Conversations II with Ross Gibson
I arrive at the Art Gallery of NSW and announce to the information desk that I am here to have a conversation with Ross Gibson. I expect to be pointed to a man standing in the foyer. I would introduce myself, we would wander through the gallery talking a little and maybe settle in the cafe over a coffee. Instead I am pointed to a white box in the middle of the foyer. Inside are two chairs, a table with a bottle of water and two glasses, and a few paintings fixed to the walls. It looks like a stark television set for a chat show title “The White Cube”. Inside is Ross Gibson, he smiles, shakes my hand and the conversation begins.
Conversations II is a project that invites the public to book a 45 minute conversation with the artist Ross Gibson. He has five conversations a day, five days a week, for five weeks. He reflects on the conversations daily in a blog and according to the Biennale literature hopes to “grow a world of thinking and feeling and talking…that grows richer than the sum of its individual speakers.”
It is an interesting project that evolves from an earlier work Conversations that was exhibited at the Powerhouse Museum in 2004. Both works could be considered interactive art but the difference in form is extraordinary. In Conversations the viewer/user is wired into a machine with a head mounted display similar to those seen in The Lawnmower Man. The viewer/user is then immersed in a virtual environment where they can converse with virtual characters and other viewers/users who are wired into the machine in other parts of the gallery. The viewer/user is displaced from their immediate environment and projected into a cinematic space where they can engage with a scripted narrative. In Conversations II the viewer/user enters another constructed environment, in this case the three white walls and invisible fourth wall, and connects themselves to more technological tools, here a table and chair. However, the terms ‘viewer’ and ‘user’ in Conversations II now become defunct. Gibson references ‘Participant Art’ on his blog, but the activity taking place is so common day, that the term participant seems excessive. The constructs of ‘viewer’, ‘user’ and ‘participant’ have been made redundant in Conversations and the usual power relationships that occur when engaging in art have disintegrated. This is evident in Gibson’s blog where he refers to the participants of his project simply as people. The work is simply a dialogue between two people
The flurry of new media art in the last twenty years and the adaption of various tools and technologies to immerse audiences in artwork has caused the breakdown of audience experiences. Artists have begun to control the environments of the audience and hence control how the audience engages with the art. This immediately enforces the viewer to submit to the artists will. This is evident even in single-channel time based works where suddenly audiences are required to engage with a work for a certain period of time. Artists begin to have expectations of how the audience engages with their work. Art is no longer considered a dialogue. In effect this makes Conversations II probably the most revolutionary work of the 16th Sydney Biennale “Revolutions. Things that Turn’. Conversations II engages the participant of the artwork as an equal, as another person, not as a viewer who is submissive to the artist through the artwork.
This may seem contrary to John Berger’s idea of the gaze, where the artwork submits itself to the gaze of the viewer. But the evolution of conceptual art and the proliferation of art theory since the publication of Ways of Seeing has led to a situation where audiences feel required to dissect a fixed meaning from a work. Audiences begin to ask ‘What does it mean?’ as though the artist is hiding the meaning from them outside of the work. This ’secret meaning’ leads to the audience feeling ignorant, stripping them of power and causing them to submit themselves to the will of the artist.
Conversations II therefore is a very significant work as it revolts against the power structures that have developed in the institutionalized art world. Audiences that engage in the work do not leave gasping for meaning in the same way people do not question the meaning of a conversation with a friend. The work draws attention to the idea that art is dialogue and that meaning does not exist in a static state to be uncovered but instead emerges silently through shared experience.
It was also a very nice chat.
You can book a conversation at the Sydney Biennale website