Groupe F’s show in the domain last night got me thinking about Peter Shand’s lecture in first year critical studies about ‘spectacle’ in art. Spectacular as a quality, referring to massive installations like Ai Weiwei’s sunflower seeds, Cai Guo-Qiang’s cascading wolves and neon-exploding cars; the sort of works that are exhibited in the Turbine Room at Tate Modern, which are massive, impressive, and have immediate impact. Things that make the public exclaim 'whoa!’ when they walk past.
This is not to suggest that their conceptual value is compromised by their appeal. In that sense I’m not sure what to think, and I'm currently listening to this video series: The Tate Modern conference, 'Rethinking Spectacle’ & trying to get my head around both sides of that debate.
Performance, video projection, lights and pyrotechnics: there’s no doubt that Groupe F’s performance is 'spectacular’ art. Inherently, no single person can create something on that scale. Like other spectacular artworks there is an army of workers and an enormous budget required to create a piece (could it be called a performance piece when there’s so much more to it?) like 'Skin of Fire.’ Just like how there’s an army and an enormous budget to create a theatre production, or a feature length film.
And yet, a single person can write a book, which occupies & entertains its audience for just as much time if not far longer. And a single person can make an artwork, or a body of art, yet there is no way to know how much time or appreciation anyone will (or ought to) lend to it, as no viewer can ever quantifiably finish reading art the way they can digest a book.
I guess I’m just thinking about this contrast of responsibility over the variety of creative works produced for the same 'public.’ Unlike theatre and film and whatever you’d like to call whatever it is that Groupe F does, books, and most artworks, usually have just one sole person - a writer, an artist - behind their creation. This is not to discount the editors, publishers and curators who distribute them: I’m only referring here to their production. After all you can still read a book that hasn’t been published or look at an artwork that hasn’t publicly displayed, it’s just less likely that you’ll encounter these in the first place.
Nonetheless, bestselling books and publicly displayed artworks can be accessed by an audience of the same scale as, say, Skin of Fire. Does this put a lot of pressure on the artist/writer? I’m not sure how to address this question - this is just something I’ve started thinking about. Perhaps I’m just trying to compare art to other creative fields to analyse what it can do most effectively. Fireworks are fun, narrative film is fantasy, books are a private conversation, and art does something else entirely.
