Relational Aesthetics

Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (1998, 2002). This text presents relational aesthetics as a theory of form based (largely) on Western European artistic production occurring in the 1990s and the theoretical work of Félix Guatarri. Bourriaud argues that art can no longer provide utopian discourses, and that modern art must move beyond melancholy. He values relational art, as a new kind of avant-garde, that provides critical participatory models of human expression, and works to produce “possible universes” or new ways to live by re-figuring human relationships in different social contexts.

In Bourriaud's view, these new works of art represent, produce, or prompt “inter-human” relations and provide social interstices as free spaces that are more democratic and allow for a (brief) restructuring of everyday experiences within the social world (16,45). Art is an encounter, not a representational object or a commodity. Bourriaud wants to get away from the traditional view of the museum as a worthwhile site for interpreting or understanding human experience. He wants to promote artistic practices that work from the “whole of human relations” and their social contexts, rather than from independent, private spaces (29,113).

This collection of essays seems to be designed for a particularly limited, educated audience familiar with the artwork and the theorists Bourriaud references. His textual connections to Marx, Benjamin, Adorno, and Bourdieu lead me to think that Bourriaud is trying to push some of the earlier work on Marxism and aesthetics in new directions in order to confront globalization and rapid technological changes.

Bourriaud briefly addresses some of the criticism that has been focused on relational artistic practices, noting that because they generally occur in galleries and art centres, they contradict the notion of social access that underpins their very meaning (82). I did not find his defense (urging his readers to compare these innovations to the staid landscape of art history), to be very convincing and I am wondering how everyone else reacted this section. I am still wondering how relational art might, indeed, be able to reach the kind of audience that Bourriaud's text seems to be envisioning.

Jacques Rancière, Selections from The Politics of the Aesthetic, (2000, 2004): In this series of interviews, Rancière explains his scholarship which seems to extend or build upon Foucault’s work to challenge existing constructions of history and politics, and to further redefine aesthetics and the aesthetic.

Working through a concept of the distribution of the sensible, Rancière argues that implicit law (as varying degrees of subjectivization?) defines and shapes human perception in the realm of both the political and the aesthetic. He explains that this distribution system has produced three separate artistic periods--an ethical regime of images, the representative regime of art, and the aesthetic regime of art. He believes the aesthetic regime holds great promise for abolishing hierarchical distributions of the sensible, but remains problematic.

I thought this was a very difficult text to decipher. The audience seems to be French intellectuals writing after Bourdieu. I’m guessing that Rancière may be in dialogue with Bourriaud, even though I did not find any mention of Bourriaud or the concept of relational aesthetics. The Forward in this text references an interest in creating new modes of perception as well as inducing novel forms of political subjectivity (9), and seems to be discussing some kind of recuperative effort after the limiting discourses of modernism and post-modernism: art is not dead or emptied of meaning but remains a critical site for understanding visible forms of doing and making, and manifest ways of seeing and thinking.

If I could be with all of you, I would love to talk more about connections between immanence (referenced frequently, but never defined) and the sublime as we have traced it through Kant and some of our earlier texts. I am also wrestling with concepts of freedom (need more Foucault here) and art’s ability to lead only to projects of domination or emancipation (19).