Relational Art
Encyclopedia
Relational art or relational aesthetics is a mode or tendency in fine art practice originally observed and highlighted by French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud
. Bourriaud defined the approach simply 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."
curated by Bourriaud at CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux. Traffic included the artists that Bourriaud would continue to refer to throughout the 1990s, such as Henry Bond
, Vanessa Beecroft
, Maurizio Cattelan
, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
, Liam Gillick
, Christine Hil, Carsten Höller
, Pierre Huyghe
, Miltos Manetas
, Philippe Parreno
, Jorge Pardo and Rirkrit Tiravanija
.
, Philippe Parreno
, Carsten Höller
, Henry Bond
, Douglas Gordon
and Pierre Huyghe
.
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."
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."
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.
, expressionism
and cubism
. Lewis finds many similarities between relational art and earlier "ism"s at their beginnings: relational art is often not considered art at all because it redefines the concept of art, many artists considered "relational" deny that they are such and relational art had a "founding" exhibition.
In "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics", published in 2004 in October
, Claire Bishop describes the aesthetic of Palais de Tokyo 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 experi- ence. As Hal Foster 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. However, 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
as whole and of community as immanent togetherness."
The University of New Mexico's
College of Fine Arts links its fine arts program with the ideas of relational art.
, Liam Gillick
, Felix Gonzalez-Torres
, Jens Haaning
, Philippe Parreno
, Gillian Wearing
and Andrea Zittel
. 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."
Nicolas Bourriaud
Nicolas Bourriaud is a French curator and art critic. He co-founded, and from 1999 to 2006 was co-director of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris together with Jerôme Sans. He was also founder and director of the contemporary art magazine Documents sur l'art , and correspondent in Paris for Flash Art from...
. Bourriaud defined the approach simply 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."
Origin of the term
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 TrafficTraffic (art exhibition)
Traffic is the title of a group exhibition of contemporary art that took place at CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux, France, through February and March, 1996...
curated by Bourriaud at CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux. Traffic included the artists that Bourriaud would continue to refer to throughout the 1990s, such as Henry Bond
Henry Bond
Henry Bond is an English writer, photographer curator, and visual artist. In his Lacan at the Scene , Bond made a contribution to theoretical psychoanalysis....
, Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft is an Italian contemporary artist living in Los Angeles.-Artistic practice:Beecroft's work is a fusion of conceptual issues and aesthetic concerns, focusing on large-scale performance art, usually involving live female models...
, Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan is an Italian artist based in New York. He is known for his satirical sculptures, particularly La Nona Ora , depicting the Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite....
, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, born in 1965 in Strasbourg, is a French artist working with video and installations. Gonzalez-Foerster lives and works in Paris and Rio de Janeiro. She won the Marcel Duchamp Prize in 2002.-Exhibitions:...
, Liam Gillick
Liam Gillick
Liam Gillick is a British conceptual artist who lives in New York City. He is often associated with the artists included the 1996 exhibit Traffic, which first introduced the term Relational Art.-Life and career:...
, Christine Hil, Carsten Höller
Carsten Höller
Carsten Höller is a German artist. He lives and works in Farsta, Stockholm, in Sweden. Today, he also shares a house in Ghana with colleague Marcel Odenbach.-Early life and education:...
, Pierre Huyghe
Pierre Huyghe
Pierre Huyghe is a French artist who works in a variety of media from film and video to public interventions. He won the Hugo Boss Prize from the Guggenheim Museum in 2002.-Biography:...
, Miltos Manetas
Miltos Manetas
Miltos Manetas is a Greek painter and multimedia artist. He currently lives and works in HighgateManetas has created Internet Art as well as paintings of cables, computers, video games and Internet websites. His work has been collected by Charles Saatchi...
, Philippe Parreno
Philippe Parreno
Philippe Parreno is an Algerian artist and filmmaker, born in Oran, and currently living in Paris, France. Parreno's work primarily revolves around the interrogation of the nature of an image, as well as the modes of its exhibition.-Life and work:...
, Jorge Pardo and Rirkrit Tiravanija
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Rirkrit Tiravanija is a contemporary artist residing in New York. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961. His installations often take the form of stages or rooms for sharing meals, cooking, reading or playing music; architecture or structures for living and socializing are a core element...
.
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 boom, using terminology such as user-friendliness, interactivity and DIY (do-it-yourself). In his 2002 book Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Bourriaud describes Relational Aesthetics as a book addressing works that take as their point of departure the changing mental space opened by the internet.Relational art
Artists included by Bourriaud under the rubric of Relational Aesthetics include: Rirkrit TiravanijaRirkrit Tiravanija
Rirkrit Tiravanija is a contemporary artist residing in New York. He was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1961. His installations often take the form of stages or rooms for sharing meals, cooking, reading or playing music; architecture or structures for living and socializing are a core element...
, Philippe Parreno
Philippe Parreno
Philippe Parreno is an Algerian artist and filmmaker, born in Oran, and currently living in Paris, France. Parreno's work primarily revolves around the interrogation of the nature of an image, as well as the modes of its exhibition.-Life and work:...
, Carsten Höller
Carsten Höller
Carsten Höller is a German artist. He lives and works in Farsta, Stockholm, in Sweden. Today, he also shares a house in Ghana with colleague Marcel Odenbach.-Early life and education:...
, Henry Bond
Henry Bond
Henry Bond is an English writer, photographer curator, and visual artist. In his Lacan at the Scene , Bond made a contribution to theoretical psychoanalysis....
, Douglas Gordon
Douglas Gordon
Douglas Gordon is a Scottish artist; he won the Turner Prize in 1996 and the following year he represented Britain at the Venice Biennale...
and Pierre Huyghe
Pierre Huyghe
Pierre Huyghe is a French artist who works in a variety of media from film and video to public interventions. He won the Hugo Boss Prize from the Guggenheim Museum in 2002.-Biography:...
.
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."
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."
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.
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 impressionismImpressionism
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement that originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870s and 1880s...
, expressionism
Expressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
and cubism
Cubism
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture...
. Lewis finds many similarities between relational art and earlier "ism"s at their beginnings: relational art is often not considered art at all because it redefines the concept of art, many artists considered "relational" deny that they are such and relational art had a "founding" exhibition.
In "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics", published in 2004 in October
October (journal)
October is a peer-reviewed academic journal specializing in contemporary art, criticism, and theory, published by the MIT Press.-History:...
, Claire Bishop describes the aesthetic of Palais de Tokyo 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 experi- ence. As Hal Foster 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. However, 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
Subjectivity refers to the subject and his or her perspective, feelings, beliefs, and desires. In philosophy, the term is usually contrasted with objectivity.-Qualia:...
as whole and of community as immanent togetherness."
The University of New Mexico's
University of New Mexico
The University of New Mexico at Albuquerque is a public research university located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the United States. It is the state's flagship research institution...
College of Fine Arts links its fine arts program with the ideas of relational art.
Exhibitions
In 2002, Bourriaud curated an exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute, Touch: Relational Art from the 1990s to Now, "an exploration of the interactive works of a new generation of artists." Exhibited artists included Angela BullochAngela Bulloch
Angela Bulloch , is an artist who often works with sound and installation; she is recognised as one of the Young British Artists.-Life and career:...
, Liam Gillick
Liam Gillick
Liam Gillick is a British conceptual artist who lives in New York City. He is often associated with the artists included the 1996 exhibit Traffic, which first introduced the term Relational Art.-Life and career:...
, Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Félix González-Torres
Felix Gonzalez-Torres was an American, Cuban-born visual artist."For Felix it was much more powerful to assume that the gay and straight audience was the same audience, that being a Cuban-born American is the same as being an American. And being American was something he was extremely proud of."...
, Jens Haaning
Jens Haaning
Jens Haaning is an artist living and working in Copenhagen. His work addresses the issue of racism in Scandinavian society.He has exhibited extensively, e.g. Documenta XI, Kassel; the 9th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul and Traffic at CAPC Museé d'art contemporain, Bordeaux...
, Philippe Parreno
Philippe Parreno
Philippe Parreno is an Algerian artist and filmmaker, born in Oran, and currently living in Paris, France. Parreno's work primarily revolves around the interrogation of the nature of an image, as well as the modes of its exhibition.-Life and work:...
, Gillian Wearing
Gillian Wearing
Gillian Wearing OBE RA is an English conceptual artist, one of the YBAs, and winner of the annual British fine arts award, The Turner Prize, in 1997. On 11 December 2007, Wearing was elected as lifetime member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London....
and Andrea Zittel
Andrea Zittel
Andrea Zittel is an American practicing sculptor, installation artist, and Relational artist.-Early Life:Born in Escondido, California in 1965, Zittel graduated from San Pasqual High School in 1983...
. 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."
Further reading
- Bishop, Claire. "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics." October (Fall 2004, No. 110): 51-79. http://roundtable.kein.org/files/roundtable/claire%20bishop-antagonism&relational%20aesthetics.pdf
- Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002. p. 113. ISBN 978-2-84066-060-6
- Bourriaud, Nicolas, Caroline Schneider and Jeanine Herman. Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2002. ISBN 0971119309
- Dezeuze, Anna. "Everyday Life, Relational Aesthetics and the Transfiguration of the Commonplace." Journal of Visual Art Practice Volume: 5, Issue: 3 (November 2006): 143-152.
- Hemment, Drew. "Locative Arts." Leonardo Vol. 39, No. 4 (August 2006): 348-355.
- Johansson, Troels Degn. "Visualizing Relations: SuperflexSuperflexSUPERFLEX is a Danish artists' group founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen. Superflex describe their projects as Tools, as proposals that invite people to actively participate in and communicate the development of experimental models that alter the prevailing...
's Relational Art in the Cyberspace Geography." Culture in the Cyber-Age: report from the Asia-Europe Forum, Kyongju, South Korea, October 23-25. Marie le Sourd, et al. (eds). Singapore: Asia-Europe Foundation, 2001. - Jones, Kip. "A Biographic Researcher in Pursuit of an Aesthetic: The use of arts-based (re)presentations in "performative" dissemination of life stories." Qualitative Sociology Review. Volume II Issue 1 (2006). http://www.qualitativesociologyreview.org/ENG/Volume3/Article5.php
- Levinson, Jerrold. "Refining Art Historically." The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism Vol. 47, No. 1 (Winter, 1989): 21-33.
- Simpson, Bennett. "Public Relations: Nicolas Bourriaud Interview." ArtForum (April, 2001).http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_8_39/ai_75830815
- Svetlichnaja, Julia. Relational Paradise as a Delusional Democracy - a Critical Response to a Temporary Contemporary Relational Aesthetics. Paper prepared for the Art and Politics panel, BISA Conference, December 19-21, 2005, University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Scotland. http://www.wmin.ac.uk/sshl/docs/jvs_relationalparadise.doc