Between Text and Audience: a Path to the Future

Abstract

This author is most interested in identifying the problematics inherent in the communication by an artist, through a text, to the audience(s). In creating a bridge to the public, ideally one which avoids the intervention of the critic or other agents of culture, the artist or author is providing a vision of possibilities for the future and attempting to induce actions taken on behalf of their realization. Having said this, however, leaves open the question of how and whether this path to communication is based on problems inherent to the process. These are aspects of communication that frustrate the ideal correspondence between the artist’s intended purposes and the audience’s reception; factors such as the conflict decisions required of a challenging text (the security at the old as opposed to the risk and uncertainty at the new) and the particular convergence or non-convergence of the respective social contexts of the artists, text, and audience. Each context requires a different organization of perception that may facilitate or limit the usefulness of the text as a catalyst. The avant-garde seeks to transcend audience expectations (the context of their perception), to challenge old concepts, and open up the communication situation which would permit the new. Their texts seeks to translate their vision into action and to engage the audience as active participants. Their impact on subsequent actions, measurable only after the text, may disclose that ideal communication may require the audience’s prior understanding of the context of the artist and his or her text. For this author, however, the avant-garde may ultimately be better clarified through the nature of quest than through its successes and failures.