Spectatorship is a key term that we use here to incite critical investigation on the production of social relation through artistic practice. Discourse on spectatorship has long linked with (somewhat mythical) audience passive reception, but various progressive artistic-activist movements have contributed to decisive paradigm shift by deploying and elaborating art as a tool to produce the agency of the spectator and collective social relations. This shift has made the social and ethical implications of artistic events as the prime focus of discussions, since individual art work/project (be it film, theater, performance or visual art) is no longer the privileged object of analysis.
Moreover, we believe that discussions on the ways artistic practice engage with its spectators–rather than just evaluation on its artistic merit–would allow us to analyze the development of current artistic production beyond the boxes of art discipline. We would like to think spectatorship as transformative aesthetic processes that works by engaging with modes of senses and sensibilities: seeing, listening, touching, feeling, thinking, etc. How do artists perceive their relationship with the spectators? How do they produce relations with the spectators? What are the roles, or the new possible roles of spectators in current artistic production? Do new modes of spectatorship shift the role (or even the definition) of artist? If so, in what ways, and how?
In addition to that, we propose to sharpen our discussions through the notion ‘democratic spectatorship’ in order to comprehend the ideological views of activism that emerge as a response to the current political climate in Southeast Asia (SEA). For one thing, it could be related to how artists read the development of state democracy and the transition of elite power in their respective country. At the same time, and perhaps more importantly, we are interested to discuss how art workers perceive democratic spectatorship as forms of creative resistance and acts of citizenship on vernacular level. What are the most pressing issues in civil society movement in SEA today? How is the relationship between social activism and artistic practice in SEA? What networks of communities do we already have or still need? How can artistic methods contribute to the participatory process of democratization, tactically, strategically, and organizationally?
We also believe it is important to draw collective knowledge from postcolonial experiences across SEA countries to gain nuanced understandings of spectatorship in our social context. Taking into account the postcolonial critical discourse, new modes of spectatorship are often times also embedded with the quest to resist the reproduction of colonial gaze in modernist sites/institutions, such as the proscenium stage in the case of theater and performance, or the white-cube gallery in the case of visual art. Differences in historical trajectory, institutional practice, and even social lives of particular local customs and traditions—not only between Euro-American and SEA countries, but also between SEA countries itself—are topics that we aim to unpack in order to make sense the theoretical stage of our experiences. Bringing together case studies and reflections upon methodologies and theories of producing democratic spectatorship from interdisciplinary approach hopefully will form progressive exchanges and collaborations in the future.
Sense and Sensibility 