This paper explores the contextual plurality that constitutes art history as a discipline by examining the dialogic and answerable relationship among the artist, artwork and spectator. Specifically, we examine the conceptions of the creative act by two 20th century thinkers: Mikhail Bakhtin and Marcel Duchamp

Haladyn, Julian Jason

Jordan, Miriam

OCAD University Open Research Repository

OCAD University Open Research RepositoryFaculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences2009 The art of answerability: Dialogue, spectatorship and the history of artHaladyn, Julian Jason and Jordan, Miriam Suggested citation: Haladyn, Julian Jason and Jordan, Miriam (2009) The art of answerability: Dialogue, spectatorship and the history of art. In: Writing Between the Lines: Art and its Historians [Symposium], 28 Mar 2009, Montreal, Canada. Available at http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/1338/Open Research is a publicly accessible, curated repository for the preservation and dissemination of scholarly and creative output of the OCAD University community. Material in Open Research is open access and made available via the consent of the author and/or rights holder on a non-exclusive basis. 1The Art of Answerability: Dialogue, Spectatorship, and the History of ArtMiriam Jordan and Julian Jason HaladynIn “Semiotics and Art History,” Mieke Bal and Norman Bryson argue for a constructionof art history that is grounded in the contextual presence of the viewer or spectator,noting that “the text or artwork cannot exist outside the circumstances in which the readerreads the text or the viewer views the image, and that the work of art cannot fix inadvance the outcome of any of its encounters with contextual plurality” (179). Our paperexplores the contextual plurality that constitute art history as a discipline by examiningthe dialogic relationship among the artist, artwork and spectator. Specifically, weexamine the conceptions of the creative act by two 20th century thinkers: Mikhail Bakhtinand Marcel Duchamp.Bakhtin’s AnswerabilityMikhail Bakhtin is Russian theorist and scholar whose major writings revolve around theconcept of dialogue as an active connection between art and life. Bakhtin’s concept of thedialogic nature of text (i.e., the unfixed quality of the text that is never closed-off inadvance but is always open to interpretation) is particularly apt for describing thestrategies of many contemporary visual artists who seek to destabilize the authority of thetext in cultural discourse. Except for Deborah Haynes’s 1995 study Bakhtin and theVisual Arts, Bakhtin’s ideas have not been discussed in relation to contemporary art in asignificant fashion.One of Bakhtin’s earliest texts is a short essay entitled “Art and Answerability.”In this text he posits the necessity for an active answerability on the part of the reader orspectator, which serves to animate and bring the work of art to life. In other words, artcomes to life when actively experienced by the spectator. Throughout his work, Bakhtinargues for an active engagement with works of art, in which readers and spectators “mustbecome answerable through and through.”1 As applied to the visual arts, it is not simplythat we are answerable for viewing, but more importantly we must be responsible in ourresponse to what we view. In this manner, Bakhtin not only posits the responsibility ofthe author/artist, but also requires a spectator who responds and is part of the dialogicexchange that is the artwork. For Bakhtin, there is not work of art without the activeengagement of spectators.In “Art and Answerability,” Bakhtin posits the necessity of an “inner connection”between a person and artwork that he terms the “unity of answerability.”2 It is through theanswerability of the spectator – the embodied response of individuals – that the artwork isgiven life and takes shape. However, answerability as Bakhtin conceived it is onlypossible through the embodied experience of the exterior world by the subject, a conceptthat Caroline A. Jones’ has termed the sensorium. In addition to visuality, she states,we should begin to reckon with the auditory, the olfactory, and the tactile assimilarly crucial sites of embodied knowledge. The resulting set of experiencescan be called a sensorium, the subject’s way of coordinating all of the body’sperceptual and proprioceptive signals as well as the changing sensory envelope ofthe self. The sensorium is at any historical moment, shifting, contingent, dynamic,and alive.32What is at stake in the concept of answerability, specifically in relation to the visual arts,is the potential of each individual to shape an embodied exterior world; for Bakhtin suchanswerability is not restricted to the one who creates, but is open to be created by theartist and the spectator in dialogue.In “Bakhtin and the Metaphorics of Perception,” Michael Gardiner argues thateach of us in response to the exterior world “is animated by a dynamic impulse to ‘sculpt’or transform the discrete elements of this object-world into coherent and meaningfulwholes.” 4 This dialogic response to the world that surrounds us exists in the potentialityof our response to it, not as a pre-existing state of affairs that is fixed and immobile.Instead, as Bakhtin states, the artwork is a world that is animated and “lives only bycoming into contact with another.”5 This concept of answerability is therefore key topositing an active and responsive spectator who activates the artwork through creativeunderstanding.Duchamp’s Creative ActBakhtin’s conception of answerability is surprisingly similar to Marcel Duchamp’sconception of “The Creative Act.” For Duchamp, the spectator literally brings the workinto contact with the external world; more importantly, he believed it was theresponsibility of the spectator to decide if the artwork would become part of art history.In other words, even the incorporation of works of art into posterity was dependent uponthis interrelationship of artist and spectator.Let us consider two important factors, the two poles Duchamp in his polemic text“The Creative Act” designates as responsible for and integral to the creation of art: theseare “the artist on the one hand, and on the other the spectator who later becomes theposterity.”6 Duchamp argues that each of these two poles or, as I discuss them, these twosubject positions in relation to the work of art function as dual parts of the same process,which he refers to as the creative act.Duchamp first presented “The Creative Act” in April 1957 at the meeting of theAmerican Federation of the Arts in Houston. Due to the fact that his argument directlychallenges the artist’s authority – specifically by undermining the privileged position thatthe artist occupies as singular author and creator of the art object, as well as artistic‘genius’ in the reception and historicization of that object – the text has consistently metwith resistance. This “little essay,” as Calvin Tomkins refers to it, “is wickedlysubversive” because of the fact that Duchamp positions the artist as a medium, with “thespectator a virtual co-partner in the creative process.”7 Duchamp clarifies this position inhis interview with Pierre Cabanne, where he states:I believe very strongly in the ‘medium’ aspect of the artist. The artist makessomething, then one day, he is recognized by the intervention of the public, of thespectator; so later he goes on to posterity. You can’t stop that, because, in brief,it’s a product of two poles – there’s the pole of the one who makes the work, andthe pole of the one who looks at it. I give the latter as much importance as the onewho makes it.8In other words, rather than creating an artwork that is experienced by a spectator after ithas been created, in Duchamp’s description the artist is positioned producing works of artin virtual partnership with the spectator. The work of art therefore cannot be created3without the participation or partnership of the spectator – or the posterity (multiplespectators in multiple contexts) that the singular spectator represents.This interrelationship that Duchamp delineates between the artist and thespectator can be seen reflected in a number of theoretical debates concerning the role ofthe author in written texts, most notably Roland Barthes’ “Death of the Author” andMichael Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” Similar to the manner in which Duchampdiscusses the role of the artist as a ‘medium’, Foucault examines “the author as a functionof discourse,” a process that he aptly terms the ‘author-function’ – a concept that locatesthe subject within the fluid function of the ‘author’.9 Foucault’s author, like Duchamp’sartist, is not a figure of singular unity or subjectivity from which the text is produced andtakes its authority, but instead the author/artist as a function is representative of the splitsubject whose actions are separated from the results of their efforts. And it is through thisprocess that Foucault makes clear the manner in which the text/artwork “apparentlypoints to this figure who is outside and precedes it,” because it is the reader/spectator whoenables the function of the author/artist to be defined.10 Stated simply, the author/artistfunctions to make something that is experienced by a reader/spectator – or, moregenerally, by the Other – that the text/artwork points to and in fact requires for thecompletion of the creative process.Like Bakhtin, Duchamp saw the role of the spectator as an active one within theformation of the work of art. Rather than an artist creating an artwork that is experiencedby a spectator after it has been created, in Duchamp’s description the artist is positionedproducing works of art in virtual partnership with the spectator. The work of art thereforecannot be created without the participation or partnership of the spectator – or theposterity (multiple spectators in multiple contexts) that the singular spectator represents.ConclusionBakhtin’s creative understanding or answerability can in this manner be seen asanalogous to what Marcel Duchamp argues in “The Creative Act,” specifically when hestates that the role of the spectator “is to determine the weight of the work on the estheticscale;” this necessarily means that the “creative act is not performed by the artist alone;the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering andinterpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.”11Both Bakhtin and Duchamp argue for an active form of spectatorship that posits anequally active and answerable history of art, a historical perspective that is not fixed inadvance but is responsive to the spectatorial encounters that it initiates. To return to Baland Bryson’s statement, “the text or artwork cannot exist outside the circumstances inwhich the reader reads the text or the viewer views the image, and that the work of artcannot fix in advance the outcome of any of its encounters with contextual plurality.”12                                                 1 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Art and Answerability,” Art and Answerability, eds. MichaelHolquist and Vadim Liapunov, trans. Vadim Liapunov (Austin: University of TexasPress, 1990), 2.2 Bakhtin, “Art and Answerability,” 1.3 Caroline A. Jones, “The Mediated Sensorium,” Sensorium: Embodied Experience,Technology and Contemporary Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 8.4                                                                                                                                                  4 Michael Gardiner, “Bakhtin and the Metaphorics of Perception,” Interpreting VisualCulture: Explorations in the Hermeneutics of the Visual, eds. Ian Heywood and BarrySandywell (London: Routledge, 1999), 50.5 Mikhail Bakhtin, “Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences,” Speech Genresand Other Late Essays, eds. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans. Vern W. McGee(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 163.6 Marcel Duchamp, “The Creative Act,” The Writings of Marcel Duchamp, eds. MichelSanouillet and Elmer Peterson (New York: Da Capo, 1973), 138.7 Calvin Tomkins, Duchamp: A Biography (New York: Owl Books, 1996), 397.8 Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (Cambridge: DaCapo Press, 1987), 70.9 Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” Language, Counter-memory, Practice, ed.Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1980), 124-125.10 Ibid., 115.11 Duchamp, 140.12 Bal and Bryson, 179.

The art of answerability: Dialogue, spectatorship and the history of art

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The art of answerability: Dialogue, spectatorship and the history of art

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