An argument for integrating aspects of art’s reception into art school curricula was presented by the dean of Columbia University’s School of the Arts, Carol Becker, who argued that art students ...
… need to be helped to understand not only the subject of their work but its objective, they must learn to ask themselves who would be their ideal viewer and who, most likely, will be their actual viewer. What might the audience need to know to understand the work? How much information should they offer? (C. Becker 1993, p.110)
Like Howard Becker’s statement regarding artists catering to professional art audiences (see 1.2.1), this is a similarly delicate question as it challenges students to consider how much they are willing to adjust their work to suit a potential audience. C. Becker emphasised, however, that this is inevitable, for instance, if artists seek to reach audiences who have little or no previous knowledge of art. The growing recognition of this objective by many art schools is evidenced in current programmes that have compulsory elements of ‘socially engaged practice’ and in the existence of specialised branches of study dedicated to this field.9 Within such a framework it is pertinent to consider how
people are likely to respond and many higher education programmes do pose
9 Examples are the MA programmes in ‘Participatory & Community Arts’ at Goldsmiths College
and Staffordshire University, ‘Social Sculpture’ at Oxford Brookes University, and ‘Socially
Engaged Practice’ at Ireland’s National College of Art and Design, and the Art. Similar
such questions.10 However, the focus of this thesis has not been on practices
seeking to reach ‘new audiences’ in particular. To avoid misunderstandings regarding the assumed responsibilities of the artist, it was noted that this thesis’ advocacy of heeding the viewer’s meaning-making must not be confused with the aims and debates surrounding social inclusion. Thus the question of what role knowledge about viewers’ meaning-making plays in the context of art education must be posed more broadly.
A pragmatic answer lies with Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Michael Shanks who argued in their contribution to the edited volume Art school: Propositions for the 21st Century, that the sheer amount of different media in contemporary art asks for multiple modes of audience engagement:
As we envision a program that meets the requirements of twenty-first-century arts practice education, an understanding of engagement is essential. The immense flow of data needs to be controlled by the artist and directed toward the viewer in such a way that the viewer enters the rich strata that joined in the work and are completed by the viewer. (Schnapp & Shanks 2009, p.149)
Art students should therefore be encouraged to consider how specific media are likely to affect the viewer. The discussions of working with video and life performers (see 5.2 and 5.3) resonate with and exemplify this point.
Some might object that art belongs to the few, ‘free’, spheres of human existence where no definable purpose or utility determines means and actions. In this vein, the function of the art school is to promote art as a field of possibilities, free exploration, and experiment unconstrained by established methodology. Gary Peters, professor of critical and cultural theory at York St. John University took this view to its extreme by advocating an “(aesthetic) educational approach that is intent on developing the will and the wherewithal to operate effectively within the arbitrary and contingent circles of incomprehensibility” (Peters 2010, p.111).11 To anticipate or facilitate the
viewer’s response would be diametrically opposed to the primacy of freedom,
10 The ‘Contextual Practice’ MFA at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art, for example,
encourages students to consider: “Who is your audience, and how does that audience shape
the meaning of your work? What impact does the work have on the life of the audience? Where do you site your work, and how does that site change how the work is perceived?” (Carnegie
Mellon University 2013, para.5)
autonomy, and intuitive experimentation. This view has been disputed throughout this thesis.
Cross-disciplinary knowledge, including theories of reception, does not substitute lived experience, artistic intuition, and free experimentation, but adds to them. First, it was pointed out that artists are permeated with learned norms of what constitutes a ‘good’ work and thus they necessarily, though not always deliberately, anticipate viewer responses. Second, reservations about students being led to ‘engineer’ audience insights are countered by the fact that it is not the viewers’ understanding of a message that is advocated here, but a mode of responding. It has been proposed that art students should be motivated to study conditions under which viewers will be more likely to adopt an attitude of separative meaning-making. This is expedient precisely because the viewer is so often envisaged as a proactive maker (as opposed to a decoder) of meaning, and the artist as not being the warrantor of signification.
Another way to dispute that attending to the viewer’s response opposes art’s autonomous spirit is to hint at the potentially tacit effect of related knowledge. Few people would argue that an artist who has first learned and then applies the effect of complementary colours unduly ‘engineers’ a response. The same applies to photographic and cinematic recording, editing, and dramatic techniques. They are methods to appeal to and resonate with viewers’ perceptual systems and common response behaviour. Arguably, the use of knowledge in art creation is more acceptable when it remains intuitive. Propaganda artists, advertising professionals, and illustrators calculate and test the effect of their methods and this is a crucial reason to distinguish this type of work from ‘fine’ arts. The former promote meaning-retrieval, the latter speculative and separative meaning-making. Once the mutual amplification of red and green or the effect of the establishing shot is learned, it is internalised and often applied intuitively. By extension, knowledge about biologically, psychologically or socially determined ways of responding to certain stimuli will operate similarly.
The above can only be a secondary or corollary argument however. In many situations, video artists consider carefully how to use an establishing shot and painters will also think about adding a red to amplify a green. Furthermore, the finished work, as a product of the artist’s tacit and/or deliberately applied knowledge, is usually evaluated by her/him before it is presented to the public.
A vast amount of works never leave the studio because they do not pass the artist’s own assessment, and it is questionable whether the decisions involved are always purely intuitive.
In an environment where art schools promote an understanding of art as ‘research’, theoretical frameworks are increasingly important. Philosopher Donald Schön described the “reflective practitioner” as involved in “reflection-in- action” and “reflection-on-action’ (Schön 1983). This notion can be applied to the artist-researcher who tries to make sense of her/his own decisions, as s/he “reflects on the understandings which have been implicit in his action, understanding which he surfaces, criticises, restructures, and embodies in further action” (Scrivener 2000, para.19). Any change made ‘in further action’ will change the defaults of the work’s reception.
There is no qualitative difference between knowledge related to the viewer’s meaning-making and many established standards of art school curricula. Students would need neither their tutors’ nor fellow students’ feedback if audience response was immaterial. Goldsmiths College defines the BA (Honours) Fine Art programme as equipping students “with creative, interpretive, critical and analytical skills” to enable them to “participate in and contribute to the expanding field of contemporary art” (Goldsmiths College, University of London 2013, para.1). The prospectus of the same course at London’s Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design agrees that “critical and reflexive ‘moments’” are “at the centre of teaching and learning” and this includes discussions about “systems for the production of meaning” and the development of “a theoretical language for practice that brings it into association with different forms of literature and criticism” (Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design 2013, p.3). Imputing that such discussions are rather typical than limited to these specific colleges and that they are intended to have a bearing not only on students’ general knowledge, their merit is to introduce learners to views and contexts that they may bring to their work. A key objective of both studio practice (including tutorials) and contextual studies thus already is to afford students perspectives on how their work will be received. Berkeley University states explicitly that its Art Practice graduate programme “seeks to help students develop a keen sense of their audience, and to consider how they will reach, or even create, that audience for their work” (The University of California, Berkeley 2013, para.10).
Tutors’ and fellow students’ feedback indicates how other people make meaning. Art history and philosophy seminars challenge students to situate their work within ‘an atmosphere of theory’ and draw conclusions regarding how their work is likely to be contextualised. Both aspects of art school education disclose how meaning will potentially be made. Seminars and/or workshops exploring biologically, psychologically and socially determined responses and common art apprehension schemata would complement existing art school curricula and further our understanding of audience behaviour. This thesis offers several examples that demonstrate the relation between artists’ strategies and the human response system that might serve as examples in related future debates, and the concepts of retrieving, speculative and separative meaning- making provide a structure for discussing and further exploring different modes of viewer response.