Relational Aesthetics
Whereas net artists embraced the new information and communication technologies emerging in the 1990s, forging a vibrant lifeworld based on democratic and participatory action, curator Nicholas Bourriaud described how others felt ‘meagre and helpless when faced with the electronic media.’ [1] Whilst net artists’ explorations of community and encounter were pragmatic, giving attention to ways in which technologies could facilitate meetings and dialogue, for Bourriaud, the focus of community and encounter is subjectivity. Describing the instrumentality of life in contemporary society - precisely that which Habermas refers to as the colonisation of the lifeworld, in which ‘the social bond has turned into a standardised artefact,’ [2]- Bourriaud is critical of the communications technologies that monitor human activity and weaken the social bond. He locates processes of rationalisation within the new and emerging technologies themselves, and identifies, a range of non-technologically oriented artistic activities that engage the realm of human relations and which have ‘to do with interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts’. [3] He sees these artistic activities as antidote to technologies’ rationalising logic, in that they produce micro-communities within which individual come together in momentary groupings. Art ‘strives to achieve modest connections’ that opens up obstructed passages so as to ‘connect levels of reality kept apart from one another,’ and contributes to the emergence of places in which non-commodified social relations can exist and in which the subject is not reduced to the role of consumer.
In Relational Aesthetics a series of essays produced from curatorial and theoretical collaborations with artists such as Liam Gillick, Vanessa Beecroft and Felix Gonzalez Torres, Bourriaud identifies the possibility of a relational art that takes ‘as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.’ [4] This articulation of a new space of art making and engagement with art through specific attention to processes and relations enables the form of an artwork to be radically rethought as ‘a state of encounter’ [5] in which ‘including the other […] turns out to be […] essential to the formal understanding of the work.’ [6] When ‘Rirkrit Tiravanija organises a dinner in a collector’s home, and leaves him all the ingredients required to make a Thai soup’ [7] he is making an artwork in which social activities carried out by the artist in his everyday life – making Thai soup and hosting a dinner at home - are included in the parameters of an artwork through their enactment by a participant, here an art collector. The artist carefully selects the ingredients required and leaves them at the home of the collector who then makes the soup to be served to guests. Both artist and participant give mindful attention to hospitality and caring for the other. The dinner guests become part of the work, although their engagement with it is different to the artist’s and the primary participant’s. Later, there is a wider audience for the work as its conceptual framework is shared in art magazines.
For Bourriaud, a work of art ‘may operate like a relational device containing a certain degree of randomness, or a machine provoking and managing individual and group encounters’. [8] Although in everyday life encounters with another sometimes emerge spontaneously, the translation of such encounters into the cultural realm necessitates their communication via one medium or another.
In Hamoc en la moma (1993) Gabriel Orozco slings a hammock in the garden at MoMA in New York and in Crazy Tourist (1991) his performance involves his moving around a Brazilian street market after hours carefully placing an orange on top of each table. Photographs allow aspects of the work to be communicated to an audience beyond the local enactment of the performance itself, and offer an opportunity to see the arrangement of tables and oranges from what Miwon Kwon describes as an appropriate distance in time and space.’ [9] Kwon identifies processes of engagement in the work that involve the viewer mentally connecting the dots as the ‘seeming randomness of the individual oranges organises itself into a pattern.’ However, she suggests that the involvement of the viewer isn’t by way of identifying a visually recognisable symbol, but is ‘rather the revelation of a fantasy trajectory, a ramble through the space of the market (travelled by the artist, but also by many others, unknown and unknowable to us). The photographs index the repetition of the oranges; the oranges, in turn, ‘mark a trace, recording a passage through space in order to record its absence in time’. [10] When Orozco takes a stroll through the market and marks his trajectory by placing oranges on tables, he is making an artwork in which everyday and social activities carried out by the artist index those carried out by others before him and in all likelihood after him. He draws attention to the potential for everyday performances in which mindful actions have the potential to create non-rationalised relations with others. Bourriaud suggests that this work operates ‘at the hub of “social infra-thinness” (l’inframince social), that minute space of daily gestures determined by the superstructure made up of “big” exchanges, and defined by it’. [11] Orozco’s photographs are ‘a documentary record of tiny revolutions in the common urban and semi-urban life (a sleeping bag on the grass, an empty shoebox, etc.)’[12]
Discussing Felix Gonzalez-Torres work Untitled (Blue Mirror), 1990, an ‘offset print on paper, endless copies’ one of which each visitor is allowed to take away, Bourriaud considers what would happen:
If lots of visitors walk off in turn with these sheets of paper offered to an abstract public? What process would cause this piece to change and then vanish? For this work did not involve a “Performance,” or a poster hand-out, but a work endowed with a defined form and a certain density, a work not displaying its construction (or dismantlement) process, but the form of its presence amid an audience [13]
Here Bourriaud touches upon the question of form and materiality in relational practices: how is it to be perceived, conceptualised, articulated? He describes form as ‘a structure (independent entity of inner dependencies) that shows the typical features of the world’ which comes into being through the ‘deviation’ and ‘random encounter’ of entities. [14] Form is a ‘lasting encounter’: ‘lines and colours inscribed on the surface of a Delacroix painting, the scrap objects that litter Schwitters’ ‘Merz pictures’, Chris Burden’s performances’. [15] Lasting encounters are ‘over and above the quality of the page layout or the spatial layout’: they are that which ‘turn out to be lasting from the moment when their components form a whole whose sense ‘holds good’ at the moment of their birth, stirring up new ‘possibilities of life’. [16]
Art keeps together moments of subjectivity associated with singular experiences, be it Cézanne’s apples or Buren’s striped structures. The composition of this bonding agent, whereby encountering atoms manage to form a word, is, needless to say, dependent on the historical context. What today’s informed public understands by ‘keeping together’ is not the same thing that this public imagined back in the 19th century. Today, the ‘glue’ is less obvious, as our visual experience has become more complex, enriched by a century of photographic images, then cinematography […] enabling us to recognise as a ‘world’ a collection of disparate element[s] […] that no unifying matter, no bronze, links’. [17]
What is significant here is Bourriaud’s proposal that form today is ‘a collection of disparate elements’ held together by ‘glue’ that keeps things together but which is not a unifying matter. How do we imagine an artistic medium through which it is possible to communicate the intention to encounter and to specify the parameters of the situation within which inter-subjective exchanges take place? Perhaps the ‘glue’ is protocol, and perhaps the form that Bourriaud is searching to articulate is the distributed form? It certainly seems reasonable to suggest protocol as a medium within relational practices, and the distributed form, as I have suggested elsewhere, is made up of discrete elements held together via protocol. Artists devise the protocols that mark the parameters of performance and participation. Just as technical protocols organise and control the activities within an electronic network, so here, artists use protocol to organise the activities of others.
In an article on Relational Aesthetics [18] Claire Bishop problematises Bourriaud’s notion of ‘structure’ as having ‘an erratic relationship to the work’s ostensible subject matter, or content.’ [19] She cites the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Liam Gillick as offering ‘the clearest expression of Bourriaud’s argument that relational art privileges intersubjective relations over detatched opticality.’ [20] Noting Tiravanija’s insistence ‘that the viewer be physically present in a particular situation at a particular time - eating the food that he cooks, alongside other visitors in a communal situation,’ [21] she points out that what, how and for whom Tiravanija cooks are less important to Bourriaud than the fact that the results of the cooking are given away for free.’ [22] Bishop recognises that ‘relational art sets up situations in which viewers are not just addressed as a collective, social entity, but are actually given the wherewithal to create a community, however temporary or utopian this may be.’ [23] Yet, pointing to ‘Bourriaud’s argument that the structure of an art work produces a social relationship’ [24] she wonders ‘how we decide what the “structure” of a relational art work comprises,’ [25] and how the quality of relationships can be measured or compared given Bourriaud’s desire ‘to equate aesthetic judgement with an ethicopolitical judgment of the relationships produced by a work of art.’ Situating relational art as ‘an outgrowth of installation art,’ [26] Bishop uses the comparison between the two art forms to suggest that the relational form is without a sense of it own materiality.
For some critics, notably Rosalind Krauss, installation art’s use of diverse media divorces it from a medium-specific tradition; it therefore has no inherent conventions against which it may self-reflexively operate, nor criteria against which we may evaluate its success. Without a sense of what the medium of installation art is, the work cannot attain the holy grail of self-reflexive criticality. [27]
Far from being without a sense of its own materiality, relational practices are underpinned by what Louis Althusser defined as a materialism of encounter and which Bourriaud refers to when describing the essence of humankind as ‘purely trans-individual, made up of bonds that link individuals together in social forms which are invariably historical’. [28] Whilst fully supportive of Bourriaud’s claim’s for the materiality of relational practices, I tend towards a more expansive conceptual and theoretical framework within which the materialism of encounter is but one element. For me, a materialism of the distributed form accounts for those elements within relational art, such as objects and processes, that fall outside Bourriaud’s concept of encounter. It also provides another means by which to conceptualise activities within a work that seem ‘open-ended, interactive, and resistant to closure, often appearing to be “work-in-progress” rather than a completed object.’ [29] For example I would nominate materialities of protocol and enactment alongside encounter. Protocol informs the structure, form and medium of relational art: it marks the parameters of performance or performativity; it bounds the activities of participants within a particular situation; it enables the storage, transmission and dissemination of work.
Bourriaud argues that in order to understand the work of contemporary artists it is necessary ‘to understand the changes nowadays occurring in the social arena, and grasp what has already changed and what is still changing. He suggests that in order to understand the artistic behaviour of contemporary artists and the way they think then it is necessary to ‘start out from the same situation as the artists.’ [30] For many contemporary artists articulating ‘the situation’ is a political, ethical and aesthetic act. However, an articulation of ‘the situation’ is not so straightforward, although it is precisely what I am attempting in this body of work.
This leads me back to Bourriaud’s assertions regarding relational artistic activities as antidote to technologies’ rationalising logic By synonymising technology and network such that the distributed form and its controlling, rationalising and aggregating logic remains invisible, Bourriaud misses an opportunity to conceptualise contemporary change in relation to the distributed network as organisational form of contemporary capitalism. For although Bourriaud, and the artists working with him do not engage the materiality of specific technologies, I suggest that relational art is informed by the materiality of the network itself. With more attention to the materiality of the distributed form, relational practices take on a more vigorous dynamic in which they both enact and resist the network. The antagonism that Bishop finds so lacking in some relational works, in fact, underpins it.
Notes
1. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 8.
2. Ibid., 9.
3. Ibid., 8.
4. Ibid.,14.
5. Ibid.,18.
6. Ibid., 52.
7. Ibid., 8.
8 Ibid., 30.
9. Kwon, “The Fullness of Empty Containers: Gabriel Orozco,” 56
10. Kwon, “The Fullness of Empty Containers: Gabriel Orozco,” 56.
11. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 17.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.,49.
14. Ibid.,19.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 20.
18. Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” 51-79.
19. Ibid., 64.
20. Ibid., 61.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 64.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 63.
25. Ibid., 65.
26. Ibid., 63.
27. Ibid., 63-64.
28. Bourriaud, “Relational Aesthetics,”18.
29. Ibid., 52.
30. Ibid., 11.