Why create? The audience and art

Following on from my last blog on the psychological pay-back to the artist in the creation of works, some thoughts now on the audience and their experience of art.

Freud talked of the creative process being akin to child’s play and for Sarason (The Challenge of Art to Psychology, 1988) the drive to create does not end with the latent period of childhood for the person in the audience: the motivation to view art is a creative practice in itself. The ‘art experience’ can be seen as a moment of personal expression, and the liking or disliking of art a revealing ‘affective response’.

As viewer we seek out this affective response. At a neurological level we experience pleasure when experiencing art and it engages both left and right hemispheres of the brain, which agrees with Arnheim’s (New Essays on the Psychology of Art, 1986) assertion that we experience art emotionally via intuition and intellectually via reason. In viewing art we enter a social relationship with the artist and the artwork: the audience participates in its creation and the art has the potential to change the person. The art experience is a sublimated expression of our suppressed desire of interest in the collective – we go to view art to ask ‘what does the artist think of life?’ to help our own quest.

A simultaneous ‘surrender and reflection’, this experience generates subconscious affects which are more intense than the conscious ones. The artwork can perform this complex task because it plays the same role for the audience as it does for the artist, with the potential of challenge and the satisfaction of desires. If we think of transference as the unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another, we might see there is a moment of transference in the art experience. Thus the art experience becomes therapeutic for the audience, as it is for the artist. It offers a way of moving a conflict with the subconscious without lapsing into neurosis; a personal creative, cathartic act of overcoming one’s own opposing feelings.

But we also have our own personal psychographic relationship with the art experience. Can it be true that at the point of exhibition the artist’s motivation and message becomes irrelevant, as art is now in the public and open to myriad interpretation? After all, we bring ourselves and our lived experience to the art experience.

And we need to remember that not everyone seeks out the art experience. The art experience is an ambivalent one; we can seek it out or we can actively avoid it as it could be confrontational or painful. How do our sectors work to increase access, participatory and community arts and art therapy, in accordance with this knowledge of audience interaction? There is a recognised audience resistance to going to designated art spaces – is this because they are spaces perceived to be contingent, a ‘special’ space where change could happen, change which may not be welcomed?