Defining the public three moments of audience address in 20th century artistic production

Abstract

This paper examines strategies of audience address as manifest in the work of the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s, the sculptural practices of the American Minimalists and the critics who served to define their endeavors, as well as the more recent projects of institutional critique that have characterized one trajectory of post-minimalist artistic production. Vladimir Tatlin and EI Lissitzky attempted to meet the demands of a newly-forming proletariat class by siting their work in the space of political and public activity. This effort to engender a simultaneous collective response, a notion theorized by Walter Benjamin, was unsuccessful: Lissitzky returned, instead, to the space of exhibition, the conventional arena of artistic discourse, where he designed a series of exhibition rooms that created an active spectator and made visible the ordering systems of the institution. Seen in light of these radical precedents, Minimalism and its critics appear to have been caught in an approach whose departure point was the physical and phenomenological nature of the object and its context-a retreat from the path initiated by Lissitzky. With the arrival of conceptual art some fifty years later, the late Constructivist explorations would re-emerge as the practice of institutional critique. These latter modes of artistic production have examined the socio-political and economic underpinnings of the institution, the composition of its audiences, and the modes of art viewing that it has promoted.