MarleneAngeja

Two quotes about the viewer we imagine:
“Unofficial culture always addresses the individual, concrete person… What kind of subject is this? He is, above all, a being who is reflective and capable of judging the work of art according to his own personal experience… That is, unofficial art is addressed to a person who can enter into a dialogue with you on the same level. It does not engage in the well known game: leader-crowd, teacher-student, prophet-adept, doctor-patient and so on.” (Ilya Kabakov, quoted in Matthew Jesse Jackson’s The Experimental Group, p. 97)

“…Kabakov’s career revolves around the artist’s performative negotiation of the Other’s gaze. The struggle throughout his art has been to overcome this Other (“the abstract viewer who does not exist”), to escape its ideological monitoring, whether it be the political gaze of the State, the pedagogical gaze of the Instructor, the professional gaze of the Editor, or the evaluative gaze of the Collector. There is a continual effort to make peace with this Big Other, while always searching out the concrete dialogic interlocutor who stands in the Other’s shadow.” (Jackson, p. 97)