Art, Artist and Spectator

Bruce Barber, “Found Situations 1970-1972”, ZX #4: Situations, ed. Paul Cullen & Grant Thompson, Auckland: Manukau School of Visual Arts, 2008, pp. 10-14.


Bruce Barber is an artist, curator, writer, and educator. In his article Found Situations 1970-72, he discusses his background, interests, and influences in his art practice. Barber’s practice, particularly his early performance pieces were influenced by conceptual art, International Situationists, arte povera, Fluxus, and the Marcel Duchamp readymade.

Barber (10) noted that during his early career as an artist, he was challenged by Duchamp’s ‘rendezvous with the ready-made’ and his proposal, ‘artist only does part of the work which the spectator completes’. Readymade is produced by transforming a manufactured object in a process of cancelling its own function and giving new thought to the object. This process is giving the artist the power to call their choice of object or art. Duchamp's theory, "its art if you say it is" is evidence to the principle of what is art is defined by the artist. If making a choice is the artist’s role as an example, what is the spectator’s role towards the completion of the work? In addition, what is the artist’s responsibility to her or his spectator? For Duchamp, the artist is a 'mediumistic being' who does not really know what he is doing or why he is doing it. In addition, the spectator is the one who, through a kind of 'inner osmosis', deciphers and interprets the work’s inner qualifications, relates them to the external world (qtd. in Tomkins 3). For him, the role of the spectator is equally important to the role of the artist’s.

Duchamp’s theory "it's art if you say it is", has for years been influencing lots of artists untill the present bringing up many positive and negative issues. One of the issues can be seen in Emily Vey Duke’s article Suffering, Empathy, Art and the Greater Good written in 2005. Duke (9) argues that the influence of Duchamp’s theory creates problems in the contemporary art world because art is suffering such a crisis of irrelevance to the public at large. I cannot totally agree with this, but her point of view is convincing. It is true that work produced by contemporary artist is not appealing to many non-art-initiated viewers. This could be caused by the expanded field of modernism continuously developing from what is already available in the art world at present. The world of art gets more and more complex and harder to understand, it limits the spectators into those who have relevant knowledge to be able to actually engage with the work. Artists are producing work using their own personal skills and knowledge in a contemporary art field and spectators also needs their own personal knowledge and experience in order to engage and make interpretations of the work through their perception. I think this issue cannot be fixed within artist’s abilities, but are artists at least trying to take responsibility? Or is this problem even an issue to contemporary artists today? “Fuck-you-if you-don’t get-it” attitude is really not helping, neither is the equally popular “it-doesn’t-matter-if-it-means-anything-to-you-this-is-about-me (Duke 9)."



Duke, Emily V. “Suffering, Empathy, Art and the Greater Good.” C Magazine Issue 85 Spring 2005: 8-10.

Tomkins, Calvin. The Bride & the bachelors. New York: Viking press, 1965.