{"id":166,"date":"2012-05-09T15:00:01","date_gmt":"2012-05-09T22:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/?p=166"},"modified":"2012-05-11T12:16:55","modified_gmt":"2012-05-11T19:16:55","slug":"ordering-the-threads-interpretive-artistic-mediation-and-accessibility-in-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/2012\/05\/ordering-the-threads-interpretive-artistic-mediation-and-accessibility-in-art.html","title":{"rendered":"Ordering the Threads: “interpretive artistic mediation” and accessibility in art"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Lately, I\u2019ve had to take a break from this writing in order to catch up a bit on my day job<\/a> and my more domestic duties.\u00a0 It is interesting, in the absence of being able to write about my random threads of thought, to watch my brain rev and churn on certain ideas without truly having a chance to sort them out.\u00a0 For me, writing this blog helps align the many different strings of thought about the arts (because I\u2019m one of those guys who seems to be constantly thinking about art) into something closer to a nice tight grid.\u00a0 It allows me to see what is useful, what connects, and what can go by the wayside, or at least be pocketed for later.<\/p>\n

Does something similar need to happen when I go to a piece of art?\u00a0 Or, more outwardly directed, when I present a piece of art to others? Like the many, many feeds that I pull in consciously and subconsciously as I curiously wander through the world, the artistic experience of the patron is often a distillation of incredible inputs, presented in faucet form, gushing out and then complete.\u00a0 Is some interpretation in order?\u00a0 And do we need to help?<\/p>\n

The technical jargon-y term I have heard for what I\u2019m zooming in on is \u201cinterpretive artistic mediation,\u201d which can come in basically three temporal forms\u2014pre-performance mediation, post-performance mediation and, most controversially, in-performance mediation.\u00a0 The idea is to create obvious and circumspect activities that help the patron, essentially, make sense of their experience.\u00a0 You, as the presenter, mediate the experience, make it easier to get more out of it, encourage the lingering that I do over the best ideas I pull in rather than the discarding that happens with the worst of them.\u00a0 Essentially, you stack the deck for retention of the experience.<\/p>\n

Which can all, of course, be interpreted as creating a bridge between someone incapable of assimilating an artistic experience without your help, and a piece of art too opaque or complex to be fully considered without your ordering lens.\u00a0 Gulp.<\/p>\n

I sit on the board for Z Space<\/a> here in San Francisco, an arts incubator and presenter founded by David Dower and now run by Lisa Steindler, a good friend of mine.\u00a0 I was telling Lisa about some of these mediation ideas and I saw her visibly wince.\u00a0 Her reaction isn\u2019t unusual, especially for artists and artistic directors.\u00a0 Why, they ask, do we need to be mediating this artistic experience?\u00a0 Why do we need to be building out bridges and then hand-holding people to help them cross?\u00a0 Why the crumbs?\u00a0 Isn\u2019t, in a way, the journey to whatever artistic understanding a single patron ends up generating about an artistic piece part<\/em> of the piece itself?\u00a0 Doesn\u2019t augmentation of that journey\u2014whether by tagging along and whispering in\u00a0 the person\u2019s ear or by posting signs along the road\u2014get in the way of the truth of that journey?<\/p>\n

I am sympathetic to this impulse even as I\u2019m not sure I agree.\u00a0 Art has, after all, been relatively unmediated for a long, long time.\u00a0 But I also think there’s something different now, in part because for most people we’re not<\/em> talking about people who believe in a basic amount of artistic\/cultural competence, who have been raised in an art-rich environment, who have a leisurely amount of time to linger over the implications of the work.\u00a0 We instead are dealing with 3 or more decades of destructive anti-arts and culture sentiment, an entire generation or more who have no particular compassion or yen for art, and who, more than anything, are defined by an incessant need to be doing many things at once.\u00a0 In the face of this, I think this fear of mediation can seem at once sort of snobby and lazy (though I know it\u2019s not meant that way).\u00a0 In my head, I see a bunch of people anxiously sitting in a library all staring at a door, some of them seasoned and jaded, some of them newly engaged in whatever’s about to come through the door.\u00a0 The artist sits behind the door, art in hand, and when the clock strikes 8 he opens the door, flings the art inside, ducks back behind, and dives away\u2014\u201cHere is your art, 1, 2, 3, go!\u201d\u2014like it is a bomb about to explode all over the audience, messy and personal but not in need of further articulation; as though (and perhaps this is exactly how they see it) when someone has the art in hand the artist\u2019s work is done, and the clean-up is on them.<\/p>\n

I guess.\u00a0 Maybe.\u00a0 In Imagine<\/em>, Jonah Lehrer\u2019s new book, he tells a story about how frustrated Bob Dylan would get when people would ask him to interpret his lyrics.\u00a0 I get that impulse.<\/p>\n

But I also think that we overestimate how much parsing a lot of our patrons are doing once they leave the experience.\u00a0 For a lot of artsgoers\u2014especially jaded, older patrons who have been to lots of arts experiences in their lives and, on the other end, anyone who is leaving an arts experience in order to plunge back into a life of work and kids and nine zillion other demands\u2014lingering on and dissecting an arts experience just isn\u2019t in the cards.\u00a0 For those people, if an experience is quite strong, then some memory might linger and pop up with the right alchemy later, and the brain may churn away at parts of it subconsciously, but it is scattershot.\u00a0 Some might argue that\u2019s how it\u2019s supposed to be\u2014random, unexpected, a sudden wash over you and then it recedes again.\u00a0 I\u2019d ask why, if we can attempt to make it more than that.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t about dumbing down work anymore than it is about the audience not being smart enough to get it without our help.\u00a0 It\u2019s about recognizing that art can be opaque just like Ulysses<\/em> is opaque, that art can be challenging just like Guernica<\/em> is challenging, that art can be unsettling and gigantic and detailed\u2014and that for some people, they actually want<\/em> to know what sits behind the veneer.<\/p>\n

When supertitles were first proposed in opera, there was an uproar.\u00a0 Supertitles, it was argued, distract from the experience, pull you away from the music and the visual, require your eyes to jump, overlay a level of processing that would inevitably engender less impact.\u00a0 In hindsight, as supertitles (or now, more usually, subtitles run on a personal screen in the seatback in front of you, which is much less distracting if you don\u2019t want them) have become more ubiquitous, the idea that for some people actually understanding the words<\/em> might be a useful step along the way to a fully absorbing experience seems obvious.\u00a0 What about understanding the intentionality of a dance piece?\u00a0 What about being prompted to hear leitmotifs in a piece of orchestral music?\u00a0 What about a director whispering in your ear about why certain choices were made as you watch a play unfold?<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got to say, I\u2019m biased.\u00a0 I\u2019m one of those guys who bought the entire Lord of the Rings<\/em> DVD box set, watched all of the movies without commentary and then went back and watched all of them again with the commentary on.\u00a0 And then I watched all of the extra documentaries on the costumes and the sets and the digital effects.\u00a0 I\u2019m one of those guys who reads synopses of Mad Men<\/em> before I watch the episode and then goes back afterward and reads what the recappers are saying.\u00a0 I seek out spoilers for my favorite shows and read supporting materials for the theatre, music and visual art I see.\u00a0 I read (all of) Ovid\u2019s Metamorphoses<\/em> before seeing Mary Zimmerman\u2019s Metamorphoses<\/em>.\u00a0 I love interpretation.\u00a0 I love knowing what the thoughts were that existed before the piece itself, what the considerations were that led to this moment, this night, at this point.\u00a0 I think it makes things richer, and rather than proscribing anything I think interpretive mediation has the potential to still give people freedom to curate their own impact, just with more options.<\/p>\n

How can the peripherals help dissect an experience?\u00a0 What can we do to help connect people\u2019s artistic experiences to their life experiences, thereby jumping the rails onto a mental track that is already well-worn and easily accessed later?<\/p>\n

In a way, this plugs into a larger conversation that is going on about the accessibility of the fine arts to this new world of not-yet-patrons.\u00a0 This same basic issue drives much of the conversation about new play development, curation, \u201cparticipation\u201d in all its forms, assessment, impact and relevance.\u00a0 Accessibility comes in a lot of forms, but in this case I think that creative solutions to interpretive mediation may mean allowing us to maintain the core form of theatre (or any of the arts) while increasing its relevance.\u00a0 We don\u2019t need it to all be sing-along Sound of Music<\/em>, we don\u2019t need it to all be people sitting around reading a play to each other\u2014we can still have people sitting in a room breathing together watching people who have honed their craft present concentrated life experiences on a stage.\u00a0 By innovating to accessibility through creative interpretive mediation techniques (before, during and after a piece of art is consumed), I believe we might all get a little closer to being relevant to more people more often.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lately, I\u2019ve had to take a break from this writing in order to catch up a bit on my day job and my more domestic duties.\u00a0 It is interesting, in the absence of being able to write about my random threads of thought, to watch my brain rev and churn on certain ideas without truly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":167,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-166","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-audience-development","8":"category-main","9":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/167"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}