Alison Jones and Amanda Beech: Audience into Community

In this essay, written in 2013 for online circulation, I set out some political questions of interpreting art, drawing on Susan Hiller's definitions of a primary and a secondary audience, and make some claim for the agency of latent communities of understanding. Alison Jones's use of painting is shown to produce bewildered recognition and an effective use of blatancy, Amanda Beech's video work is shown to be alert to the emergence of didactic online lectures and authoritative modes of speaking and narrating as contemporary capitalist form. The approach to the art I discuss is experimental, and aims to demonstrate clearly how I reach my understandings from these contrasting aesthetic strategies. Both Jones and Beech are shown to achieve a meaningful connection with urgent contemporary questions: the repositioning of feminism and laughter in painting, and the mobilisation of the viewer's wish to argue back to the screen and to understand how its authority is produced. The wounds in the word community are shown to be worth upholding.