Relational Art
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Relational art or relational aesthetics is a mode or tendency in
fine art In European academic traditions, fine art is developed primarily for aesthetics or creative expression, distinguishing it from decorative art or applied art, which also has to serve some practical function, such as pottery or most metalwork ...
practice originally observed and highlighted by French art critic
Nicolas Bourriaud Nicolas Bourriaud (born 1965) is a curator and art critic, who has curated a great number of exhibitions and biennials all over the world. With Jérôme Sans, Bourriaud cofounded the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, where he served as codirector from ...
. Bourriaud defined the approach as "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." The artist can be more accurately viewed as the "catalyst" in relational art, rather than being at the centre.


Etymology

One of the first attempts to analyze and categorize art from the 1990s, the idea of relational art was developed by Nicolas Bourriaud in 1998 in his book ''Esthétique relationnelle'' (''Relational Aesthetics''). The term was first used in 1996, in the catalogue for the exhibition ''
Traffic Traffic comprises pedestrians, vehicles, ridden or herded animals, trains, and other conveyances that use public ways (roads) for travel and transportation. Traffic laws govern and regulate traffic, while rules of the road include traffic ...
'' curated by Bourriaud at
CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, formerly the Centre d'arts plastiques contemporains (CAPC), is a museum of modern art established in 1973 in Bordeaux, France. Building The museum is housed in the ''Entrepôt Lainé'', a former warehou ...
. ''Traffic'' included the artists that Bourriaud would continue to refer to throughout the 1990s, such as
Henry Bond Henry Bond, FHEA (born 13 June 1966) is an English writer, photographer, and visual artist. In his ''Lacan at the Scene'' (2009), Bond made contributions to theoretical psychoanalysis and forensics. In 1990, with Sarah Lucas, Bond organised ...
,
Vanessa Beecroft Vanessa Beecroft (born April 25, 1969) is an Italian-born American contemporary performance artist; she also works with photography, video art, sculpture, and painting. Many of her works have made use of professional models, sometimes in large nu ...
,
Maurizio Cattelan Maurizio Cattelan (born 21 September 1960) is an Italian artist. Known primarily for his hyperrealistic sculptures and installations, Cattelan's practice also includes curating and publishing. His satirical approach to art has resulted in him bei ...
,
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster (born 30 June 1965, in Strasbourg) is a French visual artist and educator. She is known for her work in video projection, photography, and art installations. She has worked in landscaping, design, and writing. "I alw ...
,
Liam Gillick Liam Gillick (born 1964, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire) is a British artist who lives and works in New York City.
, Christine Hill,
Carsten Höller Carsten Höller (born December 1961) is a German artist. He lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.Alice Rawsthorn (January 2012)"Cliff Hanger - The Ghanaian home of artists Carsten Höller and Marcel Odenbach goes above—and beyond" ''W Magazi ...
,
Pierre Huyghe Pierre Huyghe (born 11 September 1962) is a French artist who works in a variety of media from films and sculptures to public interventions and living systems. Education Pierre Huyghe (pronounced ''hweeg'') was born in Paris in 1962. He lives ...
, Miltos Manetas,
Jorge Pardo Jorge Pardo may refer to: *Jorge Pardo (artist) *Jorge Pardo (musician) (born 1955), Spanish musician *J. D. Pardo Jorge Daniel Pardo (born September 7, 1980) is an American actor. He is best known for playing Jack Toretto in '' F9'' (2021), as ...
,
Philippe Parreno Philippe Parreno (born 1964 in Oran, Algeria) is a contemporary French artist who lives and works in Paris. His works include films, Installation art, installations, performances, drawings, and text. Parreno focuses on expanding ideas of time ...
,
Gabriel Orozco Gabriel Orozco (born April 27, 1962) is a Mexican artist. He gained his reputation in the early 1990s with his exploration of drawing, photography, sculpture and installation. In 1998, Francesco Bonami called Orozco "one of the most influenti ...
,
Jason Rhoades Jason Fayette Rhoades (July 9, 1965 – August 1, 2006) was an American installation artist. Better known in Europe, where he exhibited regularly for the last twelve years of his life, Rhoades was celebrated for his combination dinner party/ ...
,
Douglas Gordon Douglas Gordon (born 20 September 1966) is a Scottish artist. He won the Turner Prize in 1996, the Premio 2000 at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 and the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Work Much of Gordon's w ...
or
Rirkrit Tiravanija Rirkrit Tiravanija ( th, ฤกษ์ฤทธิ์ ตีระวนิช, pronunciation: [] or Tea-rah-vah-nitJerry Saltz (May 7, 2007)Conspicuous Consumption''New York Magazine''.) is a Thai contemporary artist residing in New York City, Be ...
. The exhibition took its title and inspiration from
Jacques Tati Jacques Tati (; born Jacques Tatischeff, ; 9 October 1907 – 5 November 1982) was a French mime, film-maker, actor and screenwriter. In an ''Entertainment Weekly'' poll of the Greatest Movie Directors, he was voted the 46th greatest of all time ...
's film ''
Trafic ''Trafic'' (''Traffic'') is a 1971 Italian-French comedy film directed by Jacques Tati. ''Trafic'' was the last film to feature Tati's famous character of Monsieur Hulot, and followed the vein of earlier Tati films that lampooned modern society. ...
'' (1971), in which Tati's protagonist is a Parisian automobile designer preparing a new model for an international auto show. In a ''denoument'' that became a fundamental relational aesthetics strategy, particularly for Tiravanija, Tati's entire film is about the designer's journey to the auto show at which he arrives just in time for the show to close.Bishop, Claire. "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics", pp. 54-55


Relational aesthetics

Bourriaud wishes to approach art in a way that ceases "to take shelter behind Sixties art history", 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 The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...
boom, using terminology such as
user-friendliness Usability can be described as the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience. In software engineering, usability is the degree to which a soft ...
,
interactivity Across the many fields concerned with interactivity, including information science, computer science, human-computer interaction, communication, and industrial design, there is little agreement over the meaning of the term "interactivity", but m ...
and
DIY "Do it yourself" ("DIY") is the method of building, modifying, or repairing things by oneself without the direct aid of professionals or certified experts. Academic research has described DIY as behaviors where "individuals use raw and sem ...
(do-it-yourself). In his 2002 book ''Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World'', Bourriaud describes "relational aesthetics" as works that take as their point of departure the changing mental space opened by the internet.


Relational art

Bourriaud explores the 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." The artwork creates 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." Robert Stam, the head of new media and film studies at
New York University New York University (NYU) is a private research university in New York City. Chartered in 1831 by the New York State Legislature, NYU was founded by a group of New Yorkers led by then-Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin. In 1832, the ...
, coined a term for the shared activity group: witnessing publics. Witnessing publics are "that loose collection of individuals, constituted by and through the media, acting as observers of injustices that might otherwise go unreported or unanswered." The meaning of relational art is created when arts perception is altered while leaving the original artifact intact. 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 encounters between people. Through these encounters, meaning is elaborated ''collectively'', rather than in the space of individual consumption.


Critical reception

Writer and director Ben Lewis has suggested that relational art is the new "ism", in analogue with "ism"s of earlier periods such as
impressionism Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open Composition (visual arts), composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating ...
,
expressionism Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Northern Europe around the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it rad ...
and
cubism Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassemble ...
. In "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics", published in 2004 in ''
October October is the tenth month of the year in the Julian and Gregorian calendars and the sixth of seven months to have a length of 31 days. The eighth month in the old calendar of Romulus , October retained its name (from Latin and Greek ''ôct ...
'',
Claire Bishop Claire Bishop is a British art historian, critic, and Professor of Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York where she has taught since September 2008. Bishop is known as one of the central theorists of participation in visual art and ...
describes the aesthetic of
Palais de Tokyo The Palais de Tokyo (''Tokyo Palace'') is a building dedicated to modern and contemporary art, located at 13 avenue du Président-Wilson, facing the Trocadéro, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. The eastern wing of the building belongs to ...
as a "laboratory", the "curatorial modus operandi" of art produced in the 1990s. Bishop writes, "An effect of this insistent promotion of these ideas as artists-as-designer, function over contemplation, and open-endedness over aesthetic resolution is often ultimately to enhance the status of the curator, who gains credit for stage-managing the overall laboratory experience. As
Hal Foster Harold Rudolf Foster, FRSA (August 16, 1892 – July 25, 1982) was a Canadian-American comic strip artist and writer best known as the creator of the comic strip '' Prince Valiant''. His drawing style is noted for its high level of draftsmanship ...
warned in the mid-1990s, 'the institution may overshadow the work that it otherwise highlights: it becomes the spectacle, it collects the cultural capital, and the director-curator becomes the star.'" Bishop identifies Bourriaud's book as an important first step in identifying tendencies in the art of the 1990s but also writes in the same essay that such work “seems to derive from a creative misreading of
poststructuralist Post-structuralism is a term for philosophical and literary forms of theory that both build upon and reject ideas established by structuralism, the intellectual project that preceded it. Though post-structuralists all present different critique ...
theory: rather than the interpretations of a work of art being open to continual reassessment, the work of art itself is argued to be in perpetual flux.” Bishop also 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?" She continues that "the relations set up by relational aesthetics are not intrinsically democratic, as Bourriaud suggests, since they rest too comfortably within an ideal of
subjectivity Subjectivity in a philosophical context has to do with a lack of objective reality. Subjectivity has been given various and ambiguous definitions by differing sources as it is not often the focal point of philosophical discourse.Bykova, Marina F ...
as whole and of community as immanent togetherness." In "Traffic Control", published one year later in ''
Artforum ''Artforum'' is an international monthly magazine specializing in contemporary art. The magazine is distinguished from other magazines by its unique 10½ x 10½ inch square format, with each cover often devoted to the work of an artist. Notabl ...
'', artist and critic Joe Scanlan goes one step further in ascribing to relational aesthetics a palpable peer pressure. Scanlan writes, "Firsthand experience has convinced me that relational aesthetics has more to do with peer pressure than collective action or egalitarianism, which would suggest that one of the best ways to control human behavior is to practice relational aesthetics."


Exhibitions

In 2002, Bourriaud curated an exhibition at the
San Francisco Art Institute San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) was a private college of contemporary art in San Francisco, California. Founded in 1871, SFAI was one of the oldest art schools in the United States and the oldest west of the Mississippi River. Approximately ...
, ''Touch: Relational Art from the 1990s to Now'', "an exploration of the interactive works of a new generation of artists." Exhibited artists included
Angela Bulloch Angela Bulloch (born 1966 in Rainy River, Ontario, Canada), is an artist who often works with sound and installation; she is recognised as one of the Young British Artists. Bulloch lives and works in Berlin. Life and career Bulloch studied at Go ...
,
Liam Gillick Liam Gillick (born 1964, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire) is a British artist who lives and works in New York City.
,
Felix Gonzalez-Torres Felix may refer to: * Felix (name), people and fictional characters with the name Places * Arabia Felix is the ancient Latin name of Yemen * Felix, Spain, a municipality of the province Almería, in the autonomous community of Andalusia, ...
,
Jens Haaning Jens Haaning (born 1965) is a Danish conceptual, contemporary artist living and working in Copenhagen. Haaning has produced a body of artworks since the 1990s, which attempt to offer an acute reflection of a complex and changing society in the ...
,
Philippe Parreno Philippe Parreno (born 1964 in Oran, Algeria) is a contemporary French artist who lives and works in Paris. His works include films, Installation art, installations, performances, drawings, and text. Parreno focuses on expanding ideas of time ...
,
Gillian Wearing Gillian Wearing CBE, RA (born 10 December 1963) is an English conceptual artist, one of the Young British Artists, and winner of the 1997 Turner Prize. In 2007 Wearing was elected as lifetime member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He ...
and
Andrea Zittel Andrea Zittel (born 1965) is an American artist based in Joshua Tree, CA whose practice encompasses spaces, objects and modes of living in an ongoing investigation that explores the questions "How to live?" and "What gives life meaning?" Early li ...
. Critic Chris Cobb suggests that Bourriaud's "snapshot" of 1990s art is a confirmation of the term (and idea) of relational art, while illustrating "different forms of social interaction as art that deal fundamentally with issues regarding public and private space." In 2008, Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector organized an exhibition with most of the artists associated with Relational Aesthetics, but the term itself was shelved in favor of calling the show ''Theanyspacewhatever''. The exhibition included stalwarts Bulloch, Gillick, Gonzalez-Foerster, Höller, Huyghe, and Tiravanija, along with loosely affiliated artists Maurizio Cattelan, Douglas Gordon, Jorge Pardo, and Andrea Zittel. The
LUMA Foundation LUMA Foundation is a nonprofit organization established in 2004 that is based out of Zurich, Switzerland. It supports the activities of independent contemporary artists and other pioneers working in the fields of art, photography, publishing, docu ...
has presented many artists associated with Relational Aesthetics.


References


Further reading

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External links


Extracts from Nicolas Bourriaud's ''Relational Esthetics'' (Dijon: les Presses du réel, 2002) as pdfInterview with Claire Bishop, July 2009Open Engagement 2007 conference"What is a Participatory Practice?"
in ''Fillip'' {{Westernart Aesthetics Books about visual art Contemporary art movements