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.