Art As Experience

Readings:
Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes
How to Provide an Artistic Service by Andrea Fraser
The Practice of Everyday Life by Michel de Certeau
The Future of the Image by Jacques Ranciere
Happenings by Alan Kaprow



























Since I had to present Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, I began to relate all the readings back to his. I saw each author, being the weaker to some other power, using tactics against that power. In Andrea Fraser's How to Provide an Artistic Service, she explains how and why she is attempting to formulate a set of self regulating rules and guidelines for the transaction of money regarding artistic services.
Her concern is that of the artists' autonomy and the integrity of each transaction.

The artist is the foreigner in the market, a place dominated by the presence of dealers and museums and their rules and regulations. The Market is their arena. The museums and dealers have knowledge and control of the terrain and may "prepare future expansions." On the other hand, the artist is the foreigner, taking opportunities when possible. The diagram is like an egg, where the sphere of the market is illustrated, and its cores or yolks and their appropriate sizes in relation to their influence and power is demonstrated. Andrea Fraser, by gathering the scattered artist-militia, conducting surveys and formulating her own guidelines and regulations, attempts
to increase the size of the artist's yolk, to make the artist less and less a foreigner and more a co-owner of the Market space.

























Alan Kaprow addresses the issue of the exhibition space. Here, the locale of power rests primarily in the galleries and museums, which Kaprow says is considered exclusive and "contain highly sophisticated habits."
Here, Kaprow tried to increase the use of the Art-dependent space. It is a space and time that is not predetermined by the museum, but one that is called for by the art itself. In the diagram, it is the museum again that holds power over the exhibition space. They maintain the advantage of a space that is their autonomous place, not that of the artist and art. Thus, the museum is able to maintain its "panoptic practices." Kaprow is using tactics with the persuasion of writing and the wit of art to decrease the dominance of the museum in the exhibition space.

























Lastly, the writing and verbalizing involved in theory itself is a tactic that refuses the tendency of the image or artwork to appear at first superficial and devoid of meaning. This diagram illustrates not the power of any one place or person, but perhaps the power of the image. Without theory and exegesis, almost all images begin as the "Naked Image." However, with the aid of theory and visual literacy provided by the likes of Barthes and Ranciere, we begin to develop the critical eye and mind to distinguish between the types of images and to fill or read meanings into images.

I also thought of this diagram in relation to Certeau's model of use/consumption. Like the television image that renders its viewers "pure receivers," the image, framed and hung, in its silence may also have the same effect on the museum visitor standing before it. He is unable to scribble his own thoughts on the margins of the museum wall or the little inscription beside the image. However, theory and discourse, represented by the smaller three circles, may be an indirect way of being involved in the production, readership, and maintenance of the meaning behind images. maybe.