Irit Rogoff at Santiniketan. Parul Dave Mukherjee (left)

The Implicated- Reflections on Audience

Irit Rogoff, founder of the Visual Culture discipline at the Goldsmiths College, University of London, speaks about the collapse of art history and art criticism, and the birth of Visual Culture. She also brings the issue of audience participation under her purview and says that the audience form contingent communities and gets implicated in the act of participating in culture.

“I was arguing with art history for half of my life, or may be wasting my time in this argument.” Many eyebrows shot up when Goldsmiths College’s Visual Culture Department Head, Irit Rogoff gave a piece of her mind on art history. Rogoff was speaking on a subject titled ‘The Implicated- Reflections on Audience’ on the second day of the Ram Kinkar Baij Seminar at Santiniketan. Her dejection with art history does not come out of sheer arrogance. Almost a decade ago, when Rogoff in collaboration with the cultural theorist Sarat Maharaj initiated ‘Visual Culture’ as a discipline, then also several eyebrows had gone up. None believed that such a discipline was possible. Rogoff and Maharaj by establishing Visual Culture were looking for something that addressed the complexities and searching for the possibilities of theory and art history.

Before entering into the nuances of her pet theory on audience participation, Rogoff forwarded a preamble on art historical and theoretical practices. “We labour under a set of inherited questions. We need to open up that is the only way to deal with the subject of contemporaneity. Generally art historians work towards producing ‘subjects’. Any formulation in art history demands a ‘subject’. Hence, most of the art historians end up in doing ‘fabricating’ subjects,” opines Rogoff.

According to Rogoff, contemporaneity is not a historically designated period. Or in other terms, it is not a history designated by a particular period. Establishing the Visual Culture discipline was an urgency for her and Maharaj as they needed a flexible paradigm to open up art history. Roland Barthes’ essay on Inter-disciplinarity and the power of structuralist theories came handy for them as they could deconstruct the pre-designated art historical constituents. The new discipline could erode the boundaries of prescribed art historical canons.

In the field of visual art, practice and theory have been waging a war for pre-eminence since 1980s. During 1980s the art produced in the western hemisphere was the generic illustrations of theories prevalent at that time. Now, as per Rogoff, “we have a(n) (art) practice driven by theory but not illustrative as seen in the yester years. It slowly hit the academic circles and has made impact on universities.” Then Rogoff explained how she could expand the possibilities of visual culture and transcend the boundaries by curating a show in Germany. She invited a few collaborators/participants who were uninitiated in arts and asked them to generate questions (vis-a-vis the context of the project) and produce something that would have illustrated the question. This curatorial exercise proved that the production of a work of art was possible even after transcending the boundaries of history, theory and practice.

Rogoff finds that it is not only art history but art criticism also is at the verge of a collapse as the notions of criticism, critique and criticality have come under scrutiny and further debates. Criticism has become defunct as it carries the notion/burden of the Kantian truth value. Critique becomes a problematic as it works through the notion of epistemology as seen by Foucault and look for critically understanding what gives legitimacy to produce/operate. Critique turns out to be debilitating as it involves a huge amount of information and exempt the self from it.

Criticality is a workable notion still but it provides us with only a provisional world. “You are fully armed, you are fully taking part and experiencing in the condition that you are criticizing. You are not outside the problem. We continue analyzing while experiencing it. We become fellow sufferers,” says Rogoff. She renders art history and criticism at a limbo and claims that only Visual Culture can open up possibilities to redeem the both (if at all the redemption is needed).

Citing the example of the exhibition titled ‘Black Male’ that took place at the Whitney Museum a few years ago, Rogoff presented her observations on Audience participation as a political and interventionist act. The exhibition mounted around 600 art objects that ‘represented’ the Afro-American male. On a Sunday afternoon, Rogoff reached Whitney Museum to see the show. To her surprise she found innumerable number of Afro-American men wearing best of their suits and intently observing the exhibits. Besides, they were all reading the copious panel writings without leaving a word. The dress code of these men, their gathering in the museum and their ‘performative’ act of reading and seeing through the writings and artifacts, according to Rogoff, were ‘un-scriptic’. It just happened! None told them to come there in their Sunday bests. However, unintentionally, it was turning out to be a politico-cultural act.

‘What does it mean to take part in culture?’ Rogoff raises this pertinent question. She says that it is a complex and simple question at the same time. Culture invites people to participate in it in many ways. This notion of participation intersects with the notion of political. And any institution, whether it is cultural or political directs the modes of participation. Rogoff asserts that we have to reconfigure this direction and begin to produce our own modes of participation.

Rogoff theory, as she confesses, does not have any methodology. In the absence of a prescribed methodology, she makes use of ‘Ethnographic method’, that means simply watching people who watch the artifacts in an exhibition space. Rogoff connects with these people by asking questions. “These days nobody wants to go with me for an exhibition as they know by now that I make use of their comments in my papers,” Rogoff jokes.

Considering the Black Male Exhibition response, Rogoff says that, even the performative/interventionist participation of the Afro-American males within the space of display is surreptitiously directed by the ‘curators’. She goes on to say that there are two branches in the participatory act of viewing; one, the directed participation and the undirected participation. When the curator dictates the terms of viewing it becomes a directed participation. And when the curator(s)/institution(s) leave the ends open it becomes undirected participation. “How to access undirected participation?” is the question that Irit Rogoff raises.

When access is the watch word, then the whole exhibition takes a new shape, opines Rogoff. “The display spaces could be more than what they are. The display could be an actual simulation of the process of production (of an exhibition). In my notion, institutions have to check certain kind of notions of fulfilling other’s expectations and there is an urgent need to revive the relationship between culture and politics.”

When the notions of access and accessibility are collapsed into undistinguishable formations the disasters like Tate Modern happens, says Irit Rogoff. In her view, Tate Modern has perfected the notion of accessibility. Accessibility has become a form of entertainment in Tate Modern. Annually 1.7 million people visit Tate Modern. The number of visits has replaced the logic of representation and its politics. Rogoff says that none cares to ask the question like ‘why people go to Tate Modern?’ Accessibility is simple because it makes people to see themselves in reflected categories. It is a socially satisfying feeling. Access, on the other hand is ‘proximity with the question’. We suffer from a peculiar thing: we don’t have the access to formulation of questions. The most empowering thing is the freedom to formulate the question. But institutions like Tate Modern shift the debate by providing accessibility.

Is it possible for the institutions to produce access by thematic selections, asks Irit Rogoff. She says that it is possible only when politics (that eventually determines the institutional characteristics) and culture become complimentary to each other. “Now culture and politics are moving in different directions. Instead of we the people emulating the political why can’t the political emulate us the people? Politics can learn a lot from the gamut of art and culture,” says Rogoff.

The production of participation from the viewer, though a liberal notion, is determined by contingent communities. These contingent communities, without identities come in collision with the communities with multiple identities. The contemporary art production takes place within this sphere of collisions. The only way form a basic community, which is aware of its existence (an ontological community) is by producing attention towards it. “Attention is very compelling,” says Rogoff. “It is powerful and it is powerful tool at our disposal. Exhibitions produce attention. As communities we need to produce attention. Then we have the right to take the attention and use it for our ends.” She also asserts that when we visit an exhibition space we form communities.

Noted cultural theorist Hanna Ardnt calls these community forming spaces as ‘spaces of appearance.’ Rogoff says that in these spaces of appearance, the audience is implicated as they participate in the production of attention and communities. A space of exhibition metaphorically becomes a scene of crime. Then the question is how implicated are we in each other’s culture/crime. Rogoff leaves it there for further deliberations.

Report by JohnyML