public imagination”, inevitably waiting, of course, for its past, present, and future audience.
For now, let us end by returning back to the tradition of the stage, taking from William Shakespeare: “the rest is silence.”
