Can measurement of audience responses help to evaluate whether an artwork conveys the artist’s intentions?

This practice-based PhD research project has explored the gap that exists between the artist’s intentions and audience’s interpretation of the artwork. In the debates surrounding intention and interpretation there are a range of claims made by philosophers and artists (Barthes 1978, Duchamp 1957, Kosuth 1996, Pelosi 2016, Wimsatt and Beardsley 1946, Haladyn 2015, Zhang 2012). This research revealed that no agreed method exists to test or substantiate these claims, and although all claims referred to the ‘reader’ or ‘viewer’, no claim attempted to sufficiently involve the people that experience the work, the audience.

This research evolved out of the author’s creative practice of creating body-focused, immersive artworks. As the author attempted to develop his artworks to completion, he realised a key ingredient was missing from his creative practice: the audience. The author started to bring the audience into the heart of his creative practice by shaping it into two sequential stages: thereby closing the gap between the artwork’s intentions and the audience’s interpretation. Stage One captures qualitative audience responses to help iteratively develop potent body-focused, immersive artworks with precise intentions. Stage Two conducts rigorous Artwork Participation Sessions to record qualitative and quantitative audience responses to measure the extent the author’s intentions were conveyed to the audience. This research champions the unique skills, approach and methodology of the artist-researcher engaging in practice-based research. The scope of this research should be seen from within the context of body-focused, immersive artworks. After many iterations the Two-Stage Method became the vehicle to answer the research question, can measurement of audience responses help evaluate whether an artwork conveys the artist’s intentions? 

The PhD’s contribution to knowledge is two-fold. Firstly, the Two-Stage Method can contribute to the artist’s creative practice by allowing the informed artist-researcher to confidently affirm: this is my precise intention, this is the audience interpretation data and this is the extent that my artwork conveyed its intentions to the audience. Secondly, the Two-Stage Method also contributes to the debates surrounding intention and interpretation by providing the informed artist-researcher with precise and empirical data to make valuable and insightful contributions to help close the gap at the centre of this debate.