“Who” Are You Looking At?

What does a viewer do in front of a work of art? Is he a passive receiver or an interceptor of a smooth given narrative? Samudra Kajal Saikia, drawing examples from the discourse of spectatorship, attempts to qualify the viewer as an ‘issue’ rather than receiver of the given. The spectator is a troublesome agent, says the author

“The art historian requires a conception of the spatial position of the spectator, and her conception of the spectator’s position influences her strategies of emplotment.”
--David Carrier 1
Spectator is the troublesome agent everywhere.
More than the issues and discourses around the word “spectatorship” my attempt bends towards the word “spectator2". Spectator’s physical presence and location were my first hand objects of curiosity, but, it is different from that kind of “physical location” David Carrier analyses in his “Principals of Art History Writing”. If we search for the spectator against the performer then the whole thing shifts from a perceptual or philosophical or spectatorial field to a sociological one, because, the spectator is not a mere individual but a group of people, a society, and beholder of some similar kind of acceptance or taste. At the same time one cannot avoid the need of a conceptual speculation since the act of perceiving is an individual act and the dilemma of the performer-spectator relationship contains some psychological dimensions as well. The power-relation between the performer and the spectator is also to be raised. Notably, in all the cases the presence of the spectator destabilizes or dismantles the existing notions, beliefs and comforts. So we shall see, a shift of objective choice also insists some methodological shift.
Bringing elements from theatre into visual studies I am in front some questions. My theoretical attempts are recognized as “offbeat” in art historical practice, and the same happens in theatrical discourses. So I prefer to say it a study of the interfaces. Notably, drama as a part of the literature studies is never questioned, whereas, privileging the literary text (the script) over the spatial discourse the departments of literature mostly do injustice to the art of performance. Again theatre is largely can be a part of Anthropology. (Victor Turner, the writer of Acting in Everyday Life, Everyday Life in Acting is an anthropologist. Egenio Barba, follower of Jerzy Grotowski and the writer of Four Spectators is the founder director of ISTA: International School for Theatre Anthropology). In similar ways is not the visual art or fine art a part of Anthropology? (Is there any existing methodology within the so called fine-art-history domain to analyze or articulate North-Eastern Indian tribal or non-tribal textile art without applying anthropological studies?) Simultaneously we keep in mind how after Foucauldian intervention the definition of Archeology shifted or broadened. Under such circumstances can we believe any orthodox disciplinary boundaries? In Preziosi’s words: “Art history…has never been the name of a science. It is a form of cultural practice necessarily interwoven with other forms of social and cultural practices….”3
The second cause why I have been often put into questions lies here; I frequently drag objects from performing art forms not from the performance arts. The ideological clash, formal tension and the phenomenal encounter between the performing forms of the larger public domain and the performance art inside the “high” art would insist me for another discussion.
My recent works are grounded upon some impossibility of enquiring the spectator’s subjectivity. The presence of a spectator problematizes a performer’s self-consciousness and his/her narcissism. It dismantles the whole notion of the self since the spectator is always the other. It leads us to the matter of an actor’s conscience to the presence of somebody else (be it inside him or outside). Remembering philosopher Gadamer’s observation: “Artistic presentation by its nature exists for someone, even if there is no one there who merely listens or watches”4. Spectator is the third person. The only thing a spectator can do is intervention. The constantly varied position of the spectator multiplies the actors’ self and hence, dismantles the monolith.
Other than David Carrier, the other most important art historian to draw our attention to spectator is Donald Preziosi. Preziosi comments: "…if we look at the paradigm more closely in the history of the discipline, we can identify five constituent elements that play a role: 

A. maker/artist

B. process of production

C. object

D. process of reception

E. User/viewer………..
(Associations with the "E": reader; consumer; receiver of a transmission that may or may not have been aimed at her; critic; connoisseur; worshiper)
Then Preziosi points out: "Close attention to art historical writing reveals fewer metaphorical variants for "E" than for any of other component terms in the paradigm, for by and large the viewer has been seen largely as a passive reader or consumer of images: the end of the line, so to speak, the targeted audience or inadvertent interceptor of a transmission…"
Preziosi continues: “this logo centric paradigm is given a characteristic slant or trajectory so as to privilege the maker or artist as an essentially active, originary force, in complementary contrast to the essentially passive consumer or reader of works. It involves no great leap of the imagination to see that the paradigm simultaneously serve as a validating apparatus to privilege the role or function of the historian or critic as a legitimate and unvested diviner of intentionality on behalf of lay beholders”. 5.
The subject position of the creator is well discussed through so many existing methodological practices, whereas, the spectator is remained untraceable and untouchable. We even do not know whether it makes any sense if we try to say about a spectator’s subject position. In fact, the search for an actor’s subjectivity is crucial also. It happens because the actor is always directly confronting the spectator physically, containing a spectator within him. Again an actor does not produce any object but turns his own body to an object within which the subject dissolves. However in the art-studies the creator not as a mere conceptual entity but also as a human being is specifically located through biographies, skill-oriented-appreciations, personal-attributes and historical accounts. The spectator is always a conceptualized unite, beyond time and space, without having any subject position. While thinking of some space-specified spectator (as audience) we cannot keep ourselves away from reminding Pierre Bourdeu’s emphasize on distinction, classification and interest in taste production6. I assume there might be some melting point where the conceptual speculation, perceptual study and the sociological frameworks merge.
Jan Mukarovsky, in the similar tone of Preziosi drew our attention to the creator-centered method of criticism, saying: “it is becoming increasingly clear that the framework of the individual consciousness is determined, even in its most intimate levels, by contents that belong to the collective consciousness.”7 And then, “The work of art,” Mukarovsky states, “can neither be identified (as psychological aesthetics claimed) with the creator’s state of mind, nor with any of the states of mind that it provokes in the subjects who perceive it: it is clear that every state of subjective consciousness has something individual and momentary about it that makes it ineffable and incommunicable in its totality, whereas the work of art is intended to mediate between the author and the collectivity.”8 So the semiotic model offered by Mukarovsky denies the individual from both sides: the creator’s and the receiver’s.
Reading the work of art as a sign Mukarovsky also denies to reduce the work of art to its simple status as a “thing-work”, for it may happen that a “thing –work” completely changes its aspect and its inner structure when it moves in time and space. Refusing to identify the work of art with the subjective state of mind, Mukarovsky says that we are also rejecting at the same time any hedonistic theory9. Confronting Mukarovsky’s opposition to the “thing-work” I remember Grant H Kester’s positive insight towards some late modernist artistic projects. He mentions, “There are, however, a number of contemporary artists and art collectives that have defined their practice around the facilitation of dialogue among diverse communities. Parting from the traditions of object making, these artists have adopted a performative, process based approach. They are “context providers” rather than “content providers”, in the words of British artist Peter Dunn.”10
However, in the semiological proposal of Mukarovsky he refuses the subjective recognition of both the sides, the emergence of the spectator is there behind the sign-theory, who deciphers.
Earlier I mentioned, David Carrier’s account of the spectator’s spatial location within art-history writing is little different from my enquiry. Carrier makes an account of the methods of Gombrich, Steinberg, Fried and Foucault, and while doing so these most powerful thinkers of our times are the spectators in front of their objects. When Steinberg writes on Caravaggio or Foucault writes on Velazquez, Steinberg and Foucault are the spectators for those two painters. Each of those four writer’s methodological frameworks are different, as different as their physical positioning as spectators. But when we are reading those spectators’ writings, we are the spectator of those “spectators”, and those are the performers in front of us. So, somehow we have to be aware of who is writing it – Steinberg, Gombrich, Fried or Foucault (“Steinberg, Fried and Foucault analyze the spectator’s role differently. They are systematic thinkers. Once we know how they deal with this issue in one text, we can predict what they will say elsewhere.”)11.
All the discussion by Carrier around the four art writers roams around some point upon the canvas surface. Along with the horizontal and vertical axis of the canvas, the discourse deals intensely with the third axis, with which the inside the canvas-narrative and the outside space interwoven. Precisely, it is all about where (and when) the spectator’s position is. Till now everything is dealt regarding some figurative representations upon a canvas surface, be it Caravaggio, Courbet or Velazquez. We do not know even the similar methods are in any ways applicable to a non representational (or non-figurative) art work or not. Severe discomfort arises if we ask, not ‘where the spectator is’, but ‘who the spectator is’.
In terms of dealing with some performative circumstances inside an art-institution (bringing examples from Santiniketan and Baroda) we got to do with the process of contextualizing the “spectator”. The geographic and linguistic diversity that the state exhibits, lack of linear historiography, and the non-even education system of our continent never allows us to think of an absolute or standardized spectator anyhow. Next, the tailored sense of modern art in India is so complicated (and in many region-wise accounts seems to be imposed) that one cannot adopt any single art historical methodology unquestionably if s/he once becomes conscious about the presence of the spectator. Thirdly, the contemporary art practice precisely grounds in some multicultural, nontraditional sphere, where the issues like regional identity, nation-state discourse are inevitably surrounded. In fact the case of “public art” defines its “public” in its own terms. It is understood that, under such circumstances “who is the spectator” is an obvious question.



1David Carrier, “Where is the Painting? The place of the Spectator in Art History Writing”, (Principals of Art History Writing), p.159
2Spectator: viewer, watcher, witness, eyewitness, bystander, observer, onlooker, receiver, consumer, outsider, the other.
3Preziosi continues” “...Inexorably linked to social and ideological needs and desires. Its future survival s a discipline will be read in its ability to understand its own complex and contradictory history.” P. 52, Rethinking Art History, Meditations on a Coy Science.
4Hans George Gadamer, Truth and Method, Continuum Impacts, p.110
5Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History, p. 46
6Referring Pierre Bourdeu, Distinctions, A social Critique of the Judgment of Taste ( La Distinction, Critique Sociale du Judgement, translated by Richard Nice, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, Melbourne and Henley, 1979)
7Jan Mukarovsky, Art as Semiological Fact, P.1
8Ibid
9Ibid, p. 2
10See introduction of Grant H Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community + Communication in Modern Art.
11Carrier, p.163