Relational Aesthetics

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Relational aesthetics is a theory of aesthetics in which artworks are judged based upon the inter-human relations which they represent, produce, or prompt[1].

Contents

[edit] Background

The term 'relational aesthetics' was coined in 1996 by French theorist and curator Nicolas Bourriaud to characterize artistic practice in the 1990s. In his book of the same title, Bourriaud aims to identify and characterise what is distinctive in contemporary European art in the 1990s, as compared to that of previous decades.

Bourriaud wishes to approach art in a way that ceases ‘to take shelter behind Sixties art history’ [2], and instead seeks to offer different criteria by which to analyse the often opaque and open-ended works of art of the 1990s. To achieve this, Bourriaud imports the language of the 1990s internet boom, using terminology such as ‘user-friendliness’, ‘interactivity’ and ‘do-it-yourself’. Indeed, in Postproduction (2000), Bourriaud describes Relational Aesthetics as a book addressing works that take as their point of departure the changing mental space opened by the internet (p8).

[edit] Relational art

Bourriaud explores this notion of relational aesthetics through examples of what he calls 'relational art'.

According to Bourriaud, relational art encompasses "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space." [3]

A relational artist might, for example, convert a gallery space into a temporary stand for serving coffee, with the addition of background music, suitable lighting, books to read, and comfortable chairs. The artwork here consists of creating a social environment in which people come together to participate in a shared activity. Bourriaud claims "the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist." [4]

In relational art, the audience is envisaged as a community. Rather than the artwork being an encounter between a viewer and an object, relational art produces intersubjective encounters. Through these encounters, meaning is elaborated collectively, rather than in the space of individual consumption [5]. Bourriaud believes this collective encounter can be both democratic and microtopian. These intersubjective encounters may literally take place – in the artist’s production of the work, or in the viewer’s reception of it – or exist hypothetically, as a potential outcome of our encounter with a given piece.

Bourriaud contrasts relational art with art that asserts an independent and private symbolic space’ [6]. Relational art is thus conceived as the inverse of the privatised space of modernism as articulated differently by Clement Greenberg and Rosalind Krauss: rather than a discrete, portable, autonomous work of art that transcends its context, relational art beholden to the contingencies of its environment and audience. In some manifestations of this art, such as the performance-installations of Rirkrit Tiravanija, viewers are addressed as a social entity, and are even given the wherewithal to form a new community, however provisional or utopian.

[edit] Examples

Examples of "interactive, user-friendly, relational" artistic activity listed by Bourriaud in his book [7] are:

  • Rirkrit Tiravanija organises a dinner in a collector's home, and leaves the collector all the ingredients required to make Thai soup.
  • Philippe Parreno invites a few people to pursue their favorite hobby on May Day, on a factory assembly line.
  • Vanessa Beecroft dresses twenty women in the same way, including red wigs. The visitor can only glimpse the women through the doorway.
  • Christine Hill works as a check-out assistant in a supermarket, and organises a weekly gym workshop in a gallery.
  • Carsten Höller recreates the chemical formula of molecules secreted by the human brain when in love, builds an inflatable plastic yacht, and breeds chaffinches with the aim of teaching them a new song.
  • Noritoshi Hirakawa puts a small ad in a newspaper to find a girl to take part in his show.
  • Pierre Huyghe summons people to a casting session, makes a TV transmitter available to the public, and puts a photograph of laborers at work on view just a few yards from the building site.
  • David Horvitz asked people to take public transportation with him from a gallery on Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles to watch the real sunset in Palos Verdes for everyday of one of his exhibitions.

[edit] Publications

The theory of relational aesthetics is described in Bourriaud's collection of essays published in 1998 (Esthétique Relationnelle [8]). The book was written by Bourriaud following an exhibition entitled Trafic which he curated at the CAPC Bordeaux in 1996.

The original French text was published by Les Presses du Réel in 1998 and the English translation in 2002.

[edit] Criticism

Claire Bishop, in her article Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics (2004), asks "if relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why?" [9]. She continues "the relations set up by relational aesthetics are not intrinsically democratic, as Bourriaud suggests ... communication is fine to an extent, but it is not in and of itself emblematic of 'democracy.'" [10]

Additionally, artist Fred Forest's own actions reflect the socializing aspects of Relational Aesthetics, all the while questioning their lack of critical or political grounding. His manifesto L'Esthétique de la Communication [11]) first published in 1983, fifteen years before Bourriaud's, details a form of social and socializing art that would be intrinsically discursive: "After having experienced industrial society and consumer society at their peak, we are now slowly making our way towards the promised Communication Society, a society which is in the process of seeking out new values." [12]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Bourriaud, Nicholas (2002). Relational Aesthetics, English edition translated by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods, France: les presse du réel, p. 112. ISBN 2-84066-060-1. 
  2. ^ Ibid., p. 7.
  3. ^ Ibid., p. 113.
  4. ^ Ibid., p. 13.
  5. ^ Ibid., pp. 17-18.
  6. ^ Ibid., p. 14.
  7. ^ Ibid., p. 7.
  8. ^ Bourriaud, Nicholas (1998). Esthétique Relationnelle. France: les presses du réel. ISBN 2-84066-030-X. 
  9. ^ Bishop, Claire (2004). "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics" (PDF). Retrieved on 2007-05-31., p. 65
  10. ^ Bishop, p. 67.
  11. ^ Forest, Fred (1985). Manifeste pour une esthétique de la communication. Belgium: Magazine + - o. 
  12. ^ Forest, Fred (1983). "[[1] Aesthetics of Communication]" (HTML). Retrieved on 2007-10-18., intro, para 4.

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