Practicable: Participatory Roles of the Instagram Audience to Create Artwork
By Siena White
When an artist posts a photo or video of their artwork on Instagram, the audience is not viewing the artwork itself but a reproduction of it. This is a significant shift from traditional concepts of viewing artwork in real space. According to Walter Benjamin, a work of art loses its ‘aura’ when viewed as a reproduction (Benjamin, 1936). However, when Instagram is used by an artist as a medium to produce an artwork, the ‘aura’ can only be maintained on the platform. Artist Amalia Ulman used the social media platform Instagram to produce a body of work titled Excellences & Perfections (2014), which has been reproduced in publications and for exhibitions. I would suggest that the ‘aura’ delineated by Benjamin can only be found when viewing the work on Instagram and not in the exhibition space. According to Shawn Shimpach (2011), new media has expanded the notion of viewing to be an active role of an audience. New media is interactive, and has therefore shifted the role of a viewer. With this in mind, artwork produced on a new media platform like Instagram, not only constitutes a sighted encounter with the subject, but also the interaction and participatory engagement of the viewer. Samuel Bianchini and Erik Verhagen (2008) would argue that the interaction of the audience with the artwork – the active viewing – is part of the work itself, and refer to this as Practicable.
Viewing an artwork produced on Instagram is an active role, and part of the ‘aura’ of the original artwork. The viewer participates – they view, scroll past, like, save, share or comment. Bianchini and Verhagen refer to this as Practicable (2008), meaning artworks that “feature a capacity to accommodate the concrete involvement of their viewers and to generate an activity that transform the works themselves as well as their audience” (Bianchini, & Verhagen, 2008, p.1). Shawn Shimpach (2011) refers to viewing as the intersection between the media (the message) and the subject (the receiver). These active, interactive and participatory engagements with Instagram are part of the intersection between subject and media, and an example of the meaning of viewing for new media.
In 2014 artist Amalia Ulman produced Excellences & Perfections (see Figure 1 & 2), a scripted performance on Instagram, which showed the evolution of a fictional young woman living in Los Angeles. Her first post started with 28 like, and over the space of four months, she had an audience of 90 thousand plus followers. She used identities and stories that gain large followings, and built her audience. Likes and comments were recorded, and she engaged with her viewers by replying as her character. The series is “contextualised by the audience’s comments” (Farkas, R., 2018). Without the audience’s responsive engagement, the photo and video posts by Ulman would not be complete as an artwork. A book was published documenting the series of images she posted, the likes and all the comments, highlighting the viewers interactive role as key to the Practicable artwork. The interactive role of the audience transforms the work itself and is part of the ‘aura’ of the work. It is this type of viewing, where interaction sits at the intersection between the audience and the subject, that exemplifies new media viewing practices.
References
Benjamin, W. (1935). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London, UK: Penguin.
Bianchini, S., & Verhagen, E. (2008). Practicable: From Participation to Interaction in Contemporary Art. London, UK: The MIT Press.
Farkas, R. (2018). Foreword. In Gitlow, A (Ed.), Amalia Ulman: Excellences & Perfections (pp. 6-7). London, UK: Prestel Publishing
Gitlow, A. (Ed.). (2018). Amalia Ulman: Excellences & Perfections. London, UK: Prestel Publishing.
Shimpach, S. (2011). Viewing. In Nightingale, V. (2011). Handbook of Media Audiences. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.
Ulman, A. (2020). Amalia Ulman: why I staged my own Instagram meltdown. Financial Times. Retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/d2cb7650-279b-11ea-9a4f-963f0ec7e134
Ulman, A. [@amaliaulman]. (2014, April 20). Excellences & Perfections. [Instagram photo]. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/amaliaulman/?hl=en
Ulman, A. [@amaliaulman]. (2014, April 20). Nails yay or nay 🌸🌸. [Instagram photo]. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/amaliaulman/?hl=en