Research Proposal

Meeting a performance in a public place
:Audience engagement Installation Development

Nicolas Bourriaud, who is a theorist and curator, coined the phrase ‘Relational Aesthetics’ to distinguish the art of the 1990s and mentioned that a relational art takes as its theoretical horizon “The realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space”.1 In addition, he describes Relational Aesthetics as a process of situating contemporary art in a cultural context. There are several examples of relational arts. Rirkrit Tiravanija, who is a contemporary artist and well-known for hybrid installation performances, cooks Thai food for gallery or museum visitors and the work is often completed by the audiences. Liam Gillick designs colourful frames based on Minimalism to build structure as spatial resemblance to public places such as office spaces and bus shelters. Before that, he is also aware of the fact that different materials, structures and colour surrounding spaces influence the way that people behave. In this kind of his work, he does not want the viewer to complete the work, rather he attempts to offer continuous open-endedness in which the work is a backdrop to provoke the audiences. Relational arts often accompany installations at any level and engage people to walk into and play with them physically or mentally, and which is often described as ‘theatrical’ or ‘experiential’. However, can the words ‘theatrical’ and ‘experiential’ be distinguished or are they similar things and only different from different contexts? Since the 1990s when Relational Aesthetics emerged, the boundary between theatre, installation art and everyday experiment seems to have been blurred. However I am more concerned about how the art forms which we call theatre keep performative aspects.

I am currently looking at the possibility of being part of a performance by placing installations within everyday lives and which is more concerned with theatrical context. As I mentioned above, there are a lot of examples of relational arts including installation arts but in terms of the level of interaction or the performative level, I guess they have not reached the best yet. There was a luminous installation called ‘Volume’ over winter 2006 at the V&A Museum and it gave me an opportunity to experience high-level interaction between the installation and myself as an audience. It consisted of numerous columns of light and sounds in the dark and it was designed to respond dramatically to human movement. It was installed in a public place where people walk through or stay and as a host, it invited people successfully. I felt as if I was an actor or an audience. However if it was described as a stage, what was the difference between an audience, a participant and passer-by? Obviously, as soon as people start to respond to the installations, they are not passers-by anymore. In a public place, it is more difficult to classify people into those groups and those can possibly be divided by the level of participation.

Nowadays, artists, whose art pieces are often displayed in a space, consider more providing environments for their works rather than exhibiting complete art forms. This is sometimes meant that those works are hardly complete without direct participation. “For me it’s not about showing, but rather about generating something specific. I don’t want to present a position, a story or transmit something. Instead, I want to provoke a feeling or an impression in the audience.” 2 Hans Peter Kuhn, who is a sound artist based in Berlin, created an installation called ‘Middle Place’ which interacts with participants by generating the sounds coming from the installation. He invites everyone as producers or actors and to decide what the sounds are. This is really ambiguous, and gives them opportunities to travel through his work. For that reason, installations might be able to provoke a change of consciousness and give chances to doubt the stability of everyday perception. However, in what way? To encourage physical reactions or mental engagement? On one hand, there are many paintings, sculptures, monuments in public spaces such as in museums, company buildings and on streets. Those have visual impacts but do not influence people in performative ways. Conversely, installation arts could engage people in many ways. At this point I am questioning in which way installations can be performative. What kinds of forms installation arts could be and how the installations engage people as an audience, especially in walking through public places. Interaction between the installations and the audience is a kind of communication but not using languages. Installations can provoke people to do performative movement in some ways such as by making sounds, smells or even changing shapes.

In terms of giving opportunities to reinterpret the environment given, I am looking at company buildings, where everyday lives occur and social engagement is all around, whether the buildings can encourage the workers to see other worlds but not offering a completely unaccustomed surrounding. Can it be possible to apply art pieces without changing existing places into different places, which people might have strange feelings about an aversion or the new things? At this point I am looking at the continuity of spaces and how it can be expressed in three-dimensional forms which later should be a resemblance to the places. Actually, there can be another doubt raised about the way of engaging people in company buildings, which is a psychological matter. The perspective to the existing world in every place could be various, depending on the group of people. For instance, in a company building it could be very different depending on groups of people, like owners of companies and businessmen. In addition, architects and artists’ desire of building the environment might be different from them. If so, how can it be possible to find the one point?

Basically, situating myself in the place where a performative experiment can occur and seek what is the significance of installations being in the public is necessarily considered. As I am going to do a survey and examine those ideas, I am also going to keep pace with practical work related to the same issue to prove and analyse those ideas and questions so that it can be seen whether those ideas really work in reality.

1. Claire Bishop, Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics (The MIT Press, October 110, 2004, p.53,54)
2. Hans Peter Kuhn, Interview with Wolfgang Storch (Seoul: Rodin Gallery_ The Scenic Eye, 2004, p.43)