One way of reaching new audiences is through self publishing. There are two very good sites for this.

http://www.lulu.com/

www.blurb.com

You can have individual bound copies made for very reasonable prices and then order more when you have a need for them. Perhaps I'm in a book mind at the moment. I'm looking at Charlotte Salomon's 'Life? or Theatre?' If I get too stressed this book is a life saver. You know when they ask you "which book would you take to your desert island" well this is mine.

Just in from James Hill. This is a great opportunity.

Just a reminder to you all that, if you're planning to submit an Expressionof Interest Form to take part in this year's Light Night as an artist, the deadline for submission is fast approaching - 30th April. Forms can be downloaded from the website: http://www.lightnightleeds.co.uk If you'd like to talk through your idea first, please call James Hill on(0113) 247 8234 or email James.Hill@leeds.gov.uk Don't forget to put as much information as possible on your form as this is what will be used to write the information for the Light Night information brochure. If you've already sent your form in, thank you! We've had loads of amazing ideas but would like to hear more. If you know anyone who's not on LVAF (fools!) but might be interested in getting involved, then pass the message on. Love, the Light Night team. x www.lightnightleeds.co.uk

A couple of interesting stories from the Guardian this week that could be useful in terms of thinking about public and audiences.
A new public sculpture for St Helens is unveiled, Dream by Jaume Plensa http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/apr/22/dream-jaume-plensa-st-helens

I little while ago I posted a link to a Guardian article on how empty shops in the high street were being seen as potential exhibition sites, things seemed to have moved on quickly and as the article states, “Giving artists space on the high street helps demystify the process of creating art, taking it away from the private studio and putting it into the shop front; spaces don't come much more accessible than your former Marks & Spencer or Woolies. How many people outside the art world ever get the chance to see an artist at work?” http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/apr/23/artists-take-over-empty-shops
This looks as if it could be a very good opportunity for someone with a bit of initiative.

Usually public art is dealt with by setting up commissions such as this one http://www.lanarts.com/?q=node/2463 The contact for this commission is Vanessa Scarth the public arts officer for Leeds. It would be interesting to find out if she has any plans or suggestions for how artists could be responding to the ‘space on the high street’ agenda.

For those of you interested in public art, go to the link below for a set of downloadable guidelines and policies. You may find it useful as if and when any of you get involved in this type of work (and it is a growing area) you will have to be aware of any policy documents associated with the agency/s you would be working with.
http://www.publicartonline.org.uk/resources/practicaladvice/policiesguidance/policies_outside_uk/landcom.php

East Street Arts is an organisation all of you should be aware of. This is their latest posting.
UNITED
Eight weeks of events exploring the status of `the artist' incontemporary arts activity Organised by: East Street Arts (ESA), Leeds
Dates: Friday 1 May – Saturday 27 June 2009
Times: Events have set dates/times, please see www.esaweb.org.uk<http://www.esaweb.org.uk/> for details
Price: FREE ADMISSION / Fully AccessibleVenue: Various centres around Leeds - please see www.esaweb.org.uk<http://www.esaweb.org.uk/> for details
Using contemporary arts practitioners as a starting point, ESA explores how collective and collaborative events can take shape to express andshare ideas. Involving a whole host of artists both from Leeds and further afield and referencing workers unions and other representative bodies, UNITED will examine how the professional field of art operates without formal structures, resulting in a supportive and independentseries of events that reflect the artist-driven sector and the many facets of social networks.UNITED highlights include London based Daniel Lehan and Leeds artists/designers Nous Vous hosting a weekend workshop event that will precede a march through the city centre of Leeds exploring notions of identity within the workforce and blurring the boundaries of`artist' and `participant'; Leeds based artists Kristy Noble and Tom Poultney's exhibition Day Off questioning virtual networksand asking if these new communication channels have overtaken traditional leisure pursuits and local artist Megan Smith's performance which will focus on the contemporary experience of operating within multiple locations, cultures and spaces simultaneously by using her Second Life avatar to embody this digital domain.
For the full UNITED programme, please see www.esaweb.org.uk<http://www.esaweb.org.uk/>

Louisa here
Everyone who came to a tutorial has a good idea of what I would like them to present for assessment. Anyone who missed a tutorial can email me on lmp.audiences@yahoo.co.uk

Louisa again, please send me any Stimpy URls, I still have two or three missing.

Audiences assessment
Deadline for this module is 9.30am 12th May.
Feedback week beginning 18th May. Feedback times will be posted and I presume linked to the times for feedback for your materials module.

What you will need to present.
For people not using a blog. Journals, art work done in direct response to the brief, sketchbooks and written report/evaluation/rationale.
For people using a blog. It could be all of the above if you feel the blog does not represent what you have done. However if the blog is a thorough reflection that includes comprehensive illustrations it may be just the blog. It’s your call, but remember it’s always better to be cautious and a belt and braces approach is fine. If it is just the blog, we need to know this is a conscious choice. So for assessment you need to put up an A4 print-off of your name, name and full URL address of your blog and a statement that says that all of the evidence for the assessment is contained on your blog.

A reminder of the brief outcomes.
For 20 marks. Apply and research primary and secondary sources
A primary source could be a particular site you have visited. So application of this might be your work sited in this place or a drawing/collage etc demonstrating how your work would look if sited there. A secondary source could be a book on a particular artist or a web-site. Again it needs to be applied, so an image that demonstrates that you were responding to the research done would be useful. In particular a reflection on how well or badly the piece worked adds to the evidence.
For 40 marks. Explore the contextual and professional location of their creative practice and its relationship to publics and audiences.
This exploration is both practical and theoretical. The contextual and professional location obviously points to work done such as reflecting on galleries and public art works. It also suggests that you have engaged with the wider debate as to what the profession entails; curation, the role of the critic, dealer etc etc and how audiences may receive / understand what is happening. It is also expected that you will have done something practical in response to this. Again this may be work sited in public, proposals for work or a reflection on why your work is not suitable for public reception.
For 40 marks. Realise a synthesis between concept and creative practice
This is the area where you need to position your work. Positioning work is about taking a stance. E.g. My work is shown in this way because… We will be looking for work that clearly demonstrates that it is the result of explorative thinking and looking. We will be looking for work that is a result of engaging with the main theoretical elements of the module. This includes presentation, so if you are not actually presenting artwork, you will need to show how you have thought about this. It may be that the way you are presenting the work for the materials module is a result of thinking done in audiences. If this is the case an annotated photograph or reflection within the blog could act as evidence.
So to summarise. The marks will be derived from a combination of evidence.
Studio practice is often evidenced through performance or portfolio of images. The blog should therefore consist of images as well as text. The images should evidence both contextual and professional location of practice, (i.e. all the stuff collected and responded to when thinking about exhibition site and context) as well as showing some actual work or proposed work that evidences a synthesis between concept and creative practice. (This could be a series of collages that demonstrates how your work would look if shown on the High Street)
Project report minimum 500 words, could be the actual text of your blog. 500 words would be a minimum, I would expect if you keep a blog up to be rather more than that. One way you might want to think of your report is as a last blog entry. If writing a report on paper, please can it be word processed?

I will be looking at REN and Louisa at STIMPY, but we will also do some double marking as standardisation. I will paste my written feedback into your last blog’s comment box. You will also get your feedback in the traditional way.

All modules are supposed to receive feedback from students as to how it went etc You will be getting those module feedback sheets to fill in as normal, but they don’t record any actual issues and only reflect a numerical statistic. So it would be useful if finally you could give us some feedback on the module. The easiest way to do this is to use the comment box attached to this blog. In particular we are interested in how you responded to the blog format.

Also if you cant find your blog address in the list at the front of my blog, it means I havnt found your blog yet. Please send me your URL!!

Finally. Don’t forget to look at the old posts on this blog. I have tried to spend 15 minutes a day inputting information that might be useful. So if you don’t know what to reflect on just respond to some of my stuff. The other issue is that other students are doing this. Make sure you look at what they are saying and doing. The point about this technology is that you can share. You may of course take the opportunity to feedback on my blog. What should it have included? Was it any use to you? Should we continue with this in the future?

A few resources that you may find useful in thinking about how to link practice with theory.

The best contemporary book on curating is O'Neill, P. Ed. (2007) Curating Subjects London: Open Editions
If you want to look at just one book on public art you could try Eccles, T (2004) PLOP Recent projects of the Public Art Fund London: Merrell. The book just looks at New York and these are mainly temporary installations. However it might be interesting to reflect on how the works illustrated would be received by a Leeds audience.
If you are thinking about how important location is when trying to communicate with your audience try Massey, D (2006) For Space London: Sage. She argues that space is where politics, social change, co-existence with others and the imagination resides. It is therefore vital for us to situate space at the centre of our awareness of audience. Where people engage with information can be as important as the information itself.
Useful web links that may help you think about issues related to Audiences.
Constructing audiences, defining art. Public Art and social research. http://eipcp.net/transversal/0102/buchholzwuggenig/en/print
On Northern art audiences. People in the north of England are not sophisticated enough to appreciate major works of art, it has been claimed. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/talking_point/2658785.stm
Conceptual art and contemporary audiences http://www.kellysherman.net/images/MartensKatelyn-ConceptualArtAndContemporaryAudience.pdf
Viewing the viewers An Ethnographic Study of Contemporary Visual Art Audiences. http://www.museumsaustralia.org.au/UserFiles/File/National%20Conference/2007/JanineSager_ConferencePaper07.pdf
Go to http://www.jstor.org if you want to research journals. A useful journal article is: European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, 203-223 (2007) Contemporary art's audiences. Specialist accreditation and the myth of inclusion by Spyros Sifakakis
Some books that examine the art world and its audiences
Derrick Chong in Iain Robertson, Understanding International Art Markets And Management, Routledge, 2005
Chin-Tao Wu, Privatising Culture: Corporate Art Intervention Since the 1980s, Verso, 2002
Peter Timms, What's Wrong with Contemporary Art?, UNSW Press, 2004
George E. Marcus and Fred R. Myers, The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, University of California Press, 1995
Mary Jane Jacob and Michael Brenson, Conversations at the Castle: Changing Audiences and Contemporary Art, MIT Press, 1998

http://www.garrybarkeronline.com/

It’s worth looking at the work of Timorous Beasties. Their Glasgow Toile is a textile fabric designed to look like typical Toile de Jouy wallpaper, but on closer inspection you realise it depicts Glasgow drunks. Trading on audience expectations, their work uses traditional domestic surfaces and is designed to be used as well as appreciated for its conceptual precision. See images above.

Another Leeds gallery space I have never mentioned; Harewood House. There is an issue here though, they charge entry fees and you have to get a bus to get there. The 36 from opposite the Grand Theatre. However like all the other art spaces mentioned it will have specific characteristics that can be examined. It is perhaps an ideal space within which to practice your critical theory writing. In the art gallery or museum, you are watched while you look. Foucault sees the art gallery as a place in which cultural values are authorized and specific behaviours encouraged as a means to produce socially acquired knowledge. However Lacan’s concept of the Gaze demonstrates how processes of display in the museum or art gallery produce cultural knowledge/cultural capital by a process of ownership. See others watching you acquire your cultural capital whilst adding to the coffers of the aristocracy. Even so, Michael Raedecker and Graham Crowley are both fine painters and I shall probably go just to see their work. Harewood House also has an El Greco on show and an excuse to see that is always a good one.

Home Truths, Harewood House, 3rd April - 5th July 2009 To celebrate the 250th anniversary of the laying of Harewood House's foundation stone, this exhibition entitled 'Home Truths' explores the powerful concept of home, what is home and what home means to us all. JMW Turner's watercolours of Harewood House were the catalyst to the exhibition. Rarely seen in public due to the risk of fading, this series of work epitomises much of the thought process behind the exhibition: a naturalistic style set against a backdrop of contrived landscape design. Home Truths places a broad range of works of contemporary art alongside pieces from Harewood's own collections of paintings, furniture and ceramics. It aims to inspire discussion and debate by juxtaposing historic and contemporary works and placing both within new contexts in order to challenge our notions of `home'. Some of the works are not for the faint hearted, borrowed from renowned galleries around Europe, such as London's Saatchi Gallery, acclaimed artists such as Michael Raedecker, David Thorpe, Graham Crowley, Sarah Woodfine, Kerry Harker and George Shaw show their work alongside the masters. Extraordinary modern works of art sit alongside extraordinary works and furnishings of the 1800s. Others fit naturally within the home initiative with architectural plans of Harewood at its concept, combined with today's plans for our own homes of the 21st century. The Home Truths Exhibition opens at Harewood House on Friday 3 April and continues until Sunday 5 July 2009 (Open every day 12noon - 4pm). Entrance to the exhibition is free with a House and Grounds ticket.

How to find us

Harewood is located: 7 miles between Leeds and Harrogate on the A61;10 miles from Leeds/Bradford Airport; 22 miles from York; 5 milesfrom A1 and 8 miles from A1/M1 link. The No.36 Bus to Harewood from Leeds and Harrogate travels every 20 minutes daily from Central Leeds. Entry to Harewood is half price with your bus ticket. Entry to Harewood is free all day on Wednesdays for individuals with a valid NUS or ISIC card. http://www.harewood.org/

At the opposite end of the spectrum there is another opening at MAP. Friday 17th April (6 till 11pm)

Goldfish 17th to 21st April
MAP, Hope House, 65 Mabgate, Leeds, LS9 7DR
Inquiries 07814459032 Facebook event Search “Goldfish MAP”

One last thing, have you ever tried writing an exhibition review. See: http://www.bdonline.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=429&storycode=3136570&c=2
It’s a review on Asta Gröting’s show at the Henry Moore Institute. As an artist you may at times have to do this sort of work to broaden your portfolio. What’s interesting here is that the review is written for an audience of architects.

Probably the best known artists who spend a lot of time thinking about how large scale work can be presented are Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Their relationship itself is interesting, as she tends to deal with the project management side of things while he concentrates on how ideas are visualised. See http://www.christojeanneclaude.net/
One area I haven’t mentioned is visualisation of ideas, so that potential audiences can see what might be constructed and so (in Christo’s case) that fund raising exhibitions of the drawings can be held. Christo’s drawings are a wonderful example of how traditional skills can be utilised as part of this process. Skills in image selection, linear perspective rendering, mark making, composition and control of atmospheric perspective all combine to give his drawings a conviction that perhaps a computer generated 3D model would not have. However an artist like Michael Pinsky http://www.michaelpinsky.com/ uses computer generated imagery to visualise many of his projects and the feedback from commissioners is that one of the reasons he gets so many good public art commissions is that his visualisations are so strong. See the image of the 'radio building' above. Whether you use collage, CGI or drawing, visualisation skills are vital to any artist thinking of working publicly. This is one of the areas we will be looking for evidence of when we come to assess this module.

As this blog is mainly centred on issues of communication, there are a few things you may want to consider. In particular you will have to demonstrate that you have reflected in some depth on the key issues of audiences and how they are communicated with. Therefore when you look at your work within another context or possible site, be it gallery or outside you could perhaps choose one of the concepts below as a starting point for a dialogue.

Communication is often about relational patterns of interaction. When two people communicate they are also defining their relationship by the ways that they interact. Sometimes these reactions reinforce expectations and at other times you engage in new patterns of interaction that may establish new expectations for future interactions. Patterns get established because behaviour is itself communicative. So how do artists and audiences establish a pattern of relational control? In some cases the audience may have the relational control. For instance a gallery owner may insist on an artist staying with the same style. In other cases an artist may be in control. For instance Damien Hirst has subverted the normal position of the artist by dealing directly with Sotherby’s.

If you take a critical look at questions of privilege and power within the art world, you will be able to focus on how these are the products of social difference. These differences may be to do with colour, age, sexual orientation, religion, regional affiliation, income level, language, education etc. The key question is, who does and who does not get to ‘speak’ or communicate in these relationships? Therefore what does not get said? For instance for many years art galleries had been the place where men showed paintings they had done of women. What is not ‘said’ in this case, is anything by women. Do you find any resonance with this in your own life as a student artist?

Many communication theories explore the way signs and symbols operate within certain ‘linguistic fields’. In this case the field is that of art and its discourses. Semiotics explores the relationship between the world of things and the world of signs. It makes us aware that signs are not just the intentional ones. For example; in an art exhibition the art works may be ‘saying’ one set of things, but the gallery itself may be ‘saying’ something different. A typical case is that of the artist trying to be very egalitarian and who may be concerned to praise the efforts of working class people in his or her work, whilst the gallery that shows the work only caters for the rich middle classes.

It may be that that you are more in favour of using direct experiences to reflect on communication. If so you would have to decide whether or not experience is objective or subjective. If the former you may want to read Husserl and if the later Merleau-Ponty. Most contemporary theorists would side with Merleau-Ponty. The key issue for him is that things do not exist in and of themselves apart from how they are known. Thus the world of things and events exists in a give and take or dialogic relationship. An extension of this is ‘hermeneutic phenomenology’; your thoughts resulting from speech, because meaning itself is created by your speech. This can be related to Marshall Mcluhan’s phrase ‘the medium is the message’. The media specificity of communication being something you can reflect on when you are assessing audience reaction or assessing your own ‘reading’ of a situation.

Those of you with a more logical cast of mind may want to investigate systems theory. Systems are sets of interacting components that together form a communication field, within which each part is constrained by its dependence on other parts. In the art world, you could say that the system is an interdependence between, artists, galleries, collectors, audiences, art education, curators, critics, dealers etc etc. You may want to concentrate on how this system works and examine how it manages to sustain itself within a changing environment.

An opening to go to.
It would be useful to fit this in if you have not written about how audiences engage with any shows/exhibition spaces yet or just need to deepen your engagement with how art is displayed or curated. In this case you could consider exploring the issues surrounding themed exhibitions. Also the relationship between the work and the document/catalogue could be reflected on. After all, it's just over the road.
The Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery
Parkinson Building
University of Leeds
LS2 9JT
0113 343 2778
gallery@leeds.ac.ukwww.leeds.ac.uk/gallery
The Object of Photography
7 April-19 June 2009
Opening Tuesday 7 April 2009 6.00-8.00pm
Four Yorkshire-based artists - Ignaz Cassar, Hondartza Fraga, Joe Mawson and Andrew Warstat - explore the medium of photography itself as their subject. The artists respond to and critique photography and theories of photography in a variety of media, using traditional and digital photographic formats, collage, drawing, installation and animation. Playful and subtle treatments of the photographic process show that there is more to the medium than meets the eye. A full-colour catalogue with new essays on the artists will be available for sale from the Gallery shop.
Artist Roundtable Discussion21 April 2009, 6-8pm
The Burton Gallery will also host some of the Evolution Festival this year.Go to: http://lumen.org.uk/?page_id=106

Evolution is an internationally respected visual arts festival that concentrates on screen based art. Some of the worlds best artists have shown in this festival so it’s really important that you look out for screenings. Again in terms of audiences, how does the festival format work? Why would you as an artist engage with this type of event? Lumen the company that host Evolution also operate as a support service for artists and the hire out everything from projectors to audio gear as well as provide excellent technicianing services. Without their support many of the media based projects in Leeds wouldn’t be able to exist. You may want to reflect on how artists often need to engage with others in order to make their work public and whether or not these collaborations are successful.

Another festival coming up is: Expo Leeds 24-29 September 2009
Like most festivals there are commissions available for artists. This one below is typical and is something you might think about as a way of reaching a particular discrete audience.
Expo LeedsPresented by Sound and Music and MAAP
Call For Submissions and Commission Proposals Now Open
Expo is the hub and playground of the experimental music and sound artscene in the UK and beyond. Free and open, the event mobilises anational network of artists and engages with communities from allbackgrounds – placing sonic art and the people who make it in directcontact with the public. Expo steps out from traditional venues and intospaces that lie at the heart of the community -inspiring practitionersand the public to reconsider their environments.Expo will land in Leeds in September 09 for a long weekend ofperformance, exhibition and presentation which will take place across avariety of physical and virtual spaces.The weekend aims to highlight the broadest possible range of approachesand thinking that surround the sonic arts. We welcome submissions of allkinds. Alongside international artists, the festival has previouslyshowcased work by young people, disabled adults and those with learningdifficulties, students and hundreds of emerging UK artists. We want allwork of all kinds that has sound as a central element. As well as asking for all kinds of submitted work for its programme ExpoLeeds is offering £4000 of commission money towards the creation of anew installation work that will sit within the Leeds Arena space atLeeds City Museum during the festival weekend. Please visit www.expofestival.org <http://www.expofestival.org> for details on how to submit and updates on the programme. The closingdate for submissions and commission proposals is 29 May2009.