The audience

The audience

I was just reading Introducing cultural and media studies (Thwaites, Davis, Mules 2002) and they are talking about Phatic.
'A signs phatic functions are the ways in which it constructs a relationship between the addresser and the addressee' (Twaites 2002:p18)
They also say that  phatic functions link the addresser and addressee, in all sort of inclusion and exclusion. If we are talking about the manner in which a public artwork (addresser) might communicate with its audience (addressee) the adresser the phatic is what the two hold in common and allows for meaning to transfer between the two. But if there is no relationship or 'community' between the adresser and the addressee then the phatic function might not work.

This theory about the sign and its addresser and addressee, with the phatic that lies between them, the exchange that depends on having common codes reminded me of one of the issues of public art. The issue is 'the audience', and how they are addressed or considered. Does the public artwork include or exclude social groups of people through its codes. When it does exclude them, and it cannot always include the means to signify its meaning to all, what does the artwork then mean for the people.

ON another page I was talking about what the Sculpture 'Vertex', by Ron Robinson Swann,  meant to me. Then later that weekend I was walking in Melbourne and came across the 'vault' sculpture by Ron Robertson Swann. Both of these sculptures were designed for specific places in that they were site specific and neither of them sit in the place they were designed for. They have become art objects. As I approached the Vault, I noticed two children sliding down its walls. It reminded me of when my friends son had scaled the Inge King sculpture that sits next to the arts centre. Children were running up the sides and sliding back down and he was able to climb up onto the top of the sculpture. For these children, the sculpture addressed them , but the shared code was about the shape and suitability of an object to be climbed on. The sculptures were not trying to signify this. Both sculptures are about an art practice that explores form. Some adults who understand or appreciate formalist sculpture would be reading the codes that the artist intended. But for many others who did not have any inkling of this code, the sculptures might read other meanings into them, and also inthe case of Vault, may read the sculpture as part of the building behind it ( which has a similar shaped architecture) and the strange tower just beyond it. They may read it as an art/architectural landscape that it sits in.