Everywhere we go, we hear the same demand: art must open itself, make itself useful, respond to demand and critique, provide feedback, itemize outcomes, benefit the community, render itself transparent, accessible, interactive. The Audience must be allowed to exercise choice even after the tickets have been purchased, perhaps deciding the outcome of a piece through the click of a mouse or swipe of a smartphone.
In short, art must defuse, diffuse and dilute itself, until all that is recalcitrant, awkward, uneasy, antisocial, alien or autonomous about it has been purged from its body.
Art is now a service, like tourism or banking. The Audience is a stakeholder: it has bought the privilege to be entertained and that is its right. And like every stakeholder, the Audience must have a say in how the service it has purchased is provided.
What is surprising, upon reflection, is not the fact of the nature and ubiquity of this demand. It is the fact that artists have everywhere accepted and internalized it as orthodoxy.
In my work and thought, I take the opposite position. I argue that art is not a service, but something else entirely. It should close itself off, should make itself useless, should reject demand and ignore critique, should make no excuses, disregard outcomes, and sow discord in the world around it. It should retain its mysteries, rendering itself opaque, inaccessible, obscure. And it should present a series of dangers and traps for any who dare to approach it.
This has nothing to do with intellect or elitism. Quite the reverse. Art is a thing for everyone or no one at all. It seems most likely that in the present era it must become the latter.
What I am describing I believe to be a moral and aesthetic duty, a duty with metaphysical significance. A duty that pertains to the very future of the form.
The survival of art is under threat, and the forces that seek its destruction have dressed up their phantom stooge and sewn razorblades into the lining of its jacket and called it the Audience.
Art must declare war on this Audience.
It must do this not out of antagonism towards any individual audience member, whom it can never properly know, but out of antagonism towards the instinct for casual association, mass prejudice, postmodern fascism and consumer demagoguery – in short, towards all the ways that the Audience exemplifies and enforces a society whose very existence is steeped in cruelty, greed and corruption.
For only in declaring war, in taking so total a stance, can we see through the lies and the cant and the doublespeak, and discern a fact that otherwise we might never have expected could be the case. Namely: that the Audience does not exist.
For a short outtake from a previous production – http://www.unruowe.com on the original performance – http://theyardtheatre.co.uk/show/leper-colony/ further information – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUAx1uUGkfc
‘The Audience Does Not Exist’ was originally written by Vaughan Pilikian, September 2013, and has not previously been published.