Art of Exchange: A Practice-based Inquiry into Co-opting Site and Audience Agency in the Construct of an Artwork.

This body of creative work asked what we can learn about the transference of agency between artist, site, and audience, in particular relation to the audience as a
core element in an artwork’s construct or activation. The resulting critical overview builds on, and contests, theories established in Alfred Gell’s ‘Art and Agency: An
Anthropological Theory’ (1998) and Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘Relational Aesthetics’(1996) through practice-based research and the consideration of contemporary theorists including Kim Charnley, Gregory Sholette and Claire Bishop.

The primary aim of this research was to examine the potential for co-opting site and audience agency in the construct of an artwork by asking three sub-questions
focusing on the possibility of establishing a space to be inhabited, equally, by both an art and not-art audience, the transference of ‘tokens’ or requested interactions, and how an artwork draws on its specific site. This involved the creation and observation of a body of performative and sculptural artworks and the siting of those artworks with partial or no acknowledgment of a wider artistic context. Diverse sites for exchange included rock concerts, public billboards, town centres, sometimes including ‘tokens’ to be taken away within a process of exchange.

Key findings conclude that viewers are engaged in a social relationship with the artwork - acting upon it or being acted upon by it – and, through this relationship, the artist can incorporate the audience/viewers into the fabric of the work, extending their role into a fundamental bringing-in-to-being of the artwork. Audience preconditioning towards a site extends the artwork’s dialogue beyond that of simply being considered an artwork. When successfully presenting as a credible version of something existing beyond the contemporary art canon, discussion of art or not-art becomes irrelevant,
as the artwork exists to be experienced and processed on its own recognisable terms. The memory of that experience/exchange becomes the medium through which agency is passed on to/through the audience.