ARTISTS AND THE PUBLIC’S ATTENTION SINCE THE 1960S: AN EXPLORATION OF HOW ARTISTS SEEK TO CAPTURE THE AUDIENCE’S ATTENTION

Art historical research shows that artists, especially since the 1960s rise in museum and art gallery attendance do not always trust the audience’s ability to deal with their art. The choice for a performative aesthetic, for example, has also been a method for reasserting rath­ er than — as is often thought — relinquishing artistic control. The ar­ ticle looks at aesthetic strategies developed by artists who desire(d) a more attentive look from their audiences. It considers works made by artists in the sixties and seventies. It is a fact that the appearance of mass audiences goes hand in hand with the creation of artworks that have “attention” as their subject. Secondly, the article takes a look at more contemporary work. Faced with spectators that spend about 28 seconds looking at artworks and reading the accompa­ nying labels, artists are developing strategies that slow spectators down, thus hoping to channel and hold their attention.

In 1964, American artist Allan Kaprow asked how artists could effectively position their art in "the contemporary departmentstore milieu." 1 The audience, he observed, was now a large group comprised of "readers of the weeklies, viewers of television, charitable organisations, political campaigners, schools and universities, collectors, and the average person." 2 The desire to encounter art seemed to be artificially created. He wrote: "Aunt May and Uncle Jim do not always fit the philistine costume history has assigned them. Attracted to art by its promotion in mass media, they come to an artist enthusiastically but with little grasp of what that artist is doing." 3 The media "explosion" in the United States Peter Hutchinson did not varnish his opinion when he described it as an amorphous and less dedicated audience informed by the popular press. 7 It echo's artist and critic Brian O'Dohorty's statement that "we seem to have ended up with the wrong audience." 8 This text takes as its main focus the worries artists sometimes have about the capacity of the audience to experience, interpret and comprehend their work in a satisfactory manner. These worries are often, but not always, related to the idea that audiences in a media society are losing the ability to pay attention and focus.
Artists worried -and worry -about this and incorporate strategies in their work that aim at triggering a more attentive perception.
Because artists explicitly started to work around the concept "attention" in the 1960s and 70s, while also dealing with the presence of the audience, two case studies are taken from this period.
We also look at works made by two contemporary artists. Media cultures have proliferated since the 1960s, and issues raised in the sixties and seventies have not disappeared. Media societies are saturated with stimuli that seek our attention via ever-present devices and channels. Urban spaces, homes, traffic, and cultural sites… are increasingly becoming sites of distraction. Perceptual psychology has shown that even when we are attending to certain objects, other objects in our perceptual field-even when right in front of us-can go unnoticed. 9 In societies with ever more distractions and overabundance; where dispersed attention is a necessity and continuous partial attention has become a survival strategy and cognitive habit, 10 artists wonder about the duration and intensity with which we attend to works of art.
We however explicitly refrain from any generalizations. The sixties and seventies are for instance a period wherein artists experimented with the participation of the audience in many different ways. The physical involvement of the audience was often seen, as Claire Bishop wrote, as an "essential precursor for social change." 11 Bishop characterized this preoccupation with participation as a strategy used by artists to downplay their authority. 12 The presence of the audience in other words-and the increased consciousness thereof amongst artists-often gave way to situations of empowerment. This also applies to the decade of the 1990s. The decade saw an artistic interest in projects that included the audience and aimed at participation, for many different reasons, amongst them a learning by doing attitude that was believed to trigger critical insights into social, economic, and political life. 13 Working with or making work that involves the audience is often linked to ideas of liberation. In the sixties, the performative turn increasingly took off. It was a period, wherein, as Claire Bishop argued, "the breakdown of medium-specific art" as well as the "explosion of new technologies" inspired artistic experiments wherein the audience started to play a more substantial role. 14 Audiences were no longer seen-as Duchamp would have it-as coming posterior to the creative act, but as central to it. 15 Art historian Henry M. Sayre summed it up poignantly when he wrote that at the beginning of the seventies, "the site of presence in art had shifted from art's object to art's audience, from the textual or plastic to the experiential.     (1977) Fig. 4 , Graham placed himself in front of the audience with a large mirror behind his back. He described the behaviour of the audience as well as his own. He explained that he wanted to make the visitors aware of their own perceptual process as spectator. 22 As such, it was necessary for him to guide and redirect their attention to their behaviour as spectator. He described people's carriage, sounds, facial expressions… The mirror reinforced his descriptions and people's attention to it, as well as their self-awareness. The performance also reflects media society's attempts to control people's attention. Graham however uses it to make the audience more attentive to their role as audience.
The artist was convinced that mass media bombarded people with As Bence Nanay argues, this manner of exercising one's attention is very different from the ways in which we attend in daily life.
Here dispersed attention seems to come first. 35 But the project Secrets demonstrated that-notwithstand-ing the many associations a painting can trigger-, an intentional element is at play that succeeds in capturing our attention. We are looking where the artist wants us to look. We are steered by the properties of the painted image in a direction that has a higher probability of triggering an attentive look at the elements that the artist considers important for the comprehension of the work.
Contemporary artists no longer mistrust the audience or see it as a victim of society or media culture as some artists did in previous decades. Many have accepted that the attribution of meaning and the experience of art can differ from their own intentions and ideas. The linguistic and performative turn have made that an undeniable fact. According to Dorothea von Hantelmann, the performative must be understood as a dramaturgic concept that realizes itself both in the act of creation and in the experience of the artwork by the audience. 36 This increased role of the audience was sharply described by cultural theorist Mieke Bal: "When we are standing before a work of art, and when we admire it, are touched, moved, or even terrified by it, when a work of art somehow seems to do something to us, the question of artistic intention loses its obviousness, for the artist is no longer there to direct our response. He disappears, gives his work over to a public he will not know. What they do is have us "scan" them while they impregnate our attention with an overall insightful impression of the messy economic and political realities that surround us. There is no room  Confronted with their 28-second audiences, contemporary artists actively seek to engage the spectator's attention as well as (partially) ground their intention in the experience of the work.
Attention may no longer be an explicit subject of art, but the desire for an attentive perception on the part of the audience still marks in many ways contemporary artistic strategies, just as it did in the sixties and seventies.
1 Allan Kaprow, "The Artist as a Man of the World," (1964),