Audience 2, Thomas Struth, 2004

Thomas Struth seems to want to tell us about viewing. At Marian Goodman there are two sets of work; one is a group of his typical museum photographs showing audiences looking upwards in awe, in distraction, immersed, confused or simply following what everyone else does. It is called 'audience'.

These photographs present a bizarre relation to the viewer; you are watching others engaged in an act that other are engaged in. This is not voyuerism; we empathise with our fellow viewers, position ourselves amongst the gamut of their emotions and are frustrated by their (and empathically our) ability to communicate their experience of what and how they are viewing. We want to know but they are finally quite mute. They tell us all the usual ranges that we knew from being gallery visitors from their expressions but not of their understanding. There is a great we do know now from these images about the people and we can extract about their lives but the act of understanding in the sculpture of David that they are looking at is ultimately reflected in the understand that we hold whilst apprehending Struth's images themselves.

The second part of the show is a video which records a guitar masterclass in Lucerne, Switerland. It is most remarkable for the total lack of artifice in it. It is quite simply and without any embellishment a two screen video of a music lesson. In that regard alone, you are confronted with a piece which a makes unsubtle demands of your attitude. There is nothing to see except the content, Struth is making few concessions to his viewers (except in a significant way I'll explain later). The class concentrates on the relationship of the musical text to the act of performance with the guitarist baumgarten coaxing his students into thinking critically, for themselves and through the music (which is to say not the piece on paper, but how it is read and understood).

As Baumgarten concentrates on the music in question espousing to the student, the video I saw was an investigation of the opening bars of a Moorish piece, the music class reflectively opens up the gallery audience to their act of interpretation. What is the role of the text in the music? and reflexively what is the role of the video/photographs in the act of seeing. Struth's point, should it be ground down to a simple aphorism, is this: the richness of the experience of the work lies in the viewer's commitment to rich sight. Related to the creator of images, the role of the photograph to its reality seem to be equivalent to the text to the music. They are both dependent upon a framework that seems initially absolute but depends upon sight and hearing to grant a meaningful role in the world. In this regard Struth isn't being original, this is well known, however where the emphasis is here is lies in the variance of interpretation and although this may only be an avuncular guide and reminder for us all, in the contemporary sphere it is a useful one nontheless.