Cultural Production in the Pandemic Age
by Katja Fjeld
A snake experiencing Chloe Henson’s workshop, Happy Chances. By Jasmine Storey
It is 13:30 in Oslo. I am sitting by my kitchen table in my one-room apartment and from a tiny window on my computer screen. A woman is reading a poem from her house in the UK. Several people have tuned in through their webcams, listening to her while she reads. The experience feels intimate and personal because although the performer is far away from my physical location, her art is located in my home. My computer screen has become the stage, and my kitchen area is now the auditorium. Together, I and the other spectators are located in one shared cultural space that erases our geographical borders. These types of interactions are now the new reality. As the population is self-isolating from the coronavirus and cultural spaces transition from galleries and auditoriums to online platforms, cultural institutions and their roles are in a radical shift: Tiny flats are becoming gallery spaces, living rooms are turned into art studios and the interactive internet allows both the spectator and artist to become the curator, picking and choosing what shall be displayed on the computer screen.
Digital events are far from a new concept. To make their exhibitions more globally accessible museum institutions made virtual replicas of their existing physical exhibition, displaying them via CD-ROM.(1) Thus, the digital exhibition even pre-dates the internet. However, as the coronavirus is forcing institutions to temporarily close, digital events are one of the few ways we can access and consume culture. What has previously been regarded as the secondary experience is now the norm. This shift in art consumption also affects the established roles of the artist and viewer who enter the exhibition space. Given the interactive opportunities of the internet and digital devices, creatives are re-thinking what digital exhibitions can be outside of the white cube. Because the internet encourages direct engagement with the medium, contrary to formal museum institutions that reserve such interaction for those at the top of the ladder, digital art grants artists and viewers more agency in cultural production.
One amongst many events to have shifted from a physical to an online platform is the No Jobs in the Arts Fringe festival. Originally intended to be a part of the UK New Artists City Takeover in Leicester, the two-day festival moved its programme to zoom, offering bookable links for its attendees to enter free workshops, talks and creative events. Focusing on specific workshops, I intend to showcase how the Fringe Festival as a digital event succeeded in granting artists and audiences more agency in art production and distribution. The ultimate goal is to explore how digital cultural events such as the Fringe festival have the potential to reshape and democratise the art world beyond formal institutions’ structural and geographic gatekeeping.
Freed from the gallery spaces the viewer is invited to participate in a digital experience that exists outside of the white cube which traditionally favours a passive object/spectator format. In his paper Circumventing the White Cube: Digital Curatorial Practices in Contemporary Media Landscapes digital anthropologist and curator Wade Wallerstein explains how digital devices and platforms enable the spectator to engage with art on a more physical level: “The work embodies the device and therefore the device becomes a part of the work. This means that we can create a digital piece that can be handled and interacted with by the viewer.”(2) Participation and interaction are thus digital art’s most crucial media-traits as one has to physically interact with it for it to exist. For instance, to attend the Fringe festival’s workshops and talks the attendees had to click on the links, enter a zoom meeting room and adjust their computer settings. The spectators became embodied participants that interacted with the materiality of the media rather than just passive observers. Thus, digital art and distribution can create new ways of experiencing art which ultimately, as Wallerstein puts it “push against established art world hierarchies.”(2)
The ‘established hierarchies’ that Wallerstein refers to are museum institutions' structural roles of the curator, artist and viewer. In traditional arts, the word ‘curation’ signifies the museum curator. They are the ones in charge of creating the exhibition, therefore the curator has the power of deciding what is and is not worth looking at. Thus, when deciding the distribution, the institution is also performing a form of censorship by deciding what not to display. As a result, institutions not only control who gets canonised, but also the public’s art consumption. In contemporary digital culture, art is produced and shared much more freely and intuitively through websites, social media and digital collaboration. Wallerstein defines the word ‘curation’ as follows:
“Once an activity reserved for academics and art historians working at the highest levels of art and museum world hierarchies... In contemporary digital culture, the word ‘curation’ is used to describe almost all processes of selection or organisation online.”(2)
Georgina Watson - The Places We Miss. By Joe Westley
The hierarchical gatekeeping in institutions cannot control the art distribution online. Thus, artists are liberated to explore, develop and feature their own art. For instance, the Fringe festival offered several workshops where the attendees and artists collaborated freely to produce live art through zoom. In the workshop “Happy Chances” led by illustrator Chloe Henson, the audience was encouraged to participate in a series of drawing workshops. Although the audience was instructed to some degree by Henson, they still responded intuitively to each challenge and created individual artworks. The artworks produced did not rely on specific requirements of taste, fashion or economic value. The only thing required was digital access, a pen and paper. As a result, the audience who largely consisted of emerging artists were able to produce and share valuable work and creative expression outside of the institution’s control.
Furthermore, the workshop’s aim was not to produce one finalised, polished artwork for a gallery space. Rather, the artists were encouraged to explore different artistic approaches and techniques to fuel new creativity from their homes. The workshop then offered an art experience that focused purely on the participant’s own experience and participation, granting them greater agency in the art experience and production than a physical exhibition might offer. This interactive and participatory form of art experience feeds into what Serge Chaumier describes as “muséologie de l’acte”, the participatory museum.(3) In his influential text, Writing and the Exhibition : The Structures of Museum Revolutions, Chaumier describes the evolution of exhibitions from object based exhibitions to exhibitions that were more concerned with audience experience and participation in cultural production: “[The participatory museum] was the method adopted by ecomuseums at their inception: encouraging representatives of the local population to participate in exhibitions, including at the level of their conception.”(3) Initially intended to democratise the art world and art production, the participatory museum allows the audience to become agents of cultural production by directly interacting and shaping the exhibition. This process is evident in Henson’s workshop as well. Instead of creating art for any institutional exhibiting or marketing purposes, the workshop enabled the artists to create art purely for an artistic and creative purpose. Their personal response and interaction was the value rather than any specific object.
Participation and collaboration also enables the participants to become curators and distributors of creative work. For example, Georgina Watson’s workshop “The Places We Miss” that I referred to in the introduction offered a series of writing workshops where the participants were encouraged to write their own poems about a particular place they missed. At the end of the workshop, the participants chose one line each from their poem and put it together in the chat box. Here, the goal was not a finalised exhibition, but an intuitive matrix of each participant’s individual experience and self-realisation. By making the participants produce and share artwork live, the participants gained agency in shaping the exhibition, putting it together on the go. Thus, contrary to traditional exhibitions that are curated prior to the opening day, this exhibition was put together by the audience's creative experiences during the event.
In this way, the audience is the curator and their participation and experience is the exhibition. Without their creative input, there would be no exhibition. As Chaumier states: “[The exhibition’s materiality is] realised only to the extent that a visitor invested in it.” (4) The gap between art and spectator is closed, and the experience becomes fully personal and intimate.
Intimacy and collaboration are developed further and transitioned into inclusivity in the actual festival space: The internet. Traditionally, gallery spaces have clung on to a narrative as constructed ‘neutral’ spaces 5. However, as the decolonisation of cultural studies proves, gallery institutions inhabit and reinforce hegemonic state power as the default. Cultural historian David Fleming states that “museum neutrality is not merely the avoidance of a position, it is the covert adoption of a position, disguised as neutrality.” (6) As a result, the “eternal truth” that the gallery attempts to convey is only based on the perspectives of the dominant culture. Specifically people from the privileged, middle-class, western and predominantly male groups. Thus, the gallery space remains an alienating space for those who do not conform to these hegemonic groups: sexual and racial minorities, women and the working-class.
The participatory museum attempts to break away from this vertical hierarchy. By focusing on audience communities, the participatory museum is more invested in a gallery space that represents and accommodates for the particular communities’ interests rather than the other way around. (3) By breaking away from a specific geographic and institutional site and moving to the fluid internet, the Fringe festival faces the opportunity to expand its cultural audience, allowing a more diverse and inclusive art production that resists the museum’s hegemonic gatekeeping. By literally inhabiting the audience’s homes, they are freed from the formal and social behaviours of the gallery space which can be alienating and intimidating. The space is thus a representation of the community rather than a community trying to fit in with the values of the space. Ultimately then, the virtual festival offers a more personalised and democratic art experience than physical exhibitions allow. Whilst digital platforms require stable Wi-Fi and equipment and are thus not entirely democratic, one cannot argue against these geographic and social benefits of the internet. As Wallerstein states:
“Given the decentralised nature of the internet, networking occurs outside of institutional control. The logic of cultural production and organisation is affected by this context, rather than the institutional contexts that used to house most cultural outputs.” (2)
Rightly so, because the geographic distances are erased and replaced by a relatively accessible platform, the digital art world allows for a more inclusive and diverse demographic that does not depend on institutional values of taste. As a result, more artists and creatives are given the chance of artistic expression and distribution which ultimately causes a more democratic and diverse art consumption. Furthermore, because the participants of the festival were attending from home, what is considered a cultural space also changed. Rather than emulating a typical cultural site like the white cube, people’s living rooms became the gallery. This location change then subverts the typical image of cultural space as predominantly belonging to the wealthy hegemonic institutions, transforming it into a personalised space of multiple individuals from various backgrounds. Rather than asking the community to conform to a specific space, the cultural space was shaped within the community’s locations, creating a more intimate cultural experience.
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About the Author:
Katja Fjeld (She/her) - Art historian and arts writer
Katja recently finished her MA in Art History at Nottingham University. Her dissertation focused on queer performance art centralized in the US in the 1960s - 90s. She is currently based in Oslo and volunteers at Pride Art as an art writer.
You can follow Katja on Twitter (@FjeldKatja)
https://twitter.com/FjeldKatja
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Images:
Joe Westley and Jasmine Storey were commissioned to capture their experience of the No Jobs in the Arts Fringe Festival from their homes. Their images are used to illustrate this article.
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References:
1 Jonas Blume. “Exploring the Potentials and Challenges of Virtual Distribution of Contemporary Art” in Digital Environments: Ethnographic Perspectives Across Global Online and Offline Spaces. Ed by Urte Undine Frömming, Steffen Köhn, Samantha Fox and Mike Terry (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2017): Pg. 98.
2 Wade Wallerstein. “Circumventing the White Cube: Digital Curatorial Practices in Contemporary Media Landscapes''. Anti-Materia. 2018. Accessed 02 March. 2021. Available online at:
https://anti-materia.org/circumventing-the-white-cube
3 Serge Chaumier. “Writing and the Exhibition : The Structures of Museum Revolutions” RACAR: revue d'art canadienne / Canadian Art Review. Vol. 45, No. 1 (2020): Pg. 32. 4 Ibid, Pg. 31.
5 Brian O’Doherty. Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space. London: University of California Press. 1999
6 David Fleming. “A Sense of Justice: Museums as human rights actors”. ICOM News . Vol. 68, no.1 (2015): Pg. 9.