When I arrived at the Art Gallery of NSW for my “conversation” with Ross Gibson, I expected that once the introductions were over, we would wander through the gallery, talk a little and maybe settle in the cafe over a coffee. Instead I was directed 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 looked like a stark television set for a chat show titled, “The White Cube”. Inside was Ross Gibson, he smiled, shook my hand and our conversation begun.
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.”
is it safe to buy clomid online in drugstore for women?
where can I xeloda online without prescription?
buy cheapfemale viagra for women
where can I xeloda online without prescription?
buy cheapfemale viagra for women
Despite its staged setting, the conversation between Gibson and I never felt strained. We drifted effortlessly between topics, briefly discussing the nature of the project before moving on to discussions of city structures, family, love and the gallery itself. I found myself surprisingly honest with Gibson and frankly discussed private issues that I would rarely mention to my friends. The act of confiding to a stranger might bear a similarity to psycho-analysis but the conversation focuses on analysing the broader nature of people and society rather than the individual them self. From what Gibson says of his experience with the project so far, every conversation is unique and never submits to any particular structure or topic.
It is an interesting project that evolves from an earlier work Conversations which 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. 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 have now become defunct. Gibson calls it ‘Participant Art’ in 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 20 years and the adaption of various tools and technologies to immerse audiences in artwork have 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.
This makes Conversations II probably the most revolutionary work of the 16th Sydney Biennale because it 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.
Moreover, the project is significant because it revolts against the power structures that have developed in the institutionalised 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.
This post was originally published by Reportage, the magazine of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism.
