I wake reluctantly to the imploring eyes of a black Labrador whose face is five inches from my own. Ish, as we say here in Minnesota, I’ve been licked awake again.
The locus of the work of art exists, not in the art object or performance, but somewhere between the artist’s medium and his audience. It is the work done in the interaction of the artist and his audience that creates the artwork, a necessarily transient and unique metaphysical object.
“It’s a pleasure to show the viewer how easily he can be manipulated. If you succeed in doing this, you’ve succeeded.”
-Michael Haneke
The role of the audience in cinema has largely been that of the passive spectator. Filmmaking itself is an art form that depends, to a certain extent, on the willful submission of a viewer to the filmmaker.
If art is to represent the avant-garde frame of mind in human insight, then it follows that science was the advancement of this way of thinking. This is in reference to Gene Youngblood's idea of the artist as an ecologist, that is, one who deals with environmental functions. In this way, the artist, and the scientist, rearrange the environment to the advantage of society.