Additional Thoughts on Marina Abramovic

Much has been written over the semester about Marina Abramovic’s exhibition at the MOMA, and all of the entries have provided us with fascinating perspectives on the experience. I visited the MOMA again recently, and was intrigued by how a shift in the crowd’s energy had a major influence on the exhibit overall. It seemed as though a reverential energy enveloped the space, unlike my initial visit. The first time I visited the exhibit, the room had a strange buzz of energy that did not quite seem to fit the performance properly. This was apparently due to some celebrities that had recently participated in the performance, and many of the people seemed to be there to try and catch a glimpse of someone famous instead of experiencing art. However, my recent visit left me with a vastly different view of the performance.

Before entering the exhibit, I had visited some of Duchamp’s pieces. There was a quote of his that appeared in our discussion of Nicholas Bourriaud’s writings that kept coming to mind. Duchamp states that, “Art is a game between all people of all periods.” This was running through my mind as I watched Abramovic’s performance, and seemed to have an influence on my overall experience. I found the relational aspects of the exhibit to be more powerful than my previous encounter. When I returned home, I read parts of Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics again and felt that this passage was a perfect description of my time spent at Abramovic’s exhibit:

The form of an artwork issues from a negotiation with the intelligible, which is bequeathed to us. Through it, the artist embarks upon a dialogue. The artistic practice thus resides in the invention of relations between consciousness. Each particular artwork is a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world, giving rise to other relations and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. (1)

I felt as though this helped to explain why my initial experience was not as interesting as my second visit to the exhibit. I realized that I did not fully allow a dialogue to take place with the art itself. I was too caught up in other things to have a full encounter with the art, and forgot to uphold my part of the relational art experience, thus was not able to fully engage with the work.

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I appreciated the coverage of the exhibit on the MOMA’s website. It definitely serves as an extension of the exhibit itself. I found that I have watched the live stream of the performance from time to time, and am always immersed in footage. I appreciate how we are able to access the website in order to reunite with the relational experiences that we first encountered at the exhibit. It also made me wonder at which point the interactive aspects of the website were incorporated into the exhibit overall (was this first considered by Abramovic during the initial conception of the exhibit, or was it primarily designed by the MOMA?).

- Stephanie Class

(1) Bourriaud, Nicholas. Relational Aesthetics. Pg. 22.

The Artist is Present: Marina Abramovic and Relational Aesthetics

It was nothing short of a profoundly unique experience to witness Marina Abramovic's retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art on Saturday, April 24th, 2010. I say this not just because of the profound impact that her work left on me for the days after witnessing the re-performances and re-presentations of her literal "body of work"; this experience was novel as it was the first time MoMA has curated a retrospective on the oeuvre of a performance artist.

I had an inclination of what to expect after having lunch with my artist friend on the Wednesday prior to visiting the museum. She explained the piece that Abramovic herself was to be performing on the second floor of the museum, The Artist is Present, as the artist's ultimate work. My artist friend's explanation served to be a far more modest, cursory description of the performance, as the experience is far more serene yet grand than she made it out to be. Upon entering the museum and ascending the stairs to the Marron Atrium that exists as a space traditionally in constant flux exhibiting temporary collections, large-scale pieces, and video installations, one encounters massive floodlights at each of the four corners of a large square marked off on the floor by tape, the square almost the size of the space itself. In the center of the square sits Abramovic on a chair at one end of a wooden table wearing a long, red gown that is simultaneously confining her body and yet somehow cascading around her legs and onto the floor, making herself at once separate from and one with the chair on which she is positioned. There is a chair positioned at the other end of the table facing the artist in which museum visitors are invited to sit and engage in an unspoken dialogue with the artist for an indeterminate amount of time. Her body appears in this same position every day for the length of museum hours until the retrospective closes on May 31, 2010.



Endurance is a large part of Marina Abramovic's presentation of her body/of work. Sitting or standing for hours at a time, subjecting her body repeatedly to collisions with other objects, beatings, lashings or deprivation, Abramovic tests the limits of human comfort with acts of tedium, stress, and concentration. As she submits her body to these series of acts – examples can be drawn from her three parallel pieces from 1977 entitled Freeing the Memory, Freeing the Body, and Freeing the Voice in which she speaks, dances and screams until she has pushed her body to the point of failure – Abramovic seeks to push her body out of its comfort of stasis and stagnant, un-becoming being. In committing to performing these acts in front of a live audience (or at times the future audience implied in the act of filming the performance), the artist insists on creating a dialogue with herself and her audience, creating herself as both the subject and the object of her body/of work. Much like her piece The Artist is Present, Abramovic questions the notions of object and subject and of artistic and audience.

If, as Nicolas Bourriaud asserts in his text Relational Aesthetics, "each particular artwork is a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world" (i), then Abramovic's aim of blurring the line between artist as subject and audience as object (and vice versa) lies in her confrontation of her body with the spectator. Consistently appearing nude without engaging in sexual acts and subjecting her body to the will of her audience like she did with Rhythm O – asking the audience to use one of 70 or so different objects, some of them potentially lethal, on herself and taking full responsibility – the artist is confronting her audience's notions of the body and of the traditional work of art while at the same time dispelling concepts of sexuality and humanity.

"...it is no longer possible to regard the contemporary work as a space to be walked through...It is henceforth presented as a period of time to be lived through, like an opening to unlimited discussion" (ii)

– Nicolas Bourriaud

None of Marina Abramovic's works exemplify this quote from Bourriaud more literally than her piece The House with the Ocean View (2002), a space constructed for living out a minimalist existence in the hopes of purifying the artist's body and mind. Consisting of three rooms with nothing more than a shower, a toilet, 12 changes of clothes and gallons of purified water, Abramovic lived in this elevated space for 12 days with three ladders made of butcher knives offering her only chance for escape. While the artist was only present in the space via a filmed projection of one of her performances of this work, the stark space, beautiful in its modernist simplicity and austerity, the picture below offers one glimpse into her 12 day experience in the performance space.


"I didn't have verbal communication. It was only with the eyes. I became so sensitive that – it sounds almost religious – I had this amazing opening of the heart that hurt me. This is why I believe time is so necessary: the public needs time to get the point. When I spend 12 days in a gallery, its energy is changed. Artists have to serve as oxygen to society, and that is what I do" – Marina Abramovic, from an interview for ARTnews.

Katharine Relth


(i) Nicolas Bourriaud. Relational Aesthetics. France: Les presses du reel, 1998 (22).
(ii) Ibid, 15.

Two Examples of Relational Art: Tino Sehgal vs. Marina Abramovic

Tino Sehgal's piece "This is progress" at Guggenheim was something of a disappointment for me: it did not seem a successful example of socially engaged art. The work belongs to the realm of what Nicolas Bourriaud calls "relational aesthetic": its meaning should be elaborated in a collective effort, through the encounters between the artwork and the viewers. Claire Bishop's famous criticism of the work of several artists supported by Bourriard (e.g., Rirkrit Tiravanija) raises the question of the character and the quality of the inter-subjective relationships that arise in such socially engaged artworks – the issues essentially ignored by Bourriaud. Bishop's concern in her response to Bourriard's texts is the possibility of formulating aesthetic criteria for judging socially engaged art. According to Bourriard, relational artwork is automatically capable of producing positive human relationships by means of its "social form", which immediately makes it political and emancipatory. But is it really so? Bishop argues that the mere social structure of an artwork encouraging inter-subjective interaction often leads to trivial, self-satisfied art, which circumvents truly political issues. Bishop suggests that for relational art to be successful, it should "provide a more concrete and polemical grounds for rethinking our relationship to the world and to one other". Such grounds for Bishop are political issues: social inequality, exploitation, etc (e.g., Thomas Hirschhorn's work).

I think it is fair to ask questions about the character and the quality of the inter-subjective interactions with regards to Sehgal's piece. What kind of the relationship is produced between the viewers and the performers of the piece? What is the meaning of the question that opens the piece ("What is progress?"), who asks it and why is it being asked? What are the roles of the artist, the performers and the viewers? How are they structured and why?

Sehgal's piece seems to be a good example of the relational art in which the "social form" is the end in itself: the piece is deemed socially engaged and successful because it provokes a conversation between the viewer and the performers of the piece. The whole structure of the piece is aimed at prompting such conversation regardless of its content and of the motives of the participants, and without much concern for creating a meaningful relationship between the interlocutors, in the absence of which the conversation is unlikely to be anything deeper than the accidental exchange of truisms between two commuters on a train. Although the conversation is seemingly open (the only limitation is the theme: What is progress?), the piece itself is curiously over-determined: its beginning and end are two fixed positions between which the viewer is guided with relentless determination and the encounters are strictly codified in almost all the details: the age and the social status of each successive interlocutor, the amount of time allocated to each episode, the rigid system of transitions, the impersonal character of the conversation, the business-like efficiency of the ending. The very favorable review of the piece by Holland Cotter, characteristically, contains a slightly disconcerted remark: "I was about to press on with this when Bob stopped and said gently, as if on cue, "The piece is called "This Progress,' " and walked off." At the same time, despite the highly controlled structure of the piece, its meaning is extremely loose: everyone is invited to answer for themselves what progress is. As the case usually stands with such broad questions removed from any specific context, the answers are either random observations or vague generalizations. The starting point for the conversation might have being almost any other of the so-called profound questions – what is the nature of art? what is time? what does it mean to be a human being? – without making much difference for the functioning of the piece. Anyone can say anything because there is not much to say (or there is too much to say, which eventually amounts to the same thing).

In contrast to Bishop's position, I do not think that for the social art to be successful it necessarily must raise political questions. But I am, with her, interested in a productive discussion about the social art. An artwork should not be praised for a single reason that it provides a chance for communicating with other people and for experiencing yet another random encounter. Not all communication is meaningful and not any experience is worth having. As Gilles Deleuze remarked, “We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation."

As opposed to Tino Sehgal’s show, Marina Abramovic’s retrospective at the MOMA left strong and lasting impression on me. Her current performance in the MOMA atrium is a very strong piece, emotionally charged and disturbing; undoubtedly it is also a feat of endurance. It establishes a very personal connection between the artist and those among the audience who choose to participate in the piece. The rest of the audience, although only spectators of the piece, are still conscious of the particular relationship developed between Marina and each of her successive co-performers. The piece is especially effective when considered it in the context of her work from the last few decades shown upstairs.

Seeing the documentations of so many of Abramovic’s historic performances in one show is an overwhelming experience: it makes one certain that she is among the greatest artists of the late 20th century. I am somewhat doubtful, however, about the use of the live actors in the re-enactments of several of her pieces. For me at least they looked the least interesting element in the show – mere illustrations of Marina's past work rather than actual living performances. The fact that these artists are seemingly anonymous and work in shifts only reinforces this impression. The important elements of a performance – the presence of the artist and his/her physical endurance, which create a bond between the artist and the audience – are totally lost. To make the reenactment element of the show more successful I think at the very least the performers' individual names and artistic backgrounds should have been made known to the public.

Tatiana

Postproduction After Youtube

In Postproduction, Nicolas Bourriaud discusses the process of appropriation in contemporary art. He describes postproduction as an engagement with the stages of consumption and production. Through postproduction, artists demonstrate that consumption does not mean the end of production and that these states are intertwined. For Bourriaud, the artist suggests alternative modes of living that subvert the dominant narrative of “active producer” and “passive consumer”. For the purpose of this post I would like to briefly explore how the landscape of production/consumption has changed since Postproduction was written in 2002 through the work of two contemporary artists: Oliver Laric and Michael Robinson.

With the popularization of sites such as Youtube and Flicker the idea of consumption as the end point of production has been significantly, if not fatally, wounded. Whether remixed, mashed up, or simply reposted consumers no longer keep the products of their consumption to themselves. The download culture of the Napster era is now complemented by the upload culture of the Youtube era. Through the redistribution of the means of distribution, cultural products long assumed dead-and-gone are given a second life and are projected into what often seems like an endless echo chamber of comments, remixes, reposts, and remakes. Michael Robinson and Oliver Laric explore the new forms of consumption and production that arise in this environment.

HOLD ME NOW from Michael Robinson on Vimeo.

For the sake of simplicity I would like to assign Michael Robinson’s work to the realm of Youtube consumption and Oliver Laric’s work to Youtube production, although these designations certainly bleed into each other. In an interview with Incite! Robinson describes his work as engaging and subverting ideas of nostalgia and beauty by embodying them. In works such as Hold Me Now (2008) and Light is Waiting (2007), Robinson evokes the nostalgia of instant, unimpeded access to childhood cultural products by appropriating and manipulating videos and songs from the 80s and 90s. If Jeff Koons’ work evokes the creation of desire by 80s’ advertising in order to examine it, as Bourriaud claims, then Robinson’s work evokes the creation of nostalgia (a desire for past beauty) that is created by Youtube’s endless recycling of past cultures. Robinson simultaneously evokes and alienates us from the nostalgia through which we consume Youtube videos. His mixing of the comforting and the kitschy with the strange and the mysterious creates a tension and confusion between the apprehension of the surface and a feeling of depth. (Michael Robinson’s videos can all be found online here: http://www.poisonberries.net/films.html)

If Youtube has broken down the hierarchical modes of consumption and production, Oliver Laric’s 50 50 (2007) takes a stab at redefining what has replaced them. 50 50 accumulates a range of fan-made renditions of 50 Cent’s songs that have been uploaded to Youtube. In this piece the hierarchy of past distributions of culture is brought into conflict with the shape of contemporary forms. Each contributor is given equal say, broadcasting their personal consumption of 50 Cent for all to see. What 50 50 makes abundantly clear is that consumption is no longer private, it no longer stays in the living room while watching TV, or in the gallery while viewing a painting, or in your bedroom while blasting your music. Instead, it is rebroadcast, redistributed, and reconsumed. By bringing these broadcasts together, Laric shows us the face of a new consumer, who is equally aware of their production as their consumption.

What this video also makes abundantly clear is the resilience of top down model of production and consumption. If Laric shows us the power of new technologies for rebroadcasting, 50 50 also displays the homogenization of what we choose to broadcast. The piece points to the revolutionary potential of the medium to change where and what we consume, but also the possible downfall for this potential, in which we simply rebroadcast what we receive from the top. As the name might suggest, 50 50 is equally optimistic and pessimistic about the changes in production consumption which Youtube and other new forms of online sharing can bring.

-Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa

Some Present Thoughts...

Reading Deleuze's texts has been quite a personal experience to me (as opposed to solely intellectual or academic). Therefore, such are my present thoughts. Both a wonderful and disturbing experience. Besides the fact that I have been encountering many of my own and long cherished thoughts and ideas now expressed through mostly different metaphors and thus enhanced and deautomatized in my own perception, the disturbing has been the realization that some of those very ideas had started ossifying inside of myself without my fully being aware of that. Therefore, to me, these texts have not only been inspiring but also animating. Along such a journey, to read Bourriaud's text was an annoying astray that turned into a fortunate touchstone for the hitherto developed or awakened thoughts, finally into a peculiar affirmation of them.

Being an art critic (and I suppose, an art historian, as well), therefore aware of the importance of the change, shift and novelty, Bourriaud naturally aspires to bring some of these himself. What in my view his text actually offers is a manifestation of an impotent and more importantly, destructive sort of both art practice and social thought.

His "democratic" art suggested through this cheesy and ridiculous notion of "giving everybody a chance" to the point of disgust, is what I see as a manifestation of the highest level of arrogance, which is itself nothing but an embodiment of a deepest although the most perfidious kind of racism, or fascism (to use this so dear contrasting word to all these democracy promoters). This racism is utterly unaware of itself for it never questions itself as such. It however, leaks through personal attitudes, notions and actions. What is an artist to give everybody a chance?! Is he a god? The one who gives and takes away? Or is he the omniscient? My point here is neither to affirm nor to deny the artist as a divine creature, but to focus on Bourriaud's axiomatic maintenance of the artist as such. This is important because this notion "naturally" becomes applied to the admirers and those who understand and appreciate these artists and their work. Consequently, we have a consecrated group that gives a chance to everybody who thinks the way they do.

And chance for what? To justify your own thoughts, beliefs, ways of leading your life? To soothe your pains, dilemmas or fears? Or to hear that you are ok, I am ok and everything will be just fine – we'll have a democratic dialogue. Although I haven't read Bishop's article yet, from what I've heard about it, I believe we'd agree that a democratic society is not the cohabitation of bunch of zombies producing "a specific sociability" while "harmoniously" exchanging frozen smiles, whereas any potential wondering face whose muscles might be moving toward an expression that would suggest a criticism of any kind is treated as intolerance. The two-clocks-put-next-to-each-other endlessly and pointlessly (but democratically!) striking their seconds, to me is a marvelous plastic example of the utterly vulgarized notion of democracy – a society where any genuine (re)questioning is a taboo, where contractions are anesthetized, shifts in dynamics banished and differences …well, this is the Houdini level of illusion! Differences, today, have been existing and are cherished only within the "communication" – the one Deleuze is talking about.

Opposed to this Bourriaud's ever-giving art is the "authoritarian" art of all those obsessed megalomaniacs who used to fight and sweat while persisting in the process of conceiving and creating their "private symbolic spaces". I must say that I am very mistrustful about this "invisible glue" that Bourriaud's artists are using… Maybe because I usually miss to see parts and layers that can be glued at first place. The importance of the process that precedes a finished piece of art is not in the effort itself – an artistic value certainly has nothing to do with the amount of effort that is put into creating a piece. The basic problem that most of such pieces have in common is that they are single-layered. They tend to remain on the level of a more or less (and less than more) witty, interesting or lucid idea (in the sense of a "lucky" thought, pun and the like), which they then hurry on to present to the rest of the world. But there was no journey along which "witty ideas" become questioned and re-questioned, where personal feelings and experiences become exceeded, thus preventing an artist to make a piece that is nothing but an "imagination and projection of his own ego". Again, it is not about the amount of time, tools, materials or money invested and spent, it is about a multiplicity of layers existing within a piece. For, this multiplicity is what allows me to enter a piece, forget my former self and become another, and another, and another… It is the single-layered pieces that are inevitably authoritarian, or better – totalitarian, for they always offer one – a self-sufficient, flat one. Consequently, they disable me entering them unless I agree (with whatever is the content of the layer). And if I agree, I can rejoice in the recognition of my own self. Thus undisturbed, I go home, back to my harmonious democratic life.

This is why such pieces, besides their very questionable artistic value, have some seriously problematic political implications. Even more so, for the fact that the artists themselves usually designate their works as socially engaged, political and so on. This again brings me to the one of the biggest scams of our contemporary society – the notion of democracy that safely keeps under control any unanticipated movements behind the two-clocks mask, under the pretext of a banal and vulgar, yet deeply indoctrinated understanding of harmony and tolerance as static and limb states of mind. The Middle Ages had their rich subculture that emphasized the body sometimes to the extreme, thus creating a contra balance to the dominant Christian culture. Former totalitarian systems had their underground formations that in their own ways kept persisting in subverting them. But they had iron boundaries to deal with – when they hit against them, their bodies were bleeding. Our boundaries are elastic, made of silicone. Not only that they are indiscernible, but also smooth and soothing – when you hit, you get anesthetized.

… Maybe it is not about hitting anymore – about attacking and aggression, but about acknowledging and creation. Deleuze says: Good destruction requires love. I am sure he did not have in mind some kind of post-modern flower children (of which above discussed artists actually remind me). So what does it mean? To me, it is a very deep, multi-layered and difficult thought. The one I used to find only in texts of some Eastern artists, thinkers, healers. One of the ways I interpret it: to be able to create is to forget. But, forgetting here is not rejecting, starting off as some kind of a tabula rasa (which we never are), but rather allowing oneself to be deeply involved with the world, to look and see, to observe and learn, to accept it in a way of acknowledging it, thus to know it and, to use Deleuze's thoughts, to see what is missing in the existing in order to extract something that still belongs to it, though you also turn it against it. By having accepted your past, you liberate yourself from dependence upon it – you forget, and enable yourself for the future. Like one of the layers in Nietzsche's aphorism suggests:

· Was I ill? Have I recovered?

Has my doctor been discovered?

How have I forgotten all?

· Now I know you have recovered.

Healthy is who can't recall. (Gay Science)

And then, you create.

Vladana

Aesthetics of Relational Art and Ethical Criticism

In her October paper "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics," Claire Bishop critically reexamines Nicolas Bourriaud's analysis of the works of contemporary artists that he associates with "relational art". For Bourriaud, the focus of the relational aesthetics that emerged in 1990s is "the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space" [Relational Aesthetics (hereafter cited as RA), 14]. The works of the artists involved in the project of relational art, he believes, are formed by inter-subjectivity and through the encounter between the artwork and the viewers, with the meaning of an artwork elaborated in a collective effort. Bishop's criticism toward Bourriaud's text and the work of artists he supports raises the question of the character and the quality of the inter-subjective relationships that arise in the work of these artists – the issues essentially ignored by Bourriaud. Aesthetic judgment, Bishop claims, for Bourriaud is equated with an "ethicopolitical judgment of the relationships produced by a work of art". ["Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics" (hereafter cited as ARA), 65] By means of its "social form", relational art work is assumed automatically capable of producing positive human relationships, which immediately makes it political and emancipatory. Bishop argues that the mere social form of an artwork encouraging social interaction often leads to trivial, self-satifsfied art, which circumvents truly political issues. She uses the examples of Rirkrit Tiravanija and Liam Gillick to highlight the problematics of Bourriaud's analysis and the danger of "simple Nokia art - producing interpersonal relations for their own sake and never addressing their political aspects" [Bourriaud's quote in "Public relations: Bennett Simpson Talks with Nicolas B.", p. 48, cited in ARA, 68].

Bishop proposes two other artists which, in her view, "provide a more concrete and polemical grounds for rethinking our relationship to the world and to one other" than some of the artists championed by Bourriaud. In particular, she uses the example of Thomas Hirschhorn's work Bataiile Monument (2002) as a work which raises serious political issues. This work does not just lure the viewer into interactive and inter-sibjective relationships, it provokes a range of emotional and ambivalent responses among the visitors of the Monument thus leading to the emergence of an independent thought, "which is the essential prerequisite of political action" [ARA, 77].

Despite her whole-hearted support of Hirschhorn's work, Bishop admits a certain moral ambivalence surrounding Bataille Monument. In particular, she mentions "accusations that Hirschhorn's gesture was inappropriate and patronizing" [ARA, 26]. Indeed, Martha Rosler compares Bataille Monument with "company towns" such as Pullman, Illinois or Hershey, Pennsylvania. She resents the project because the seemingly harmonious relationships between the artist and the Turkish workers in Nordstadt were in fact the result of substantial efforts: for one thing, Hirschhorn had the workers bound by a contract to build the monument for several euros per hour; moreover, he was compelled to move into the area to prevent the project from being vandalized. Instead of being an interactive social project, Hirschhorn's work then becomes another example of exploitation of lower-class Turkish workers with the goal of exhibiting this marginalized group for "the delectation of the international art appreciation crowd". [e.g. see the transcripted conversation between 37 artists, curators and scholars, November 14, 2005, in: "Who Cares", Published by Creative Time Books, 2006].

This and similar critiques apparently motivated Claire Bishop to publish another text on social and relational art, this time in Artforum, in February 2006 [The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents, (hereafter cited as STCD)]. In this paper she claims that the "social turn" in contemporary art led to the "ethical turn" in art criticism that addresses the works of artists making interactive and collaborative works [STCD, 180]. For the supporters of socially engaged art, social effect of the artwork is prioritized over consideration of its artistic quality: "collaborative practices are automatically perceived to be equally important artistic gestures of resistance: There can be no failed, unsuccessful, unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond" [STCD, 180]. In the absence of articulated aesthetics of social art, the interactive and collaborative projects are increasingly judged by the artists' working process - the way a collaboration is undertaken, the level of political correctness among the participants, the degree to which the collaborators are acknowledged as co-authors of the artist and are represented through the artwork [STCD, 181]. Bishop compares the ethical criteria for assessing socially engaged art with the Christian ideal of "good soul", which exalts the self-sacrifice of the artist - his or her renunciation of their authorial presence "in favor of allowing participants to speak through him or her" [STCD, 183]. In her view, such ethic-based criticism falls short of providing useful criteria for assessing social art. She believes that aesthetic judgment and the idea of the autonomy of art (its independence of functionality and rationalism) should not be abandoned in the name of social change, because "the productive contradiction of art's relationship to social change [is] characterized precisely by the tension between faith in art's autonomy and belief in art as inextricably bound to the promise of a better world to come".

Claire Bishop, 2004. "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics," October 110, Fall 2004, p. 51-79.
Claire Bishop, 2006. "The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents," Artforum, February 2006, p. 178-183.
Nicolas Bourriaud, 2002. Relational Aesthetics, Paris: Less Presses du reel, 2002.


Tatiana

A Reappraisal of Relational Aesthetics

In Relational Aesthetics, Nicolas Bourriaud outlines a theory of contemporary art, paying particular attention to the ways that present-day artists break with the traditions of Modernism, or perhaps more accurately, adopt, shift, distort and transform the goals and ideas of modern art. As Bourriaud writes, “Social utopias have given way to everyday micro-utopias and imitative strategies, any stance that is ‘directly’ critical of society is futile, if based on the illusion of a marginality that is nowadays impossible if not to say regressive” (31). Thus, art proceeds within the world of lived relationships and circumstances, creating new conditions –what he calls “relational devices” – out of the set of existing forms, objects and relations. It does this by taking up and transforming existing conditions and relations, such as those that persist in the art world: “The exploration of relations existing between, for instance, the artist and his/her gallery owner may determine forms and a project” (33). In such projects the art object, however immaterial it may be, now becomes “a relationship with the world rendered concrete by an object” (48).


In her two exhibitions “The Appraisal” at Steffany Martz Gallery and “The Reappraisal” (pictured above) at Winkleman Gallery, the first in 1999 and the second in 2009, artist and former Christie’s auction house employee Jennifer Dalton auctioned off objects from her home. In “The Appraisal” she had the possessions in her apartment valued by Christies and then sold some of them on Ebay, comparing the estimates from the former to the money obtained via the latter. Some of these works were her own paintings and sculptures, or those of friends, but the auction also included found furniture and household belongings.

In “The Reappraisal”, she made an inventory of every item in her home on index cards with photos, descriptions and initial bids based on their emotional value to Dalton, her husband and their four-year-old son. For the five weeks that the exhibition lasted – the materials in the gallery consisting of shelves full of multicolored index cards – visitors could bid on any and every object from Dalton’s home. Here, Dalton collapses not only the utilitarian value of an object and its aesthetic qualities – a manipulation at work in the readymade artworks of Marcel Duchamp – but she adds the additional economic wrinkle of translating emotional attachment into economic terms. In so doing she underlines the fundamental equality between the objects in her private home and those shown in an art gallery. As Bourriaud might write, both classes of objects are valuable as material records of immaterial relations between people, whether they be Dalton and her family and friends, or the gallery-goers who appraise and, in some cases, buy her belongings.

Dalton's installations and performances address some of the questions that were raised in our conversations in class tonight, about whether or not such events, situations and relations have some inherent value (whether we call it democracy or discussion, or something else), or if they need to be qualified by some additional criteria like those suggested in Claire Bishop's constructive criticisms of Bourriaud's work. Being in an art gallery certainly limited Dalton's audience: even though admission to the space is free there are certain cultural boundaries implicit in the gallery space, certain inherent values to the way art is presented that allow some people in and not others. That being said, Dalton's work also acknowledged its status as art that has the benefit of certain privileges based on differences of class, race, sexuality and gender. The work she presented, the life being appraised, was very clearly that of a middle-class white woman living in a suburban home with a husband and child. In making these cultural circumstances apparent, Dalton's "Reappraisal" at least acknowledged and addressed the problems of homogeneous spectatorship that Bourriaud's work tends to ignore, even if she didn't necessarily posit a solution to those issues – as if one existed!

Below is a more or less helpful video of the installation, with commentary that isn't always valuable but provides good context. There are also more images of Dalton's exhibition here.

- Ben Sutton