Lets consider the museum as interactive space.
If we imagine a performance in the museum, we would be able to invite our audience into an artwork where they have a choice of experience. Like we are used to when we go to a museum, and in fact like we do while living our daily life, the audience is, more or less, free to choose what they want to do, in which order and which time proportion, and can interact freely inside the situation that they find themselves involved in. Unlike in theaters and concerthalls, the audience gains a freedom of time and directionality.
The situation demands one to take literally an individual standpoint, and the behaviour of one becomes an internal aspect of the performance. Furthermore the choices in time and space that one makes determine largely what type of work one experiences. The audience become composers themselves, and the artwork provides a frame for many individual compositions to be created simultaneously.
From this perspective we can reconsider Joseph Beuys provocative exclamation: “Everybody is an artist!”. Indeed, everybody creates his or her own vision on matters and defines borders between what is art and what is not. And now we consider to create a performance situation inwhere our individual vision is not only challenged to interprete, but indeed to create the actual artwork through our behaviour in time and space. We create this for ourselves, but therewith influence those of others as well.
In the case of a performative artwork, meaning there are living performers invloved, whether musician, singer, actor or dancer, the museum’s spatial settings redefine the relation between performers and audience. Walking around freely in the museum every encounter is a performative one. In fact the roles of performer and audience become blurry. The observer becomes a performer itself at the moment he’s observed, while the observing performer is just as well part of an audience.
The challenge for the artist lies in ‘curating’ such a performance experience. The artist becomes in fact the curator of the elements of his own artwork. Although the visual artist will still create images, and the composer will write music, since this is the material they know how to handle, their respective ways of thinking are not so clearly separated anymore. Every artist creates his own discipline, in where he submit any media to his highly personal way of creating art.
The opportunity these spatial conditions offer for artists to receive their audience in, suggests a new relationailty between them. The participation of the audience in the artistic space makes his position in the performance literally more realistic. Their presense has become more decisive for the artwork. Therefore it implies a more active involvement from the audience with the content and form of the artwork. This might be a new interest for people to gather together in art.
If we consider an imaginary space for 21st century arts, it could be the model of the contemporary museum, with its collection of interconnected empty spaces, inwhere we create our own personal route. John Cage was visionary when he wrote in the late 60’ies: “Going in different directions, we get instead of separation, a sense of space.”
Where the artists that the museum orginally exhibits have become uomi universali who use and blend every medium, context and platform that serves their purpose, the museum could stand model for an free spatial structure that can open up to a large variety of artistic activity in between its walls. Whether we call it installation, performance, music or whatever else, is not relevant anymore. We are simply sharing art.
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