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Audiencing James Turrell’s Skyspace: encounters between art and audience at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

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.