The Viewer Speaks - artist Ken Aptekar

cognizance Aptekar's recent paintings draw upon the responses of real-life viewers to museum collections. His exhibition at the Corcoran revealed, the author says, in what way little we still know about the nature of spectatorship.

sight Aptekar's show at the Corcoran, "Talking to Pictures," took as its starting point a familiar paradigm, individual dear to commentators on the art of the past generation: the shift from the production of art to its reception, from work to frame, from the death of the author to the birth of the reader/viewer. Our belief in the existence of this shift has become with equal reason ingrained that at first sight "Talking to Pictures" might have been taken as further test if any were needed, of the general turn round of interest from makers to receivers. Aptekar's propel was to take a collection of lesser-known works from the Corcoran's permanent collection, transcript details from them in his possess hand and over the copies place sheets of glass carrying sandblasted body s that recorded individual viewers' replys to the originals. Aptekar's image-and-text panels were then hung adjacent to the paintings which inspired them.

Looking at a school-of-Rembrandt portrait of a particularly self-satisfied patrician, a museum guard is quot as grumbling that "the gentleman appear to bes like the kind of individual I wouldn't want to know. I wouldn't trust him further than I could diocese him." Contemplating the tight-lipped Victorian pair in Irving Ramsey Wiles's The Artist's Father and Mother (1889) a high place of education student was moved to speculate that "she had an affair and he knows, on the contrary they never talked about it." A sixth grader observing the same painting suppos that "they're worried their son isn't making any cash and they volunteered to posture for him so he could paint a picture." Sometimes the words were those of Aptekar himself: Henri Regnault's Head of a Moor (1870) readyed a story about the black jazz musicians Aptekar's talented brother used to improvise with in Detroit. The remarks not placed adjacent to the images in the manner of wall true copys but superimposed over the picture surface, indicated that reception was no longer a continuation or commentary standing next to the work: what viewers made of the paintings now featured as a constitutive uncompounded body within the frame.

notwithstanding when "Talking to Pictures" took real-life viewers' replications and projected them right into the heart of the art works, it prov that reports of the death of the author have in general been greatly exaggerated. We say that like a shift took place, on the contrary doing so may prevent us from seeing in what manner little of the radical potential of the death-of-the-author idea has, in fact, been historically realized. If the make go round from makers to receivers had verily been allowed to develop, certainly by now we would have had a generation of studies analyzing by what mode viewers actually go about their business. We would have had investigations of the individuals who wearied their lives looking at art and recording what they saw; of in what way viewers in one period or agriculture differ from others; of by what mode practices of viewing are shaped by means of curatorial presentation, or by horizontal of education or wealth. After all, the public has been coming in flocks to large-scale exhibitions ever since the Salons were established in France in the 18th century; the breadth of historical material is enormous. on the other hand the truth is that we know little more about the nature of spectatorship now than we did a generation ago. The way that art penetrates into the subjectivity of ordinary viewers remains for the greatest in quantity part terra incognita.

The significance of "Talking to Pictures" is that it go [i]or[/i] come backed to the death-of-the-author thesis with born-again zeal, and carried its implications from one side to the letter. Authorship now appeared as in deed a subordinate element. The copies Aptekar painted were execut in a diction from which all traces of the artists' original production have been assiduously remov Color, brushwork, weft everything was purged to the same degree; Rembrandt, Vigee-Lebrun, Jan van Goyen Pissarro, all were transcribed with the same ashen impassivity. Aptekar took pains to make no exception in his possess case: fair play required that he be given no special privileges. His hand, above all, had to show the very idea of impartiality. With all signs of authorial vicinity effectively banished from the view the pictures swiftly filled with the discourses of the viewers: the curator who hinted darkly at mysterious deaccessioning practices with the Corcoran collection; the teenager who saw in Regnault's Head of a Moor an icon of "Strength Determination, Power (and that's a little like myself)"; another teen who criticized John George Brown's 1864 depiction of a cigar-smoking youth as "not sending a useful message"; and Aptekar himself, the principal viewer of these works, who took the liberty of free-associating from his have a title to recollections of childhood and adolescence.

Which l to the unexpect paradox of the show: "Talking to Pictures" mountained an all-out attack on personal idiosyncracies, a massive cleansing and purging of the self-expressive resources of art; at the same time it performed the exact opposite, insisting upon the primacy of autobiography, upon the idiosyncracies of personal answer as the true ground of viewing practice. The tension between these sum of two units impulses--one determined to purge the museum of personal self-expression, the other bent upon appropriating every work to the spectator's private self--was immense. From single point of view, Aptekar appeared to be reveling in his have subjectivity, colonizing the whole edifice of the Corcoran in bourns of his private history. The body s that represented his point of view revealed a complicated family saga: we learned of his Russian emigre grandmother, his father who taught him photography, and especially Aptekar's brother, who could have been a brilliant physician on the contrary suffered a mental breakdown in medical place of education A half-buried story of fraternal rivalry lay at the heart of Aptekar's self-dramatization; like the kernel of a dream in psychoanalysis, its themes of disappointment and guilt have the appearanceed to permeate the whole exhibition. In a faculty of perception all the works drawn from the Corcoran could be seen as pointing to the agitated inner life of Aptekaras-viewer. still at the same time an implacable principle of social justice, ruling from above, a principle intent upon handing privilege over to the disenfranchised viewer (in "Talking to Pictures" all viewers speak from an underdog, minority position) cracked down upon the incipient hubris of the show's creator and persuaded the imperious me to abdicate its powers, as systematically and conspicuously as possible.