458397

2012
CGJ0010.1177/1474474012458397Cultural GeographiesWarren

Article

cultural geographies

Audiencing James Turrell’s 20(1) 83­–102

© The Author(s) 2012
Reprints and permission: sagepub.
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DOI: 10.1177/1474474012458397

art and audience at Yorkshire

cgj.sagepub.com

Sculpture Park

Saskia Warren
University of Sheffield, UK

Abstract
This article investigates the under-addressed topic of audiencing in relation to art in landscape,
considering the ways in which this study can enliven cultural geography. Exploring how issues
of interpretation and reception have been approached in the past, it tailors mixed methods
to trace audience practices using the case study of James Turrell’s Skyspace at Yorkshire
Sculpture Park, England. Turrell’s site art is installed in a remodelled deershelter within the
Bretton Estate, bringing together contemporary art, heritage and working landscape. This
research contributes to recent debate on post-phenomenological work by representing
multiple subjects’ engagements with site art. Vignettes of audiencing are presented that
challenge authorial control and curatorial interpretation in specific ways pointing toward
the open-endedness of the production and reception of cultural forms. Developing cultural
geography’s engagement with art, the article challenges geographers to consider how the
meaning of works and sites can be renegotiated according to the specialisms of others, and
the social dimensions of audience experience. By showing how critical enquiry can become
more democratized through the inclusion of different subjects, it reveals the important
theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions the study of audiencing can make to
the geographies of art.

Keywords
art, audience, audiencing, landscape, site

I’m always puzzled by audiences. I really don’t know who they are or why they’re there or what
they’re thinking.1

Corresponding author:
Saskia Warren, Department of Geography, University of Sheffield, Winter Street, Sheffield, S10 2TN.
Email: warrensaskia@gmail.com

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84 cultural geographies 20(1)

In the above quote, lauded contemporary dance choreographer Paul Taylor describes his interest in
the audiences to his shows. For Taylor, audiences are a curiosity that he is ‘always puzzled by’. The
success of a performance is entwined with the role of the audience; however, as Taylor indicates,
their identities, sense of purpose and thoughts often remain obscure. Post-structuralist theory has
emphasized the active role of the audience in negotiating the meaning of art. In particular, signifi-
cant texts including Umberto Eco’s The Poetics of the Open Work2 and Roland Barthes’ later text
Death of the Author3 foregrounded the interpretative role of the viewer, listener or reader in open-
ing up fields of possibility in the meaning of a piece of artwork, music or text. In the arts, the notion
of the audience has been widely mobilized to embrace the range of positions and participatory
dimensions of audience encounters.4 ‘To audience’ describes an exchange between the subjects and
medium or form.5 Yet, in geographical research on art there remains a paucity of research into what
audiences ‘really think and do’.6 In the following section I outline the theoretical, methodological
and empirical aims of this article, which are intended to address in part the lacuna in research on
audiencing art, and its implications for geographical enquiry.
By performing qualitative research into audiencing, an understanding of the spatial and social
dimensions of arts engagement can be enriched, empirically broadening existing research on art
and the role of the audience. With emphasis on the contingency of art experience, this article ques-
tions whether constructing and designating the ‘meaning’ of art should be the preserve of critics
and arts professionals who represent only a proportion of the audience who engage with art.
Instead, by tracing the audiencing of art in landscape, this article makes the contribution of recog-
nizing how audiences are not a separate moment in the meaningful biography of an artwork but
enmeshed within circuits of exchange that mediate cultural forms. The case study of this article is
a work of site art by artist James Turrell entitled Skyspace (2006), which is installed in the pictur-
esque landscape of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, England. Yorkshire Sculpture Park is situated in the
Bretton Estate and was opened to the public in 1977, creating an open air gallery in the landscape
of an historic estate.
I first introduce the artwork and biography of Turrell, with attention to Skyspace at Yorkshire
Sculpture Park, which forms the empirical focus of this article. I then review the literature on
audiencing itself, before moving on to literatures in other key areas. Developing from the proj-
ects of Nina Morris, Venda Pollock and Joanne Sharp, and Dydia DeLyser, among others,
research into reception can uncover how actual audiences engage with creative forms and pro-
duce meaningful relationships between site and art. The methods I use to explore audiencing site
art at Yorkshire Sculpture Park are discussed, which offers alternative challenges to advancing
an auto-ethnographic interpretation or tracing the audiencing of an ephemeral art work. Writing
by Stephen Daniels and Yve-Alain Bois on the picturesque landscape and Miwon Kwon’s three
strand exploration of the relationship between site, art and audience are then engaged to open up
discussion on the specificity of site art experience. I follow these theoretical engagements with
vignettes of audiencing Skyspace drawn from empirical findings obtained over 10 months at
Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

James Turrell at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

James Turrell is an artist who has gained international recognition for site art installations that
focus on light and space. Most renowned is Turrell’s magnum opus, Roden Crater, an extinct vol-
cano transformed into a ‘naked eye observatory’ near Arizona’s Painted Desert.7 His work has been
commissioned by private collections and museums across the US and Europe, with a further con-
centration of works in Argentina and Japan. While the installations are situated in different

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Warren 85

countries and across distinctive cultural and material locales, the meaning of the art has often been
located in critical literatures by recourse to the artist’s biography. Concerns with light and percep-
tion, for instance, have been related to his Quaker upbringing, his training as a pilot in Nevada, and
undergraduate degree in maths and psychology.8 Notably, critical interpretations of Turrell’s light
and space works have also tended to situate his art within a 20th-century project that interconnects
with phenomenological theory.9 Combining these approaches, the originatory source of the artist is
emphasized by William Banks, who guides the reader/viewer on a behind-the-scenes tour of
Turrell’s Second Wind 2005, presenting the conception to the realization of the installation by text
and photography.10 Taking the interpretation of Turrell’s work in a new direction, I use audiencing
as a method to open up the alternative ways in which the meaning of art can be framed with focus
on Turrell’s Skyspace at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. By addressing the social and spatial dimensions
of encounters with Skyspace, this article responds instead to the cultural geographies of site art, and
in particular the spatial practices of its audiencing.
Turrell’s Skyspace was adapted from an early deershelter that formed part of the Bretton
Estate, which in the 18th-century extended between Barnsley and Wakefield, West Yorkshire.
Once a private country estate made wealthy from lead and iron interests, Bretton was part sold
in 1948 following occupation by the War Office during the Second World War. Since 1977,
under the management of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, over 500 acres of the estate has gradually
been reunified. In the summer of 1993 Turrell stayed for several weeks at the sculpture park
while working on a project for the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust at Dean Clough, Halifax.
Fascinated by the history of the Bretton Estate, Turrell developed a proposal to transform the
deershelter into a Skyspace. The project was eventually realized 13 years later through a
£800,000 grant from The Art Fund. Clare Lilley, Director of Programme at Yorkshire Sculpture
Park, emphasized the vital connection between landscape heritage and art in the project: ‘As
well as making a contemporary art work, the Turrell Skyspace has facilitated the restoration and
conservation of this historic structure.’11

Critical engagements with audiencing

The theory and methods that underpin the findings in this article shift the usage of the static noun
‘audience’ to the active verb ‘audiencing’. The term audiencing is indebted to the work of cultural
theorist John Fiske.12 Fiske emphasizes the process by which the mass media is engaged with by
the viewer configured as the active audience. He advances the argument that culture is a continuous
process of the social circulation of meanings and that ‘audiencing’ is part of that process. Sites of
analysis are used where this circulation becomes accessible, such as participant observation of
teenagers watching a television show, which reveal ‘glimpses of culture in practice’.13 With focus
on visual images, Gillian Rose also defines audiencing as a ‘process’ whereby an image has ‘its
meanings renegotiated, or even rejected, by particular audiences watching in specific circum-
stances’.14 Privileging the visual over other sensory responses, Rose, using a combination of one-
to-one and group interviews, builds on the work of Shaun Moores, David Morley and Ien Ang, to
propose that, as a method, audiencing can reveal multiple meanings of a particular form or medium,
as well as informing us of ‘the complexity of the decoding process’.15 Audiencing can therefore be
understood as the ‘process of producing through lived experience’16 insights into the audience and
their social relations, combined with the active inscription of meaning into a particular medium or
form by different audiences. Using grounded empirical research, recent work on audiencing has
explored audience responses to television, film, comic books and the internet to inform under-
standing on nationalism, identity, fan-bases and emotion.17

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86 cultural geographies 20(1)

Tracing the audiencing of art in landscape has not been addressed directly in cultural geogra-
phy; however, geographers have considered complimentary issues of audience reception and
place-making through a variety of artistic mediums. In her article on the landscape-installation art,
The Storr, Morris develops a methodology that engages a range of experiences beyond her self-
perspective.18 The notion of audiencing is not specifically mobilized by Morris, yet a combination
of semi-structured interviews with the audience and organizers, participant observation, and an
online feedback form were tailored to write about ‘multiple/collective experiences’ of art in land-
scape.19 This approach can be seen to enliven certain post-phenomenological theorizing about
landscape, such as John Wylie and Mitch Rose’s work where personal experiences are represented
in narrative-based writing developing ‘a more relational understanding of landscape with a stress
on process, movement and becoming’.20 As Morris notes, the subjective focus of this strand of
post-phenomenology has subsequently been criticized for ‘being solipsistic, introverted and her-
meneutically sealed’. The decision not to preclude the thoughts, feelings and experiences of the
other participants was configured by Morris as responding to a theme of The Storr installation,
‘one walk, many journeys’.21
In work that also explores reception and interpretation, rather than presentation, DeLyser inves-
tigates the active participation of tourists in the creation of attractions relating to the 1884 US novel
Ramona.22 Instead of concentrating on the real-estate hype and the ‘boosterist promotion of place’
that followed the novel’s success, DeLyser recovered traces of tourist responses to Ramona-related
attractions in newspaper articles, inscribed postcards and personal memory albums. While ‘none
speaks loudly’ together, these traces demonstrate the ‘roles of individual tourists in the creation of
tourist sites’.23 This offers a subtle methodological approach for engaging with audiencing prac-
tices in historical geography that also has pertinence for analysing different forms of reception in
contemporary arts practice. Other methods used to gain insight into the role of audiences and art in
place-making activities are Sharp and Pollock’s postcard feedback questionnaires for local resi-
dents on Stephen Hurrel’s Constellation, in Ayr, West Scotland.24
In these articles the agencies of different kinds of audience, traced through interviews, par-
ticipant observation, archival practices and questionnaires, are central to the production of
meaning at each site and artwork under discussion. In part informed by Morris, DeLyser, and
Sharp and Pollock’s various engagements with issues of reception, this article sets out to illu-
minate audience engagements that usually remain unrecorded or disregarded, and that can give
new insights into the meaning of art within different people’s lives. By expanding understand-
ing of critical spatial sensibilities, tracing the audiencing of site art can enliven cultural geog-
raphy’s engagement with the geographies of art. In the next section I outline the methods used
in this research, which complicate the agency of site art beyond authorial intention and curato-
rial directives. The work advances debate on the role of the audience with emphasis on different
forms of expertise and social relations that engage the ‘transient encounters, states of flux and
open-endedness’ of art in landscape.25

Tracing the audiencing of Turrell’s Skyspace

The empirical findings in this article are drawn from fieldwork undertaken at Yorkshire
Sculpture Park from September 2009 to July 2010. The fieldwork extended over a longer period
than other geographical studies on art interpretation and reception partly to gain insights into
ways in which a permanent piece of site art adapts to the changing spatial environment of the
sculpture park.26 Furthermore, bringing a range of audience practices to the analysis of art is
central to the theoretical concerns of the research, hence the timeline allowed for observing

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Warren 87

initial encounters, repeat visiting and conducting follow-up interviews. The research extended
upon the findings recovered by archival and questionnaire-based studies by gaining insights
into the active and physical dimensions of audience negotiations with site art.27 Interview mate-
rial, participant observation and photographic diaries provided vignettes of audience engage-
ments with art and landscape, alongside more focused detailed responses to the Skyspace from
which the material in this article is selected.
In order to understand the audiencing of Turrell’s Skyspace within the wider context of the
sculpture park, non-directive, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 60 audience mem-
bers on their visits.28 Responding to fluxes in visitation, opportunistic sampling was used as a
method to follow the phenomenon of audiencing with the location of the interviews varied accord-
ingly.29 The majority of interviews were conducted in the Visitor Centre café, which is a meeting
and resting point for many visitors, offering a sheltered and warm space to recruit participants.
Other ‘on-the-spot’ interviews took place outdoors in the parklands and at special ticketed events
where bodily interactions with the artwork could be observed, including three Sunrise in the
Skyspace events.30 A further stage of in-depth follow-up interviews was conducted with 11 audi-
ence members. These took place variously by telephone, in public places such as a coffee shop, or
on a repeat visit to the park.
The combination of methods revealed how these audiences physically engaged with the art, how
they culturally framed their experiences and how they ‘recoded as well as decoded’ the exhibition,
rather than whether they ‘had got or not got the messages intended’.31 The contention that methods
can turn the audience into the object of study and therefore fail to capture the meaningful exchange
between the medium and members of the audience is pertinent. In reference to television, Ang
enforces this point, disputing whether the audience can be regarded as ‘a proper object of study
whose characteristics can be ever more accurately observed, described, categorised, systematised and
explained until the whole picture is “filled in.”’32 Learning from these and other insights, it was
important to make clear that, as literary and cultural theorist Mieke Bal recognizes in her analysis of
exhibition displays from the American Museum of Natural History, New York, ‘the things that hap-
pen in cultural practices cannot be fully mastered, predicted, and programmed’.33
The tailoring of mixed methods combined with different interview sites was adopted not to
presume a complete perspective, but to show how they can be used together to create multi-faceted
and attentive insights into audiencing art in landscape.34 Observed encounters with Skyspace were
often brief, as audiences moved from artwork to artwork, point to point, mapping their own itiner-
aries across the spaces of the sculpture park. Interviews conducted apart from the Skyspace, such
as in the Visitor Centre café, offered reflections and contextualized the work in relation to the wider
experience of visiting the park. Each of the vignettes of audience practices differs from the direc-
tives of Turrell and curatorial mediation outlined later in the article, offering their own critical
corrective that demonstrates the gap between artistic intentionality and the intended audience
through the spatial practices of audiencing.
Notably, there are comparisons between the role of the ethnographer and the role of the audi-
ence when considering the experience of site art. In the same way that ethnographers ‘become part
of the fabric of the context they are researching’35 on entering the art installation ‘the whole audi-
ence were in the field, ensconced in the richness and complexity of the experience’.36 The compari-
son Carl Bagley draws between the role of the ethnographer and the audience is particularly
enabling for he recognizes subjective responses of audience members as sophisticated and special-
ized. By considering the audience as individual experts, differential knowledges can be brought to
an understanding of Skyspace; in particular, experiences that challenge how we categorize Turrell’s
works.

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88 cultural geographies 20(1)

The picturesque landscape and Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Before turning to the empirical findings of the research, in this section I consider theoretical work
on the picturesque that elucidates the relationship between art, landscape and the implied audience.
Writing by Daniels and Bois provides points of comparison with Kwon’s work on site art. Read
together, Daniels, Bois and Kwon offer an analytic grounding for the empirical findings of audi-
encing Turrell’s Skyspace that follow.
Yorkshire Sculpture Park is comprised of four internal white-cube gallery spaces along with
expansive parklands designed in the 18th-century by Robert Woods in the picturesque style closely
associated with renowned landscape gardeners Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown and Humpry Repton
(Figure 1).37 As Daniels’ study of Brown’s drawings and Repton’s ‘Red Book’ watercolours with
overlays has shown, the connection between landscape, art and audience was presented in the care-
ful artistry of the plans for the improvement of country estates: when examined in detail the social
and cultural layering of meaning could be ‘read’ in the drawings’ symbolic visual imagery.38
Brown and Repton’s pictures worked as artistic models to be scaled up for the finished object.
However, as Bois contends, there is a contradiction when Brown, Repton and their peers treat the
scenic garden with its ‘promenade, temporal experience’ and landscape painting ‘as though they
were one and the same thing’.39 Vital to the dynamics of the picturesque is that the landscape is not
simply a picture. Aristocratic amateur gardener and writer on the picturesque, Uvedale Price,
describes how the garden ‘excites and nourishes curiosity’ by a ‘partial and uncertain conceal-
ment’.40 As Bois and Price illustrate, the picturesque garden is an escape from the pictorial and the
visual into the embodied experience of a person moving through the physical landscape.
The English garden heritage interrogates the distinction between nature and art in the landscape
of historic estates, which was further emphasized with the founding of a sculpture park within the

Figure 1. View across Country Park with Henry Moore sculptures,YSP. Photograph by the author, 2010.

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Warren 89

Bretton Estate. Importantly, the physicality of the bronze Henry Moore sculptures and Antony
Caro’s Promenade41 assert their monumental scale and dimensions in dialogue with the park’s
picturesque landscape (Figure 2). Turrell’s Skyspace is installed more subtly with the deershelter
embedded into the hillside of the Country Park, originally designed to protect the deer from the
elements. Standing within the Country Park the deershelter is apparent from a south facing per-
spective but almost obscured from view from other vantage points. As one participant observed,
‘from the outside it is very discrete, it blends into nature, but when you enter it makes this real
statement’.42 The Skyspace, sculptures and landscape at Yorkshire Sculpture Park are designed to
be discovered by audience navigation with the appearance and visibility of ‘nature’ and ‘art’ alter-
ing depending upon the season, weather conditions and physical approach.
The exceptional opportunity to bring designed landscape and sculpture into concert was recog-
nized by the Founding Director Peter Murray, ex-lecturer at Bretton Hall College, who was awarded
Commander of the Order of British Empire in 2010. Reflecting on the distinctive spatial capabili-
ties of the site, Murray states:

One thing which is particular to this landscape is as you walk through it the experiences change and that is
to do with the quality of the landscape. It is designed in that way. Sometimes to artists it is a challenge to
take on that landscape, that scale of it. But if you walk around the landscape and get to know it, there are
lots of intimate areas too . . . I think the variety, the beauty, the range of different spaces make it one of the
best sites for sculpture in the country.43

The spatial capabilities outlined by Murray are captured in the title of Yorkshire Sculpture
Park’s 30th anniversary publication Landscape for Art.44 Essential to the dynamics of the sculpture
park are the active and generative relationship between art, landscape and audience. Bois has

Figure 2. View across Lower Lake with Antony Caro’s Promenade,YSP. Photograph by the author, 2010.

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90 cultural geographies 20(1)

noted, ‘[t]he dialectic of walking and looking into the landscape establishes the sculptural experi-
ence’.45 In the next section I develop this discussion using the work of art historian Miwon Kwon,
to emphasize how the physicality of site art demands the presence of the audience. Continuing with
Kwon’s argument on the cultural and discursive framework of site art, I outline an analytical
approach for understanding the negotiated relationship between site art and audience that under-
pins the empirical findings of this research.

Miwon Kwon: site, art and audience

The critical relationship between site, art and audience is explored in detail by Kwon. Outlining
the genealogy of site art, Kwon examines site specificity not exclusively as an artistic genre but
as a ‘peculiar cipher of art and spatial politics’.46 She traces key stages of site-specific theory and
practice since the late 1960s with recognition that ‘the paradigms are outlined as competing defi-
nitions that operate in overlapping ways in past and current site-orientated art’.47 Emerging from
the lessons of Minimalism, site-specific art was initially informed by a phenomenological or
experiential understanding of site that took the site as a tangible reality and ‘whether interruptive
or assimilative’ the work ‘gave itself up to its environmental context, being formally determined
or directed by it’.48 Drawing parallels with minimalism and conceptual art, the site-specific turn
is associated by Kwon with a move from the ‘disembodied eye’ to ‘an inextricable, indivisible
relationship between the work and its site, [which] demanded the physical presence of the viewer
for the work’s completion’.49 The phenomenological understanding of the roots of site art
described by Kwon can be seen to place the audience and the experiential dimensions of audienc-
ing at the core of the works.
Kwon also identifies a second strand, represented by artists including Daniel Buren, Hans
Haacke and Robert Smithson, which variously conceived the site ‘not only in physical and spatial
terms but as a cultural framework defined by the institutions of art’.50 The epistemological chal-
lenge created by emphasis on the cultural framework in site-specific art not only shifts meaning
from ‘within the art object to the contingencies of its context’, but acts to ‘challenge the “inno-
cence” of space’.51 By drawing attention to the space(s) of presentation, the art institution is shown
to be a controlled environment that can serve an ideological function through shaping how audi-
ences perceive art.52
The third strand Kwon draws is site as a discursive vector. This site is not a ‘precondition’
rather, ‘it is generated by the work . . . and then verified by its convergence with existing forma-
tions’.53 The discursively determined site is delineated as a field of knowledge, intellectual
exchange, or cultural debate. Expanding upon Kwon’s reading of the physical, cultural and discur-
sive framework of site art, audiencing can empirically open up new avenues for understanding the
agency of the audience and cultural geographies of site art experience.
Kwon places into a trinity the presence of the viewer, the art work and the site, in order to
draw out the importance of context in reading art’s meaning. A student of Rosalyn Deutsche,
Kwon conceives of site-specificity in Deutsche’s terms, as ‘urban-aesthetic’ or ‘spatial-
discourse’.54 That is, her work seeks to frame site specificity as the cultural mediation of
broader social, economic and political processes that organize urban life and public space.
Notably, although Kwon situates the application of her ‘spatio-political’ work on site speci-
ficity in the urban domain, she nevertheless acknowledges a shared critical heritage in site
specific work created in non-urban contexts: ‘whether inside the white cube or out in the
Nevada desert, whether architectural or landscape-orientated, site specific art initially took
the site as the actual location’.55 Morris and Cant have recognized that site art beyond towns

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and cities is prominent in UK public-art commissions; however, these works continue to be

under-represented in spatial discourse and critical writing on public art.56 By using the case
study of Turrell’s Skyspace at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, I attend to this tension by focusing
on audiencing site art in a rural environment. In the section that follows I describe the physi-
cal and cultural context of what guides the audience experience of Turrell’s Skyspace in the
‘outdoor gallery’ of Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Curating Turrell’s Skyspace

The Skyspace is a short 10 minute walk from the Visitor Centre on undulating terrain part way
down the Country Park (Figure 3). To access the Skyspace audiences are required to enter the gate
that is closed to keep the grazing sheep outside of the deershelter structure. Signs notify that the
Skyspace is open from ‘10–4 pm. in Winter’ and ‘10–5 pm in Summer’. Outside the Skyspace, an
interpretation panel written by the curatorial team reads:

James Turrell is one of the world’s leading artists. Working with natural or man-made light, he makes
thought-provoking and beautiful works which often have a profound effect on the viewer.

Another panel outside the Skyspace explains the rules for visitors:

Timed viewings may be allocated to avoid over-crowding. Please respect the experience of other visitors.
Do not be noisy or use mobile phones. Do not picnic or smoke. Allow yourself time, space and silence.

Figure 3. Deershelter with Visitor Centre in background,YSP. Photograph by the author, 2010.

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92 cultural geographies 20(1)

The curatorial interpretation firmly emphasizes the creative act of the artist: Turrell ‘makes
thought-provoking and beautiful works’.57 The structures that enshroud the artwork are deci-
sive both foregrounding the importance of the artist and the rules by which the artwork is to
be engaged. The authority of the artist and the institution are reinforced despite the rhetoric
drawn by the mediation of an open ‘thought-provoking’ work that often has a ‘profound
effect’ on the viewer.58 To see the Skyspace, audiences must walk through the subtly-lit brick
arches of the 18th century deershelter and into the remodelled concrete and stone central
chamber. Benches line the edges of the chamber with inclined walls that guide the audience
to look upwards toward the ceiling. Cut into the ceiling is a square aperture that opens out
onto the sky (Figure 4). Through a trick of perspective affected by the soft, yellow lighting of
the bulbs that line the top of the seating, the colour intensity and physicality of the light from
the sky appears to materialize more fully within the aperture. While interpretation of the Sky-
space remains open to the audience, as is ultimately the case with any artwork,59 a framework
for engaging with the installation is inscribed through the signage and architecture, which
directs behaviour and understanding.

Figure 4. Deershelter, Skyspace, James Turrell, 2006. Installation at Yorkshire Sculpture Park © 2006 YSP
and James Turrell. Photograph by the author, 2010.

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Warren 93

Published on the website and interpretative material are quotations of Turrell discussing his
design for the Skyspace:

My work is not so much about my seeing as about your seeing. There is no one between you and your
experience.60
My desire is to set up a situation to which I can take you and let you see . . . My art deals with light itself,
not as the bearer of revelation, but as the revelation itself.61

In Turrell’s formulations the audiences’ perception of light entwines the concept and mate-
rial of the art. The artist is the agent who enables the right conditions, yet it is the audience
member who perceives the light, processing her or his experience. Interestingly, Turrell is
rarely present for the making of his exhibitions or Skyspaces. Instead, a manual is sent with
one or two of his assistants to oversee the installation of the work. Therefore, despite the
sculpture park’s website and interpretative material foregrounding the role of artist, the con-
ventional notion of the artist’s hand in the process of making is removed.62 The artist as the
creative source is troubled, placing further strain on the efficacy of the notion that the artist
has authorial control over the artwork and its meaning. Alternative ways in which the meaning
of the artwork can be interpreted are opened up in the section that follows with audience prac-
tices of Turrell’s Skyspace. This frames the meaning of art empirically, offering new avenues
to the compelling yet problematic narrative of the artist that is widely circulated in critical
literatures and replicated in the curatorial mediation above.63

Vignettes of audiencing Turrell’s Skyspace

Audiences map meaning in multifarious ways from encounters with Skyspace; therefore, the
vignettes selected in this section are significant because they challenge authorial control and
curatorial interpretation in specific ways. The following interviews and analysis aim to create
the important recognition that audiences are specialists who ‘use’ art according to their own
knowledges, interests and social relations. However, the experience of art is not singularly
based on where audiences come from, but who and what they meet with during their encounters.
Instead of residing unreservedly with the artist or arts professionals, the cultural meaning of art
exists in exchanges between very different and power-differentiated communities of audiences,
the artwork and the changing environment of the artspace.
In these opening vignettes, participants Maria and Jeremy64 drew upon their different trainings,
respectively an amateur choralist and undergraduate student in architecture, to inform the meaning
of Skyspace:

I’m actually a tenor . . . did you hear us singing in there? Well, we were singing because it has the most
beautiful acoustics and we were just saying that we want to bring back our quartet and sing in here . . . In
music there’s this return to communal singing and I wonder if there could be something like this for art.
Communal art. It’s about bringing people to the artwork and seeing what they make of it. It’s coming from
the inside and sharing.65
With the architecture course [we’ve] been doing the tutors have been trying to get us away from what you
think architecture is and [the course has] been a lot more expressive this year. We’ve been looking at a lot
of sculpture and trying to be more creative . . . One of the things they told us was to look at the Skyspace
in the deershelter.66

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94 cultural geographies 20(1)

In the first extract Maria established that she is a choral singer, and then described how she
practiced singing in the Skyspace. Later on in the same interview Maria introduced her occupation
as a homeopath, relating her work to ‘this cerebral feeling of everything slowing down, of calming
down’. The sensorial ‘very therapeutic’ qualities of the Skyspace that Maria described can be seen
to engage the language of her homeopathy. The installation is described by Maria through physical
registers rather than visual description, with the reflection that Skyspace ‘slows you right down, I
can actually feel my blood pressure dropping’.67
Interpreting the Skyspace through the sensual physicality of singing and her homeopathy, this
audiencing vignette reopens the question of whether the experience of installation work is ever
purely centred on optics,68 with the relationship between visual and other sensory modalities vital
to the subject’s self-reflexive understanding of the artwork.69 Turrell’s work was also conceptual-
ized by Maria as a productive place that brings people together creatively; a space for ‘communal
art’.70 This interest in communalism draws a direct connection between Maria’s interests in life
outside the spaces of the park with how she performs within the Skyspace, through choral singing
with a friend.
The vignette provides a powerful example of audiencing site art, emphasizing the active role of
the audience in an art encounter. In particular, the act of singing in an artspace intended for quiet
contemplation is indicative of the non-uniformity of audience experience. Insights from this
vignette reach beyond description of the material, formal qualities of the artwork, to elucidate the
social, performative and affective capabilities of Skyspace. It also signals the potential for creative
reimaginings of established and already ‘located’ site art according to different specialisms and
passions.
In the case of Jeremy, the organized visit to Skyspace was creatively directed by guidance from
tutors on his university course. Visiting the deershelter Skyspace was intended to push the students’
conceptions of architecture through its intersections with sculpture. The architectural design of the
inner chamber was Jeremy’s primary focus:

I think you can look at the sky anytime you want but to walk into that environment and to put a frame
around the sky suddenly makes it more interesting . . . It took me a few minutes to know what I was
looking at . . . Because when I went it was such a cloudy day and it just looked like a fluorescent day [in
the chamber] . . . I found it interesting that just by having a frame around the sky, it becomes art.71

Jeremy refers to the framing device of the aperture, suggesting a distinction between subject and
object, rather than collapsing the two into one another. This vignette therefore works as a critical
corrective to the account of Turrell: ‘[m]y art deals with light itself, not as the bearer of revelation,
but as the revelation itself’.72 Instead, Jeremy proposes that the architecture of display forms the
most engaging aspect of the work: ‘I found it interesting that just by having a frame around the sky,
it becomes art’.73
In the vignettes taken from the interview with Jeremy, the architecture of the Skyspace forms the
point of interest rather than the light itself. Or, indeed, the way in which the architecture and inter-
nal lighting makes and transforms celestial light. Extending understanding of the dynamics of the
picturesque landscape, this example attends to the relationships between sculpture and landscape
with architecture and the sky that gives rise to the sculptural experience in Skyspace. The experi-
ential connection between these elements is magnified in intensity by the aperture. The structure of
Skyspace therefore frames the sky as another kind of site for the audience;74 however, in doing so
it simultaneously draws attention to the technologies of its design. Throwing into relief the mecha-
nisms of the artwork, Jeremy’s insights point toward a rupture between Turrell’s and the curator’s

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design with the audience response. Jeremy’s specialized response to the Skyspace resists demateri-
alizing the art and, by foregrounding the architecture, he also challenges where the artwork
resides.75 Underscoring the importance of context in the determination of the artwork, the case can
be seen to intersect with Kwon’s account of the cultural framework in site art. In this vignette, it is
not the perceptual power of the light that holds value, but the contingencies of the architectural
structures, meaning the whole arena of the deershelter Skyspace becomes the artwork.
Maria and Jeremy are distinct in how they analyse their experiences, with terms including inter-
est, expressiveness and sharing employed to communicate the meaning of each encounter. These
terms bear similarities, however, in owing a relationship to registers of critical and affective
engagement. In both cases the installation acts as a creative catalyst in the geographical spaces of
the sculpture park and beyond. The encounter with the Skyspace was neither a singular nor con-
tained experience. Follow-up interviews with Maria and Jeremy revealed that both had revisited
Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the Skyspace. Further, they had reproduced their engagements with
Skyspace in representational spaces beyond the park.
Maria, marking the commemorative occasion of her retirement as an occupational therapist,
returned with other choir members and recorded their communal singing in the Skyspace on video-
tape. Recordings of the tape were then distributed to the homes of all those who had participated in
the singing. Meanwhile, Jeremy revisited with his partner where he developed sketch book draw-
ings from his first visit that were revised and submitted as part of an assessed component of his
undergraduate course. Jeremy also visited Turrell’s Skyspace in Kielder Park, Northumberland, on
‘another trip with the uni’ in the same academic year, articulating connections between the two site
works:

There were three different trips you could choose between . . . and I specifically chose the one with the
Turrell so I could get to see [ Skyspace in Kielder Park] and compare it to the one at the Yorkshire Sculpture
Park . . . I think this one [he points to the image of the Skyspace in Kielder Park] is a lot more successful
than the one at the sculpture park because of the round shape of it. It looks like a planet which is orbiting.76

The vignettes of Maria and Jeremy show certain ways in which the site art at Yorkshire Sculp-
ture Park hosts creative and educational exchanges, and exists in representational and ‘more-than-
representational’ spaces beyond the geographical boundaries of the park.77 Together, they also
point toward new areas of critical investigation, such as where site and site art meets with the
geographies of mobility.78
Meanwhile vignettes that draw out embodied issues of (im)mobility in the research can be used
to inform the on-site geography of Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The built environment has been
shown to discriminate against certain bodies in the geographies of disability79 and feminist geog-
raphies of maternity and obesity.80 Sue and her husband David pointed out to me on a map the route
they took around the park on their visit: ‘We went through this park – across the bridge – up and
over to Longside – then to Oxley Wood – and then to the café’.81 After completing their journey of
the sculpture park, Sue and David told me that they came ‘to rest’ because they ‘were absolutely
knackered’. Sue detailed the demands of the landscape as the reason for why the married couple
did not experience Skyspace despite considering themselves ‘keen walkers’. ‘I’ve been ill and I’m
still not very well so that affects my mobility’, said Sue. ‘We did well but that gradient is too
difficult.’
Two other participants also highlighted how mobility issues negated a visit to Skyspace: ‘mum’s
hurt her leg and so we couldn’t walk that far’.82 The attention drawn to mobility by these partici-
pants recalls Harriet Hawkins’s critical spatial sensibilities, where the embodied experience of

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96 cultural geographies 20(1)

travelling through installation art is informed by landscape practices.83 In fact, in the context of the
sculpture park the embodied experience of being in landscape directly informs the quality of art
engagement. Landscape is not described in terms of visuality and aesthetics; instead, the gradient
is referred to in bodily registers of (im)mobility. For Sue, the incline of the Country Park leading
to the deershelter is ‘too difficult’ to access.84
Contributing to research on the geographies of the built environment and bodies, the environ-
ment of Skyspace shifts the focus from within the art object to the contingencies of its context,
undermining any notions of the neutrality or innocence of the artspace in relation to audiencing.
This vignette shows how the landscape of the sculpture park can create restrictions and barriers
beyond the perceptual, which can be obstructive as well as generative depending upon the embod-
ied mobilities of different audiences. In this instance, art and landscape are considered in degrees
of tension that offers a different story from the phenomenological theorizing of Bois on the pictur-
esque landscape. Instead of perceptually enmeshing art and landscape, the geographies of (dis)
ability can necessitate degrees of separation between the two. The journey through a varied pictur-
esque landscape to access an artwork may discriminate against certain bodies, such as Sue’s, mean-
ing that the ‘dialectic of walking and looking into the landscape’ actually has the potential to
disrupt rather than establish the sculptural experience.85
In the final vignette, audiencing by visitors Lizzie and Kevin develops the reflection on the
agency of the landscape by attending to non-human dynamisms and Skyspace:

Lizzie: It feels very spiritual. In fact I was thinking it was somewhere I could come once a
week and spend time . . . Just watching the clouds. And birds. You see them occasion-
ally. They appear from nowhere [in the aperture].
Kevin: We had to chase some sheep out today.
Lizzie: Not from right in [the Skyspace] but from the grass bit. We had to chase them out.86

The birds and sheep that enter Lizzie and Kevin’s experience of Skyspace at first appear to inter-
rupt the direct relationship between the couple and the artwork. Yet, by facilitating ‘experience of
the sky and celestial phenomena’ the work can instead be seen to stage a heightened awareness of
the relationship between inside and outside space.87 The agency of creatures in the sky and land-
scape are an indivisible part of the connectedness of Skyspace with other functions of the site(s)
beyond. The installation of Skyspace in the restored and remodelled deershelter created a purpose-
built artspace, yet the Country Park is also a working landscape used by local farmer, Phillip Platt,
to graze his sheep.
Through this vignette Skyspace can usefully be observed as a prism where art, landscape, sky,
and its human and non-human inhabitants act upon each other. The intervention of architecture and
site art within the working landscape is emphasized in the vignette with the chasing of errant sheep
from the entry to the artwork. Challenging the received notion that the aperture in Turrell’s site art
‘forces us to attend to the sky as the main focus’,88 this vignette uncovers the important recognition
of the multiple uses of Yorkshire Sculpture Park with its relational and contrasting qualities as
working landscape, heritage site and artspace.89
Lizzie and Kevin’s account indicates the competing functionalities of the landscape that
Yorkshire Sculpture Park now manages, which are historically layered and overlap in the park’s
geography. Material markers remain as testament to each of the changing land uses of the Bretton
Estate, from the private historic estate, to War Office, educational college, and sculpture park. The
dominant institution on the Bretton Estate has changed, yet certain continuities from these different
eras have stayed in place. Lizzie and Kevin uncover the usage of the Country Park by the local

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Warren 97

farmer in a shared agreement with the management of the sculpture park that remained when the
organization gained control of that area of the estate. The functions of the landscape coalesce in
this vignette of audiencing Skyspace, providing insights into the competing ways in which the park
and its artworks can be conceptualized and practiced in the present day. By attending to the wider
dynamisms of Skyspace within its spatial environment, the definition of art, and specifically sculp-
ture, is brought into question; a point to which I turn to in the final section.

Expanding the meaning of sculpture

With the recognition that deershelter Skyspace can be multiply categorized, the definition of sculp-
ture is opened, which intersects with the work of art critic and theorist Rosalind Krauss in her essay
‘Sculpture in the Expanded Sphere’.90 In part of this essay, Krauss specifically considers sculpture
for the open air, and the transition from the style of commemorative statuary sculpture to modern-
ism. Krauss documents the transition in the 19th century made from ‘commemorative representa-
tion’ that ‘speaks in a symbolical tongue about the meaning and use of that place’ to ‘its negative
condition, a kind of sitelessness, or homelessness, an absolute loss of place. Which is to say one
enters modernism’.91 I propose that encounters with the deershelter Skyspace can be characterized
in the ‘expanded sphere’ as a return to the contextual contingencies of sitedness and situation.
While Turrell and curators may accord that the artist’s main material is the light itself, it is clear
that for a proportion of the audience the structural complexities of the deershelter, the technologies
of the space and human and non-human inhabitants of the landscape provoke equal contemplation.
By extension, the bodily experience of being in the designed landscape with the sensuous dimen-
sions of site art engagement brings richness to an appreciation of the various ways in which the
work functions for different audiences. Audiences are revealed to be individual specialists with
experiences informed by different bodies and bodily capabilities, recreational interests and social
relations on visits. Tracing the audiencing of deershelter Skyspace also points toward the relation-
ality of art and audience with other kinds of site, drawing connection between the sky, the working
landscape and other Skyspaces. Together, the vignettes show that through attention to audiencing
site art the geographies of art are informed by changing dynamics of the social and spatial environ-
ment, emphasizing the contingency of embodied experience and knowledge production in docu-
menting the meaning of art.

Conclusion
Audiencing as a method contributes to Morris’ recent writing on post-phenomenology by
representing multiple subjects’ engagements with site art. By developing the argument that
individual experience is tied to the perceptual environment, along with ‘the actions and
expressions of others’, this article emphasizes that art encounters are rarely autonomous or
isolated experiences.92 By drawing out the geographies of audiencing site art, the accounts of
audience members work together to critically interrogate the authorial control of the artist,
challenging the efficacy of Turrell’s statement that, ‘[t]here is no one between you and your
experience’. Through following processes including interviewing and participant observa-
tion, artistic intentionality is disputed as determining the meaning of artwork, with the cre-
ative role of the artist and audience brought into greater parity. Instead of a regressive linear
process that emphasizes the originatory source of the artist and locates the meaning of art
according to statements attributed to the artist, audiencing reveals the continuous and socially
contingent production of site art’s meaning.

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98 cultural geographies 20(1)

By attending to each of these audience vignettes drawn from interviews and participant obser-
vation, and in particular those of Jeremy, Lizzie and Kevin, different kinds of ‘site’ are mobilized
that expand understanding of the dynamics of site and site art by highlighting the sky, the landscape
and relational sites of arts practice and arts audiencing. Further, the vignette of Sue interrogates
critical spatial sensibilities through the embodied registers of (dis)ability and illness. In the case
study of Turrell’s Skyspace, (im)mobility can be seen to unbalance the ‘configuration of bodies,
spaces and objects’ in installation art where ‘you take your whole body’.93 Emphasizing again the
ways in which subjective encounters can collide with the design of the artist or author writing on
behalf of audiences, this experiential account also serves to critically challenge the phenomeno-
logical theorizing of Bois, and to some extent, Kwon. The vignettes open up the question of how
we categorize site art, and according to which type of audience.
Together, the empirical findings argue for the non-uniformity and creative potential of site
art audiencing. Tracing the audiencing of deershelter Skyspace reveals that meaning is not the
preserve of the disinterested, trained eye. Intentionality and curatorial directives are chal-
lenged by recovering the practices of audiences that offer different perspectives on the mean-
ing of art, which is pertinent whether in the context of the gallery or landscape. Developing
cultural geography’s engagement with art, the article challenges geographers to consider how
the meaning of works and sites can be renegotiated according to the specialisms of others, and
the social dimensions of audience experience. Audiencing as an approach makes theoretical,
methodological and empirical contributions to the geographies of art by showing how critical
enquiry can become more democratized to include different and power-differentiated subjects.
In order to acknowledge the dynamic processes through which art gains meaning as a cultural
and aesthetic object, installation or performance, audience engagements ought to be made vis-
ible through more attentive and considered investigation. By providing insights into the ways
in which different audiences practice Turrell’s Skyspace, this article goes some way toward
advancing the recognition that audiences are central to creating and reworking the meaning of
cultural forms.

Funding
This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council with & Co.TM The cultural marketing
house [grant number CDA143432].

Notes
1 P. Taylor cited in H. Blau, The Audience (London and Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University,
1990), p. vi.
2 U. Eco, ‘The Poetics of the Open Work’, reprinted in C. Bishop (ed.) Participation: Documents of Con-
temporary Art (London and Cambridge, MA: Whitechapel and MIT, 2006).
3 R. Barthes, ‘Death of the Author’, in S. Heath (ed.) Image - Music - Text (New York: Hill and Wang,
1977).
4 C. Bagley, ‘Educational Ethnography as Performance Art: Towards a Sensuous Feeling and Knowing’,
Qualitative Research, 8, 2008, pp. 53–72; M. Sperlinger, Afterthought: New Writing on Conceptual Art
(London: Rachmainoff’s, 2005); R. Martin, ‘Dance Ethnography and the Limits of Representation’,
Social Text, 33, 1992, pp. 103–23; Blau, Audience.
5 J. Rosen, ‘The People Formerly Known as the Audience’, 27 June 2006, <http://archive.pressthink.
org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr.html> (30 June 2011).
6 J. Lull,‘The Audience as Nuisance (Critical Response)’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 5(3),
1988, pp. 239–42.
7 Friends of Roden Crater <http://rodencrater.com/about> (18 June 2012).

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Warren 99

8 For example see, F. Adcock, James Turrell: The Art of Light and Space (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia, 1990), p. xix; W. Häusler (ed.) James Turrell: Lighting a Planet (Verlag: Hatje Cantz, 2000), p. 37.
9 See M. Merleau-Ponty (ed.), Eclipse: Merleau-Ponty (New York: Hatje Cantz, 2010); Banks, James Tur-
rell (Spain: Edizioni Charta, 2009); P. Noever (ed.), James Turrell: The Other Horizon (New York: Hatje
Cantz, 2001), R. Bright, ‘James Turrell’, in Airmass (London: Hayward Gallery, 1993).
10 Turrell, Second Wind 2005 (1999) at the NMAC Foundation, Montenmedio, Spain ‘Banks, Terrell, 2009’.
11 C. Lilley, <http://www.artfund.org/turrell/deer_shelter.html> (14 September 2011).
12 J. Fiske, ‘Audiencing: A Cultural Studies Approach to Watching’, Poetics, 21(4), 1992, pp. 345–59.
13 Fiske, ‘Audiencing’ .
14 G. Rose, Visual Methodologies (London: Sage, 2001), p. 5.
15 Rose, Visual, pp. 193–7; see S. Moores, Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consump-
tion (London: Sage, 1993); D. Morley, Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies (London: Routledge,
1992); I. Ang, Watching Dallas: Soap Opera and the Melodramatic Imagination (New York: Methuen,
1985).
16 Fiske, ‘Audiencing’, p. 353.
17 J. Dittmer and K. Dodds, ‘Popular Geopolitics Past and Future: Fandom, Identities and Audiences’,
Geopolitics, 13, 2008, pp. 437–57; J. Dittmer and S. Larsen, ‘Captain Canuck, Audience Response, and
the Project of Canadian Nationalism’, Social and Cultural Geography, 8, 2007, pp. 735–53; K. Dodds,
‘Popular Geopolitics and Audience Dispositions: James Bond and the Internet Movie Database (IMDb)’,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 3, 2006, pp. 116–30; K. Gorton, Media Audiences:
Television, Meaning and Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009); J. Gray, ‘New Audi-
ences, New Textualities: Anti-Fans and Non-Fans’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 6, 2003,
pp. 64–81.
18 N. Morris, ‘Night Walking: Darkness and Sensory Perception in a Night-Time Landscape Installation’,
cultural geographies, 18, 2011, pp. 315–42.
19 Morris, ‘Night Walking’, p. 335. A lack of ambient light prevented photography and the use of sound
recording devices was also rejected due to the desire of NVA (Nacionale Vite Activa) that participants
remain silent as they walked through the installation. Morris, ‘Night Walking’, p. 318.
20 Morris, ‘Night Walking’, p. 318; see J. Wylie, ‘Landscape, Performance and Dwelling: A Glastonbury
Case Study’, in P. Cloke (ed.) Country Visions (London: Pearson, 2003), pp. 136–57; J. Wylie, ‘A Single
Day’s Walking: Narrating Self and Landscape on the South West Coast Path’, Transactions of the Insti-
tute of British Geographers, 30, 2005, pp. 234–47; and M. Rose, ‘Gathering “Dreams of Presence”: A
Project for the Cultural Landscape’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24, 2006, pp.
537–54.
21 Morris, ‘Night Walking’, p. 318.
22 D. DeLyser, ‘Recovering Social Memories from the Past: The 1884 Novel Ramona and Tourist Practices
in Turn-of-the-Century Southern California’, Social & Cultural Geography, 5(3), 2004, pp. 483–96.
23 DeLyser, ‘Recovering Social Memories’, p. 493.
24 S. Hurrell, Constellation, 2003. Ayr, West Scotland; V. Pollock and S. Sharp, ‘Constellations of Identity:
Place-Ma(r)king Beyond Heritage’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25, 2007, pp.
1061–78.
25 C. Doherty, ‘New Institutionalism and the Exhibition as Situation’, in Protections Reader (Graz: Kunsthaus
Graz, 2006), republished by Situations at the University of the West of England, Bristol, 2007, p. 1.
26 See, for example, C. DeSilvey, ‘Memory in Motion: Soundings from Milltown, Montana’, Social &
Cultural Geography, 11(5), 2010, pp. 491–510; H. Hawkins, ‘The Argument of the Eye’? The Cultural
Geographies of Installation Art’, Cultural Geographies, 17, 2010, pp. 321–40; D. Crouch, ‘Flirting with
Space: Thinking Landscape Relationally’, cultural geographies, 17, 2010, pp. 5–18; T. Butler, ‘Walk of
Art: The Potential of the Sound Walk as Practice in Cultural Geography’, Social & Cultural Geography,
7(6), 2006, pp. 889–908; and Morris, ‘‘Night Walking’, p. 318.
27 DeLyser, ‘Recovering Social Memories’, p. 489; Pollock and Sharp, ‘Constellations’, p. 1072.
28 The findings from this article are taken from a wider body of research, which comprised ethnography
featuring over 80 interviews with audiences grouped as ‘visitors’, ‘volunteers’, ‘local residents’ and

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100 cultural geographies 20(1)

‘site workers’ over one year spent at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. This article focuses on one aspect of the
research – visitors in relation to Turrell’s Skyspace – in order to develop the argument for the cultural
geographies of site art and, in particular, the spatial practices of its audiencing.
29 M.Q. Patton, Qualitative Research & Evaluation Methods (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2002), p. 45.
30 Sunrise in the Skyspace are commercial events where audiences can view the rising of the sun within the
Skyspace and enjoy breakfast for £25 per person. I attended three events (24 October 2009; 13 December
2009; 14 March 2010).
31 S. Macdonald, Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum (Materializing Culture) (Oxford: Berg, 2002),
p. 219.
32 Ang, Dallas, p. 105.
33 M. Bal, Double Exposure (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 130.
34 S. Elwood, ‘Mixed Methods; Thinking, Doing, and Asking in Multiple Ways’, in D. DeLyser, S. Herbert,
S. Aitken, M. Crang and L. McDowell (eds) The SAGE Book of Qualitative Research (London: Sage,
2010), p. 96.
35 S. Skjulstad, A. Morrison and A. Aaberge, ‘Researching Performance, Performing Research: Dance,
Multimedia and Learning’, in A. Morrison (ed.) Researching ICTs in Context (Blindern: Intermedia and
University of Oslo, 2002), p. 213.
36 C. Bagley, ‘Educational Ethnography as Performance Art: Towards a Sensuous Feeling and Knowing’,
Qualitative Research, 8, 2008, pp. 53–72 (p. 67).
37 See, D. Cowell, Richard Woods: 1715-1793, Master of the Pleasure Garden (Suffolk: Boydell & Brewer,
2009), pp. 107–8.
38 S. Daniels, Humpry Repton: Landscape Gardening and the Geography of Georgian England (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 4–5. For other iconographical approaches to landscape
see, D. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London: Croom Helm, 1984); D. Cosgrove,
‘Geography is Everywhere: Culture and Symbolism in Human Landscapes’, in D. Gregory and R. Wal-
ford, Horizons in Human Geography (London: MacMillan, 1989); D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (eds),
The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Envi-
ronments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
39 Y.-A. Bois, ‘A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-Clara’, trans. by John Shepley, October, 29, 1984, pp.
32–62 (p. 43).
40 U. Price, ‘Essays on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful, London’, in M.M.
Martinet, Art et Nature en Grand-Bretagne au XVIII siecle (Paris: Aubier, 1980 [1810]), p. 249.
41 A. Caro, Promenade, 1979. Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Yorkshire.
42 Interview with Maria (12 October 2009).
43 Interview with Peter Murray (13 February 2010).
44 Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Landscape for Art (Wakefield: Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2008).
45 Bois quoting Serra, ‘Stroll’, p. 34.
46 M. Kwon, One Place after Another: Site Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation (London:
MIT Press, 2002), p. 2.
47 Kwon, One Place, p. 4.
48 Kwon, One Place, p. 12.
49 Kwon, One Place, pp.11–12.
50 Kwon, One Place, p. 13.
51 Kwon, One Place, pp. 12–13.
52 See J. Rendell, Art and Architecture: A Place Between (London and New York: I.B.Tauris, 2008), p. 13.
53 Kwon, One Place, pp. 28–9.
54 Kwon, One Place, p. 2.
55 Kwon, One Place, p. 11.
56 N. Morris and S. Cant, ‘Engaging with Place: Artists, Site-Specificity and the Hebden Bridge Sculpture
Trail’, Social and Cultural Geography, 6(7), 2006, p. 864.
57 Emphasis mine.

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58 Text on interpretation panel, outside Deershelter Skyspace, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 2006.
59 Clare Bishop proposes that it is a misreading of post-structuralist theory to apply work such as Eco’s
‘The Poetics of the Open Work’ to a specific type of work that requires literal participation. Every work
of art is potentially open, argues Bishop, with certain forms of contemporary art simply foregrounding
this understanding in the formal structure, ‘thereby [redirecting] the argument back to artistic intentional-
ity rather than the issues of reception’. C. Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, 110,
2004, pp. 51–79 (p. 57).
60 Free leaflet by Yorkshire Sculpture Park, ‘James Turrell Deershelter: An Art Fund Commission’ (Wake-
field: YSP, 2000), p. 1.
61 ‘James Turrell’, November 2005, <http://www.ysp.co.uk/exhibitions/james-turrell> (June 2011).
62 For discussion of the concepts of authorial control, artistic originality and the creative act in relation to
artists and their technicians see, M. Petry, The Art of Not Making: The New Artist/Artisan Relationship
(London: Thames & Hudson, 2011).
63 For example, see, F. Adcock, James Turrell: The Art of Light and Space (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia, 1990), p. xix; W. Häusler (ed.), James Turrell: Lighting a Planet (Verlag: Hatje Cantz, 2000), p.
37.
64 All names of participants in the article are pseudonyms to protect their identities.
65 Interview with Maria (12 October 2009).
66 Interview with Jeremy (12 October 2009).
67 Interview with Maria (12 October 2009).
68 Hawkins, ‘Argument’, p. 324.
69 See S. Pink The Future of Visual Anthropology: Engaging the Senses (London: Routledge, 2006).
70 Interview with Maria (12 October 2009).
71 Interview with Jeremy (12 October 2009).
72 Yorkshire Sculpture Park, ‘James Turrell’, 2005, <http://www.ysp.co.uk/exhibitions/james-turrell > (20
June 2011).
73 Interview with Jeremy (12 October 2009).
74 See Y. Saito, ‘The Aesthetics of Emptiness: Sky Art’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space,
29, 2011, p. 505. Also T. Ingold, ‘Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute, 13, 2007, pp. 19–38.
75 L. Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object From 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley, CA: Uni-
versity of California, 1997[1973]), p. 2.
76 Turrell, Skyspace, 2000. Kielder Park, Northumberland; Interview with Jeremy (12 October 2009).
77 H. Lorimer, ‘Cultural Geography: The Busyness of Being “More-Than-Representational”’, Progress in
Human Geography, 29(1), 2005, pp. 83–94.
78 For new research on public art and mobility, see AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award, ‘Art in the Air-
port: The Production of Public Art at Oslo Airport T2’, Department of Geography, Royal Holloway,
University of London in partnership with Oslo Lufthavn AS, 2012–15.
79 See R. Imrie and H. Thomas, ‘The Interrelationships between Environment and Disability, Local Envi-
ronment, 13(6), 2008, pp. 477–83; R. Imrie and C. Edwards ‘The Geographies of Disability: Reflec-
tions on the Development of a Sub-Discipline’, Geography Compass, 1(3), 2007, pp. 623–40; R. Imrie,
‘Architects’ Conceptions of the Human Body’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 21(1),
2003, pp. 47–65; R. Imrie, Disability and the City (London: Paul Chapman Publishing, 1996).
80 See R. Longhurst, ‘The Disabling Affects of Fat: The Emotional and Material Geographies of Some
Women Who Live in Hamilton, New Zealand’, in E. Hall, V. Chouinard and R. Wilton (eds) Disabling
Geographies: Mind and Body Differences in Society and Space (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); R. Longhurst,
Maternities: Gender, Bodies and Space (New York: Routledge, 2010); R. Longhurst, Bodies: Exploring
Fluid Boundaries (London: Routledge, 2010).
81 Interview with Sue and David (12 October 2009).
82 Interview with Hellie and Vanessa (22 July 2010).
83 Hawkins, ‘Argument’, p. 323.

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84 Interview with Sue and David (12 October 2009).

85 Bois quoting Serra, ‘Stroll’, p. 34.
86 Interview with Lizzie and Kevin (7 July 2010).
87 Saito, ‘Emptiness’, p. 505.
88 Saito, ‘Emptiness’, p. 505.
89 There is notably a bias in the research presented where Yorkshire Sculpture Park is framed primarily
as an artspace. Platt and his sheep can be seen as different kinds of audience who variously use the
landscape Skyspace is sited within; therefore, one shortcoming of this research is that I was unable to
interview the farmer (or his livestock).
90 R. Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, 8, 1979, pp. 30–44.
91 Krauss, ‘Sculpture’, p. 33.
92 Morris, ‘Night Walking’, p. 334.
93 Hawkins, ‘Argument’, pp. 323–4.

Biographical note
Saskia Warren is a research student at the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield. Her current
research interests include: place, space and landscape; consumption/audiencing; legacy of conceptualism and
site art; creative industries and cultural policy; and intersections of art theory and cultural geography.

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