An Enquiry Concerning a Faint Image of the Public

Hermetic art works and non-specialist audiences.

Audience members sport 3-D glasses during the first screening of “Bwana Devil,” the first full-length, color 3-D movie, November 26, 1952, at the Paramount Theater in Hollywood. J.R. Eyerman/Life Pictures/Shutterstock

Mexico City, June 30, 2022

This week I just want to formulate one simple question, but  it will be preceded by a very long preamble.

In the early to mid 2000s there was a small trend involving organizing  independent, grassroots exhibitions in unexpected locations— small cities and towns and remote communities that were peripheral to the art world capitals. The curatorial impulse of these initiatives was inspired and very hopeful, and I was lucky to be invited to be part of a few of these experiments.  What we learned from those was never fully articulated, but I never forgot those experiments and those learnings feel particularly relevant today.

One of those experiments took place in a small beach town in Latin America. The plan was for a group of artists would be invited to stay in a house that was lent for the project and do collaborative and experimental projects on the beach and in the surrounding areas. I participated organizing an experimental symposium in the form of Plato’s Symposium-an event that was only open to the participating artists.  In many ways, the entire curatorial project was closer to an artist residency than a biennial: the space was open to the public— including the town’s residents— on a given day, but as I recall the visitors were mostly perplexed by all the activities and were missing the larger context which was so meaningful to all of us.

A couple years later, in 2006, a collective named Laboratorio 060 organized a project in the small town of Frontera Corozal, Chiapas, a community in the border of Mexico and Guatemala on the edge of the Usumacinta river in the Lacandon jungle. Many artists were invited to do projects in that community—some of us spent a few days (I offered to teach a short story writing workshop for the local school children, all of which were Chol speakers). Being in that town was magical in many ways, and many of the participating artists were remarkable, but the cultural gap between us and the community could hardly be greater.  At times it felt that we were separated by a century of history.

One of the participating artists was Aníbal López- the late Guatemalan radical conceptualist who is today considered one of the most influential artists of his generation. He was working on a video and photography project that included placing a local indigenous man named Don Carmelo inside the local archaeology museum of the town and interview him about the relationships between different local indigenous groups (Chol and Lacandon people).  As he was working on the project I had a brief conversation with him about it.  I asked him about his process of engaging these participants, wanting to know about the degree to which they were aware that they were engaging in a  conceptual art project. Aníbal then said to me, “my work is not for them— it’s for the art world.”

Another artist participating in the Frontera project was artist Miguel Ventura, who created a performance work titled “Indian House” where he dipped a chair in a barrel full of chocolate syrup — a surreal action that evoked some pieces by Paul McCarthy and meant to generate shock and revulsion.  As one of the organizers, artist Javier Toscano, describes it,  “it was a grotesque, voluntary project. Miguel wanted to criticize everything”, such as the artistic discourse wielded by those with white savior syndrome and paternalistic identity politics, “but he also was not looking to ingratiate himself with the locals.” He added: “at first people saw it as kind of a circus act, but later they did not really get it. Neither the idea of popular culture nor museum culture was for them. There was a short circuit between the expectations and the reality of a guy who would never break character, ever. It was crazy. In the end he did not bother anyone, but it also was not inspiring for anyone in the town. I think it was more of an eccentric gesture that could be read as a critique of contemporary art for whoever would know something about it.”

 As I recall from that day, when the artist smeared himself in chocolate the action definitely shocked the townspeople, who were holding their heads in their hands in disbelief, asking: “why did he do that?” A question that even for a seasoned educator would have been extremely difficult to engage with.  All in all, considering the extreme performances and odd experiences we put the town through, it was understandable that they would see us as just a bunch of crazy tourists.

Toscano adds, regarding the entire Frontera experience: “in general, speaking about the “townspeople” was an abstraction. We understood it as things were already happening.”

This last comment by Toscano, of the idea of the townspeople being an abstraction, is what interests me the most here.  Of course, experiences like these were unmediated by any local arts (or non-arts) organization, which is partially why their sudden appearance in local contexts caused the kind of befuddlement that it did. But I posit that we can learn a lot from these curatorial and artistic experiments particularly as we constantly misuse  the term “public” in much more institutional settings that purport to serve a wide audience.

One of the contributions of the 18th century empiricist philosophers like Hume and Berkeley was to make us skeptical of the use of broad categories to understand things. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) Hume made a distinction between “impressions” and “ideas”, the former being those things that are experienced by the mind and  that what we describe as “ideas” are nothing but “faint images” of impressions. Hume also argued that every idea we think about actually references a particular object (in other words, when we think of the idea of a tree, we mentally resort to visualize a specific example of a trees that comes to take place in that supposedly universal representation of a tree that we are forming in our mind). It is not hard to see how the insistence of empiricism to focus on the direct experience of concrete things as the basis of construction of knowledge would be a direct source for one of the most important philosophies that focus on action as a key epistemological engine and that has deeply influenced contemporary museum education: Pragmatism.

There is a reason why this nearly three-century old philosophical argument against universal categories of ideas is useful to remember. While curating and art making are in essence  forms of public practice,  there is evidence that the way we often think about publics as curators and artists is very much in the abstract — and this is a problem.

Artists often argue that it is not their job to determine, or engage, a given public for their practice- rather, it is the public’s obligation to become educated to understand their work, and to an extent this is precisely the job of the curator and the educator— adequately contextualize artistic practice so that it makes sense to a broader public.  I, in fact, fully endorse the idea that artistic practice should not (and in fact, it can’t ever) be subjected to any kind of criteria that would make it intelligible to any given public, but this is doesn’t mean that we should not be clear, as curators or artists, about who is our intended (implicit or explicit) interlocutor.

I remember once we hired an education consultant to evaluate the kind of exhibition tours we offered at the museum I worked at. The consultant suggested that given the wide degrees of familiarity with art that our audiences had we needed to consider tailoring our tours to fit a range of levels, such as “beginner”, “middle” and “advanced”,  just as the way languages are taught. I remember we briefly entertained the idea and were somewhat intrigued by it, but ultimately discarded it as no one was too enthusiastic about explicitly demarcating levels of knowledge in art outright: somehow it felt elitist.  Furthermore I, for one, also felt at the time that audiences would not be able to self-assess their knowledge level.

Yet,  I now feel that this educator was right. This omission of explicit address is particularly problematic when we make or present art that clearly may only be readable only for a very small elite group of people, but it is presented with the implication that it is “for everyone”.  In fairness to Ventura and Aníbal López, both artists were clearly not making —nor intending to make— work that was actively intending to engage the people of Frontera, but rather were using the local context as a stage onto which make their commentary about ethnography and colonialism. In fact, these artists —as López explained to me— were very clear that their work was coded specifically for that insider art audience (which only included a handful of us, and ostensibly would also eventually include a larger audience who would  experience  the piece in the form of documentation).

While from the standpoint of the individual artist we can’t and should not demand that anyone keeps in mind any public, the equation changes when we are speaking of museums, kunsthalles and similar institutions that have a public mission.  For the longest time, museums that present experimental art have struggled to make it palatable for all audiences —mostly placing the burden on their education departments to make it accessible. In general, the approach is that experimental art must be shown publicly, and that the learning of art (even difficult and abstruse forms of it) should be available to everyone. The very idea that only some kind of art should be made available to the public is truly anathema to the very essence of the public nature of a museum.

But there needs to be better debate and discussion and thoughtful analysis and study of best practices for art that is not for novice viewers.  Something like this is already done for art that contains material that is not appropriate for younger audiences ( particularly when there is violence or “mature content”).  

So, the question is: how do we negotiate the need to promote and gain public support of highly specialized art that was not meant for consumption by a general audience?   Art that, even when explained by the most skilled educator still arises skepticism and derision from a non-insider?

The answer might require deeper thinking about the way we think about publics in art museums. Mainly, it requires the need to better define the role that an institution plays in speaking to both those who are professionals and specialists in the art field and those who see art as a source of entertainment or pleasure in a more conventional sense.

And for that to take place we need to dispose of that abstract image of the public that exists in the mind of the specialist— a generic, hopeful, but ultimately misguided impression of an imaginary, receptive, friendly interlocutor whose passive spectatorship helps validate the relevance of the art we make and present.