Institutional Trust
Emily Zimmerman, Associate Curator of Programs, Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington
Experimentation demands risk. In the arts this is as true for audiences as it is for artists and the institutions that support them. I have been interested in the conditions that allow audiences to expand or move away from the boundaries of comfort, and very often my research into the relationship between experimentation and risk has brought a third term into the fold: trust.
For the past two years I have been conducting a series of interviews with artists, curators, choreographers, philosophers, theater directors, and others about the role of trust in participatory and performative pieces. At its core the interview project has been a distillation of the open-ended exchanges of power — what Jacques Derrida refers to as the “invisible theater of hospitality” — that take place in the production and reception of these works.[1] Frequently participatory and performative works take place outside the expected contexts for art viewing and challenge inherited modes of spectatorship from the visual and performing arts. They are underpinned by an invisible economy of trust between the individual viewers, the artist, and the institution.
My interest in this project was sparked by witnessing individuals’ behavior in relation to several pieces that mixed the codes for audience behavior of the performing arts and the visual arts. David Levine’s theatrical play Habit from 2011 was presented not in a theater but in a gallery space at MASS MoCA. Within the gallery was a house-like structure whose windows and doors framed the play unfolding within. The ninety-minute realist play was performed repeatedly over the course of five hours a day, and viewers were allowed to peripatetically engage with the piece for as long as they wished. The set’s windows and doors became the threshold of engagement for each individual to test what was acceptable within the situation. Most viewers remained outside the structure, but there were several instances of viewers walking into the house or reaching through a window to take a piece of candy from a bowl sitting on the dining room table. The social contract implicit within each of these pieces became quite interesting to me: How were the audience’s expectations set? And how were those expectations then negotiated within the affective fabric of the piece?
In her book Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, Claire Bishop calls for a new set of criteria by which to evaluate participatory pieces, as traditional visual analyses no longer serve as useful tools for understanding. She writes that images of such pieces “rarely provide more than fragmentary evidence, and convey nothing of the affective dynamic that propels artists to make these projects and people to participate in them.”[2] Examining the techniques employed to build or dismantle a set of expectations in participatory works can provide insight into these affective dynamics.
There is a long and intertwined history of participatory works that actively engage trust. The works that most clearly elucidate trust as a kind of affective medium are ones in which a physical threat is present, for example, Graciela Carnevale’s Acción del encierro (Confinement action, 1968) or Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0(1974). In Acción del encierro, Carnevale invited individuals to an opening and locked them in the gallery, where they remained trapped for just over an hour until a bystander broke the glass. In Rhythm 0, Abramović laid out a variety of instruments that viewers could use on her, including honey, scissors, and a loaded gun. In contrast to these cases, there are also extremely subtle modulations of trust, evident in pieces such as Caitlin Berrigan’s Spectrum of Inevitable Violence (2010), a food fight between participants grouped according to their socioeconomic status, cultural capital, and social mobility. This range certainly does not correlate to a spectrum of success or failure of a work but points toward a vocabulary for how works individually negotiate trust as an affective condition.
Notes
1. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 109.
2. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 5.
Emily Zimmerman is the associate curator of programs at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington. Previously she was the associate curator at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) , where she commissioned new work from artists such as Melvin Moti, Gordon Hall, and Marie Sester and curated the exhibitions Uncertain Spectator (2010) and Slow Wave: Seeing Sleep (2009). She received the 2011–12 Loris Ledis Curatorial Fellowship at BRIC Contemporary Art and and her writings have appeared in BOMB, Big, Red & Shiny, and Contemporary Performance. She has served on as a panelist for the New York State Council on the Arts and is a board member for the Wave Farm. She received her MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and her BA from New York University.
