Audiencing James Turrell’s Skyspace: encounters between art and audience at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Saskia Warren

University of Sheffield, UK

Abstract

This article investigates the under-addressed topic of audiencing in relation to art in landscape, considering the ways in which this study can enliven cultural geography. Exploring how issues of interpretation and reception have been approached in the past, it tailors mixed methods to trace audience practices using the case study of James Turrell’s Skyspace at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, England. Turrell’s site art is installed in a remodelled deershelter within the Bretton Estate, bringing together contemporary art, heritage and working landscape. This research contributes to recent debate on post-phenomenological work by representing multiple subjects’ engagements with site art. Vignettes of audiencing are presented that challenge authorial control and curatorial interpretation in specific ways pointing toward the open-endedness of the production and reception of cultural forms. Developing cultural geography’s engagement with art, the article challenges geographers to consider how the meaning of works and sites can be renegotiated according to the specialisms of others, and the social dimensions of audience experience. By showing how critical enquiry can become more democratized through the inclusion of different subjects, it reveals the important theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions the study of audiencing can make to the geographies of art.

Keywords

art, audience, audiencing, landscape, site

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I’m always puzzled by audiences. I really don’t know who they are or why they’re there or what they’re thinking.1

In the above quote, lauded contemporary dance choreographer Paul Taylor describes his interest in the audiences to his shows. For Taylor, audiences are a curiosity that he is ‘always puzzled by’. The success of a performance is entwined with the role of the audience; however, as Taylor indicates, their identities, sense of purpose and thoughts often remain obscure. Post-structuralist theory has emphasized the active role of the audience in negotiating the meaning of art. In particular, signifi- cant texts including Umberto Eco’s The Poetics of the Open Work2 and Roland Barthes’ later text Death of the Author3 foregrounded the interpretative role of the viewer, listener or reader in open- ing up fields of possibility in the meaning of a piece of artwork, music or text. In the arts, the notion of the audience has been widely mobilized to embrace the range of positions and participatory dimensions of audience encounters.4 ‘To audience’ describes an exchange between the subjects and medium or form.5 Yet, in geographical research on art there remains a paucity of research into what audiences ‘really think and do’.6 In the following section I outline the theoretical, methodological and empirical aims of this article, which are intended to address in part the lacuna in research on audiencing art, and its implications for geographical enquiry.

By performing qualitative research into audiencing, an understanding of the spatial and social dimensions of arts engagement can be enriched, empirically broadening existing research on art and the role of the audience. With emphasis on the contingency of art experience, this article ques- tions whether constructing and designating the ‘meaning’ of art should be the preserve of critics and arts professionals who represent only a proportion of the audience who engage with art. Instead, by tracing the audiencing of art in landscape, this article makes the contribution of recog- nizing how audiences are not a separate moment in the meaningful biography of an artwork but enmeshed within circuits of exchange that mediate cultural forms. The case study of this article is a work of site art by artist James Turrell entitled Skyspace (2006), which is installed in the pictur- esque landscape of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, England. Yorkshire Sculpture Park is situated in the Bretton Estate and was opened to the public in 1977, creating an open air gallery in the landscape of an historic estate.

I first introduce the artwork and biography of Turrell, with attention to Skyspace at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which forms the empirical focus of this article. I then review the literature on audiencing itself, before moving on to literatures in other key areas. Developing from the proj- ects of Nina Morris, Venda Pollock and Joanne Sharp, and Dydia DeLyser, among others, research into reception can uncover how actual audiences engage with creative forms and pro- duce meaningful relationships between site and art. The methods I use to explore audiencing site art at Yorkshire Sculpture Park are discussed, which offers alternative challenges to advancing an auto-ethnographic interpretation or tracing the audiencing of an ephemeral art work. Writing by Stephen Daniels and Yve-Alain Bois on the picturesque landscape and Miwon Kwon’s three strand exploration of the relationship between site, art and audience are then engaged to open up discussion on the specificity of site art experience. I follow these theoretical engagements with vignettes of audiencing Skyspace drawn from empirical findings obtained over 10 months at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

James Turrell at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

James Turrell is an artist who has gained international recognition for site art installations that focus on light and space. Most renowned is Turrell’s magnum opus, Roden Crater, an extinct vol- cano transformed into a ‘naked eye observatory’ near Arizona’s Painted Desert.7 His work has been commissioned by private collections and museums across the US and Europe, with a further con- centration of works in Argentina and Japan. While the installations are situated in different countries and across distinctive cultural and material locales, the meaning of the art has often been located in critical literatures by recourse to the artist’s biography. Concerns with light and percep- tion, for instance, have been related to his Quaker upbringing, his training as a pilot in Nevada, and undergraduate degree in maths and psychology.8 Notably, critical interpretations of Turrell’s light and space works have also tended to situate his art within a 20th-century project that interconnects with phenomenological theory.9 Combining these approaches, the originatory source of the artist is emphasized by William Banks, who guides the reader/viewer on a behind-the-scenes tour of Turrell’s Second Wind 2005, presenting the conception to the realization of the installation by text and photography.10 Taking the interpretation of Turrell’s work in a new direction, I use audiencing as a method to open up the alternative ways in which the meaning of art can be framed with focus on Turrell’s Skyspace at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. By addressing the social and spatial dimensions of encounters with Skyspace, this article responds instead to the cultural geographies of site art, and in particular the spatial practices of its audiencing.

Turrell’s Skyspace was adapted from an early deershelter that formed part of the Bretton Estate, which in the 18th-century extended between Barnsley and Wakefield, West Yorkshire. Once a private country estate made wealthy from lead and iron interests, Bretton was part sold in 1948 following occupation by the War Office during the Second World War. Since 1977, under the management of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, over 500 acres of the estate has gradually been reunified. In the summer of 1993 Turrell stayed for several weeks at the sculpture park while working on a project for the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust at Dean Clough, Halifax. Fascinated by the history of the Bretton Estate, Turrell developed a proposal to transform the deershelter into a Skyspace. The project was eventually realized 13 years later through a £800,000 grant from The Art Fund. Clare Lilley, Director of Programme at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, emphasized the vital connection between landscape heritage and art in the project: ‘As well as making a contemporary art work, the Turrell Skyspace has facilitated the restoration and conservation of this historic structure.’11

Critical engagements with audiencing

The theory and methods that underpin the findings in this article shift the usage of the static noun ‘audience’ to the active verb ‘audiencing’. The term audiencing is indebted to the work of cultural theorist John Fiske.12 Fiske emphasizes the process by which the mass media is engaged with by the viewer configured as the active audience. He advances the argument that culture is a continuous process of the social circulation of meanings and that ‘audiencing’ is part of that process. Sites of analysis are used where this circulation becomes accessible, such as participant observation of teenagers watching a television show, which reveal ‘glimpses of culture in practice’.13 With focus on visual images, Gillian Rose also defines audiencing as a ‘process’ whereby an image has ‘its meanings renegotiated, or even rejected, by particular audiences watching in specific circum- stances’.14 Privileging the visual over other sensory responses, Rose, using a combination of one- to-one and group interviews, builds on the work of Shaun Moores, David Morley and Ien Ang, to propose that, as a method, audiencing can reveal multiple meanings of a particular form or medium, as well as informing us of ‘the complexity of the decoding process’.15 Audiencing can therefore be understood as the ‘process of producing through lived experience’16 insights into the audience and their social relations, combined with the active inscription of meaning into a particular medium or form by different audiences. Using grounded empirical research, recent work on audiencing has explored audience responses to television, film, comic books and the internet to inform under- standing on nationalism, identity, fan-bases and emotion.17

Tracing the audiencing of art in landscape has not been addressed directly in cultural geogra- phy; however, geographers have considered complimentary issues of audience reception and place-making through a variety of artistic mediums. In her article on the landscape-installation art, The Storr, Morris develops a methodology that engages a range of experiences beyond her self- perspective.18 The notion of audiencing is not specifically mobilized by Morris, yet a combination of semi-structured interviews with the audience and organizers, participant observation, and an online feedback form were tailored to write about ‘multiple/collective experiences’ of art in land- scape.19 This approach can be seen to enliven certain post-phenomenological theorizing about landscape, such as John Wylie and Mitch Rose’s work where personal experiences are represented in narrative-based writing developing ‘a more relational understanding of landscape with a stress on process, movement and becoming’.20 As Morris notes, the subjective focus of this strand of post-phenomenology has subsequently been criticized for ‘being solipsistic, introverted and hermeneutically sealed’. The decision not to preclude the thoughts, feelings and experiences of the other participants was configured by Morris as responding to a theme of The Storr installation, ‘one walk, many journeys’.21

In work that also explores reception and interpretation, rather than presentation, DeLyser inves- tigates the active participation of tourists in the creation of attractions relating to the 1884 US novel Ramona.22 Instead of concentrating on the real-estate hype and the ‘boosterist promotion of place’ that followed the novel’s success, DeLyser recovered traces of tourist responses to Ramona-related attractions in newspaper articles, inscribed postcards and personal memory albums. While ‘none speaks loudly’ together, these traces demonstrate the ‘roles of individual tourists in the creation of tourist sites’.23 This offers a subtle methodological approach for engaging with audiencing practices in historical geography that also has pertinence for analysing different forms of reception in contemporary arts practice. Other methods used to gain insight into the role of audiences and art in place-making activities are Sharp and Pollock’s postcard feedback questionnaires for local resi- dents on Stephen Hurrel’s Constellation, in Ayr, West Scotland.24

In these articles the agencies of different kinds of audience, traced through interviews, par- ticipant observation, archival practices and questionnaires, are central to the production of meaning at each site and artwork under discussion. In part informed by Morris, DeLyser, and Sharp and Pollock’s various engagements with issues of reception, this article sets out to illu- minate audience engagements that usually remain unrecorded or disregarded, and that can give new insights into the meaning of art within different people’s lives. By expanding understanding of critical spatial sensibilities, tracing the audiencing of site art can enliven cultural geog- raphy’s engagement with the geographies of art. In the next section I outline the methods used in this research, which complicate the agency of site art beyond authorial intention and curato- rial directives. The work advances debate on the role of the audience with emphasis on different forms of expertise and social relations that engage the ‘transient encounters, states of flux and open-endedness’ of art in landscape.25

Tracing the audiencing of Turrell’s Skyspace

The empirical findings in this article are drawn from fieldwork undertaken at Yorkshire Sculpture Park from September 2009 to July 2010. The fieldwork extended over a longer period than other geographical studies on art interpretation and reception partly to gain insights into ways in which a permanent piece of site art adapts to the changing spatial environment of the sculpture park.26 Furthermore, bringing a range of audience practices to the analysis of art is central to the theoretical concerns of the research, hence the timeline allowed for observing initial encounters, repeat visiting and conducting follow-up interviews. The research extended upon the findings recovered by archival and questionnaire-based studies by gaining insights into the active and physical dimensions of audience negotiations with site art.27 Interview material, participant observation and photographic diaries provided vignettes of audience engagements with art and landscape, alongside more focused detailed responses to the Skyspace from which the material in this article is selected.

In order to understand the audiencing of Turrell’s Skyspace within the wider context of the sculpture park, non-directive, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 60 audience members on their visits.28 Responding to fluxes in visitation, opportunistic sampling was used as a method to follow the phenomenon of audiencing with the location of the interviews varied accordingly.29 The majority of interviews were conducted in the Visitor Centre café, which is a meeting and resting point for many visitors, offering a sheltered and warm space to recruit participants. Other ‘on-the-spot’ interviews took place outdoors in the parklands and at special ticketed events where bodily interactions with the artwork could be observed, including three Sunrise in the Skyspace events.30 A further stage of in-depth follow-up interviews was conducted with 11 audience members. These took place variously by telephone, in public places such as a coffee shop, or on a repeat visit to the park.