Determinación de la resistencia a la tracción por

When I entered West to see Gary Hill´s exposition, I was welcomed by a young woman who gave me a map of the eight rooms of the museum and suggested the route most visitors took. I told her I was interested in these visitors, since I studied the interaction of the audience with new media art. She smiled and said it was a sunny day, so the number of visitors was scarce. “I believe there is one other person in now” she said. “But it is interesting that you want to know more about this topic. This year’s ‘art gift’ is called ‘Please Touch’ and is an essay on how art becomes more powerful when people interact with it”.55 She handed me a copy of the essay to read on my way home. Since I would probably not see too many visitors today, I asked her if the audience here interacted with Gary Hill’s works and if there was a trend in who this audience consisted of. She said most visitors were ‘involved in the arts’, especially media arts. They were art students, artists and people from the municipality that invested in the museum. I had noticed before that audiences of new media art forms are often people that are already involved in new media arts. Combining this with the ‘niche’ character of these art forms, as was often proclaimed to be the case by my informants, one could – in a way – speak of the existence of a media art ‘scene’.

The employee continued by telling me that there were rarely families with children that visited and this last group of people ‘does not really understand how to appreciate or

54_{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riohO4dcy08 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auzGQjApzYA} visited last on 14-06-2018

55_{During the annual ‘museum week’, museum visitors get an art gift, which is different each year. In 2018 it}

was called “Do not touch”. For more information see:

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understand these kind of art works. Children start playing with the installations or get scared’. Later, I read in the art gift she gave me:

“WORK OF ART – DO NOT TOUCH. I found this text last summer on a field of grass next to the entrance of a holiday resort in Drenthe. Behind it, I saw a creation of planks, beams and slats that indeed could easily be mistaken for a play set. The fact that they had to tell us it was

in fact art, finished it off for me.”

(Weijts, 2018:11) It was interesting to me how this idea of art as something detached from ‘the real world’, something that is not to be touched, seemed present in prevailing conceptions of art, as the museum employee actually demonstrated herself when she mentioned the playing children. As I proposed in the theoretical foundation of this thesis, new media art is an example of art forms that disrupt with this notion by means of an active audience who are essential to give meaning to the works of art. One of my informants felt the same way, and described how he breaks with what he calls ‘the romantic idea of the solitary artist’:

“There is a romantic idea about an artist as a solitary creature that creates just for himself. I do not agree with that. I really don’t like that. Art is a way for me to bridge my loneliness. […] For me art is a way to play with people. So basically, I propose a game, and people are

invited to play with that”.

Matteo, artist at iii Matteo Marangoni has thought about this connection between the artists, the art and his audience a lot. Coming to The Hague from Florence to study Art Science at KABK, he has always been interested in relationships between people and materiality. At the faculty of Art Science, this is a field of interest for many students. It was this shared interest, combined with the possibilities of the broedplaatsen in The Hague that led him and a few fellow graduates in 2013 to start the instrument investors: iii.56 This platform for research, production and presentation of art still operates in the Westerpark broedplaats, where I met Matteo for our interview. His Italian roots influenced his way of perceiving art a lot, as he states himself, in the way that he has had a ‘classical’ education in ‘classical forms of art’. Later, he started questioning all of these ‘ground rules for art’ which were proclaimed throughout his upbringing in Florence. In his search towards the meaning of arts, KABK offered a possibility to ‘create

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art trough the research of art’, a way of working iii still stands for.

His perception of art includes the audience as part of his ‘game’, his creation. For instance, he created a room, a scene, an experience, filled with sounds he manufactured as well. People were challenged to go through this room, that was located in a munition depot in Den Bosch, following sounds and lights – but there were objects on the floor, just like in an obstacle course.57 If the audience would just sit and stare, there would be no interaction and the room would lose its meaning, its cause:

“Without the audience it has no meaning. Of course it is my game, I make the rules. The idea is that I propose my game and we play together and afterwards you propose your game and

we play together”.

Matteo, artist at iii

Image 8 and 9: Part of Quiet before the Storm (2013-2015) by Matteo Marangoni. Pictures from https://www.haagsekunstenaars.nl/cv/76009/Matteo++Marangoni

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This idea of art as a game is also used by Sytze Schalk, a theatre maker from The Hague who created a long-term project named ‘De werelden van Schalk’. 58 This work is a so-called ‘trans medial arts project’ in which he experiments with different forms of (media) art in order to create his own universe. These art expression for instance include theatre, books, paintings and a video game that he (co-)created.Sytze Schalk and his works were brought to my attention by Stef Katwijk from the municipality as examples of new media art. Stef suggested I should talk to Sytze because of his ‘theatre games’. Sytze explained to me these ‘theatre games’ are offline games that take place in the theatre, during a play. Part of the performance is the possibility for the audience in the theatre to influence the outcome of the play they are seeing. They can do this for example by using technology (smartphones) to ‘vote’ between different outcomes of the scenes, during the performance. The actors are then influenced by these votes and play their parts depending on suggestions made by the audience.

The role of the audience in the works of Matteo and Sytze is apparent, but the settings they used for their installations are different from a museum. In West, I tried to experience for myself if interaction would also arise in the clean setting of a museum that was not initially designed for ‘interacting’.

The first room I entered was pitch-black. I carefully shambled forward until I busted into something I figured was intended to sit on. I sat down and tried to let my eyes get used to the darkness. Suddenly a fierce light flashed through the room, completely disorienting me, and a

voice started to speak. The words were of someone pondering life and existence, but the combination with the intense flashes that happened every few seconds confused my brain so

much I had to get out of the room.

This ‘experience’ was meant to last half an hour, but – according to the museum hostess – most people only lasted a few minutes in that room, and I was no exception.59 _{All the other} artworks were intense as well. Most of them used sound and images that were alienating, like one consisting of a projection of hands moving around colourful backgrounds which looked kind of soothing. However, once I put on the nearby headphones, I heard voices that made the experience uncomfortable. The noises and images simply did not fit together in my brain. I felt the audience in these works of art would not really influence the art directly, but their experience

58_{‘The worlds of Schalk’: http://dewereldenvanschalk.nl}

59 _{A picture with a Dutch explanation of this art piece – Gary Hills Slow Torque of Bonsai – and another example}

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by the use of multiple senses made one feel more ‘connected’ and ‘part of the art’ than a purely visual and non-moving art work would.