Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen is a Canadian, Stockholm based, artist. Her work evokes participatory readings. Puzzle is a piece where the audience is invited to assemble a monochrome puzzle; and Car is a work in progress where the artist collaborated with other professionals form the artistic field, in creating the audiovisual context making up the piece.
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Maria Efstathiou: In all your pieces’ nature and process, you are somehow eliminating the curator from the process of the exhibition event, by making self-, or pre-, curated work.
Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen: I don’t take the curator intentionally out of the process. I think that the artist is also a curator. If an artist is working with an art piece and art in itself, then s/he is working with the art object. From modernism we moved onwards to something else; if we are working beyond the object, then we are working with the room, and from the room with relational aesthetics, therefore with people. Then this for me becomes an equation which has to be taken into account when making an art piece that is not just giving essence to the object, but thinking beyond that; the architecture, the space, the audience, the people, how it’s going to be received and all those knots are as important as the object. To think of an art piece without an audience is like writing a book without a reader… then it has no existence.
M.E.: Your work is an apparent illustration of Roland Barthes The Death of the Author; you make yourself invisible in this production. In Car, you are presenting an actual car, nonetheless prepared for an audience; you disappear from the scene and you offer the experience to the viewer, you don’t terminate the piece but you offer it to the reader in order for it to exist through, and in, [a] narrated experience.
J.H.N.: I am playing with that issue and by extension questioning the notion of the viewer specific, moving from site specificity to how each viewer then becomes a site in itself with its own specificity; the way the work is being encountered, and how the viewers take in their own experience.
M.E.: I would say that your work is a “how to read and narrate art in the C21st” workshop. Your audience is given the opportunity to come in on a blank page- no prior information of your practice, or art for that matter- and narrate it, regardless of their demographic characteristics, and the experiences encountered in the space with the work would have similarities.
J.H.N.: What I find hard with dry conceptual art, is the lack of this notion. Sometimes the aesthetic elements are missing and it’s hard to trigger something into the viewer. If it is distant, then it’s hard to give place for a relationship between viewer and art work… it becomes more intellectual.
M.E.: In your displays people are invited to put the art together either physically or in abstractly. Do you approach these as participants or audience?
J.H.N.: I would call them a participatory audience. Participation requires conscious and active decision making. Taking part in something is about the course of what is happening. The term audience is too passive.
M.E.: The Unilever Series, 2006, at Tate Modern’ Turbine Hall by Carsten Höller, was an amazing spring of interaction; the narration could have taken a number of forms. In this movement being trotted, if as a viewer one doesn’t participate and take the art into their hands, then s/he cannot claim that to have seen what is on display… and perhaps “ to experience the art on display” would be more of an appropriate contemporary term for describing the exhibition experience.
J.H.N.: To see Carsten Höller’s piece in Tate Modern is to see the piece utilised. Seeing the objects [slides] alone as a free standing piece, would be absolutely misunderstanding because the participatory audience is needed to give a function to all that space which he activated.
M.E.: Art behaves differently according to the cultural setting it is placed in. There are places where to show participatory pieces there would have to be host triggering the “aping” characteristic of the audience into experiencing participation. In previous waves there was almost a dictation of the art being precious. Having the Please Stand Behind the Line perception, created boundaries in the theatricality allocated to the viewer in the exhibition space.
J.H.N.: As an artist you take for granted that you try to trigger enough to suggest something with which the durable will be let, and expect the audience to follow.
This also lies in a matter of tradition and background. In count we’ve worked with the strict tradition of modernism not to touch. I know, for example, that when my parents see Car, their reaction will be “OK… what is this? Car songs… thank you” and they’d move on to the next piece, not coming closer to the work. But then again that is also an element I am currently working on: the impossibility of having the totality of the piece/ the narration which is happening. Car deals with that issue as well; if you are not taking part in the car ride you are also having an element of it as a participant in the rest of the audience. It becomes your own responsibility how much you want to encounter the piece. In video work, as a viewer you accept, this invisible agreement whether you are going to stay and watch it in its entirety or not. If you decide not to, then you accept that “I saw five minutes of this, I’ve had enough” or “I saw five minutes, it was great, I think I got it”. The entirety in Car lies in a limit of two or three people maximum who can take part at once. Then for the out-of-car-audience there is a narration outside the car, a back flash happening which might also be heard from inside the car; and then, it being heard inside the car is possible but uncertain. I am trying to put different layers to it, bits to grasp but not being capable of taking all of these in.
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In the established genres of art the code of conduct, along with aesthetics, are set, almost as in a manual of how to read these works. But in participatory art it’s different, for a new field is being entered for which the rules are still to be set.In situations, such as Tino Sehgal’s, first encounters are awkward, almost uncomfortable. The viewer observes the interpreters chanting a phrase over and over, or moving in slow motion as if you had before you, in visual aesthetics, a three dimensional Bill Viola piece. Live aesthetics require a collaborative input and approach in order to come alive in the frame they are intended to, both during process and during display. The viewer is bound to feel disoriented and look for the end of the twine to untangle. Live aesthetics, as Mikael Scherdin puts it, require a collaborative input and approach, during both process and display, in order to come alive in the frame they are intended to.
