Assessing the Assessment of ISEA 2006 / ZeroOne San Jose

I am moved to write this evening by questions about Access and the Indended Audience for the ISEA/ZeroOne event.

Both questions (access and audience) were characterized as "dangerous".
(is this ideological encoding?)

Why is it dangerous to discuss the intended audience of an art presentation? Does it call into question the definition of "public"? This may be problematic, but dangerous?... and what kind of access was spoken of?

Real, practical regional access? Theoretical/ethical universal access? Cultural access? (can any cultural product be universally accessible?) Everyone has a different take on what access is. One speaker's point was that the bulk of peoples all over the world don't even have access to basic technology, and are therefore denied access to "technophilic" cultural production.

This begs the question who was the audience for the ISEA/ZeroOne art exhibition? Here's the dangerous part: We were. The elite art world, the regional public with practical and cultural access to what constitutes "cultural production" in the art sense. It could be said that the art world is a cadre of elites, collectors, academics, curators, educators, institutions and last on the food chain: elite artists. There being of course, a distinction between elite art practice, elite art presentation and elitism for its own sake, right?

Every panelist at the Assessment spoke the words "cultural production" or "culural producer" at least once during the discussion. However when the question of "who is the intended audience" came up, the response was that "this is not a marketing study".

If artists are cultural producers, this literally means that they are "producing" products. Many of these products, as one panelist put it, "would never exist in a for-profit system". However, non-profits ARE required to market their products, just like artists, museums and conferences. ISEA/ZeroOne had plenty of marketing, and this means there was definitely a target audience. Further, arts conglomerations like ISEA/ZeroOne are mediators of the cultural production of artists. They get to decide which artist's work is seen, who gets funding for projects and who gets in to see the work on display. If the institution does not consciously make these decisions, they by default protect the status quo. The ethics of institutions are reflected in decisions and while many of the players of an institution might aspire to widen the circle of the art conversation, the institutional interest is to foreground a certain part of the conversation and speak to the elite audience culturally conditioned to appreciate and support the products it has to offer.

It is clear that the presenters of ISEA/ZeroOne conferences were genuinly interested in widening access to the cultural production of artists, but at the same time every institution must serve the interests of core constituents and funders. The ramifications and availability of this indenture differ from region to region.

However this raises another dangerous question: Why should the wider audience be interested in accessing these cultural productions? What is their incentive to become involved in the conversation? Do they care? Who are they? (and we're back to the audience question again)

This evening's Assessment barely begun before it was waylaid by troubling ideoligical issues that loom large in the western cultural context. Do we as artists, art educators and academics have more or less responsibility to adress serious issues when our voices already speak through the work we produce, the places we exhibit and the institutions we inhabit? Notably absent from the Assessment was discussion of the ethical content, social advocacy work and humanistic voice of the artists at ISEA/ZeroOne.


-dc