Virtual Relational Aesthetics

This video – a virtual re-enactment of the re-enactments of Abramovic's works in Second Life – is a follow up to my previous post on Marina's 'The Artist Is Present."



(Note you might need view the video directly on youtube because you need to sign in as above 18 years old viewer)

-Azin

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.

Relational Aesthetics

I took my children, Luca age seven and Jackson age 11 to the MOMA for my field report. We had a wonderful day and it was interesting to see and feel the museum from a child’s point of view. When we arrived there was a long line and both of my children started to complain. We jumped on line, and because of the ten-minute wait we started to socialize with the people all around us. Just waiting on line was a relational experience for us; it appears people enjoy seeing children at museums! This was a good omen, I have never taken my kids to any museum other than The Museum of Natural History and aquariums and zoo’s. I was not sure if my boys and the MOMA were ready to meet each other?

We walked around, looked at many beautiful paintings and finally stumbled upon the Marina Abramovic installation, “The Artist is Present”. Bourriaud states that what the artists produces, “first and foremost, is relations between people and the world, by way of aesthetic objects." This installation was a little world of its own and for me and my children experiencing this piece of art was definitely a “state of encounter.”

The whole atmosphere felt like a cross between a movie set and a church. There were big lights shining on the artist and her partner and cameras were placed at each end of the exhibit. There also was a hushed silence, and a feeling of reverence or group prayer hovering in the air. My children were immediately captivated and my younger son said, “Mom let’s sit down, it’s weird but I am not getting that bored feeling in my stomach."

So we sat down and experienced Marina Abramovic in a beautiful flowing red dress sitting across from a young woman in a jean skirt and white sneakers. Abramovic and the woman intently looked into each other’s faces and the experience was silent and beautiful. Most of the people watching in the audience quietly chatted with each other and it was so invigorating to sit and watch the artist and her subject interact. The intimacy between the two women was spellbinding and it felt refreshing to witness this true human connection without any filters. I felt like I had a social bond with the artist and her subject and I also felt like I was sharing what it means to be human with my children and the other spectators.

Afterwards, I had a conversation with my children about what the work meant. For me, it was like a metaphor for how an artist works and what it means to “put yourself into your work”. Also, it was a truly relational experience, something akin to a collective group worship, where every spectator is fiercely engaged in the process of learning about themselves and their experience in the world. Thank you Marina Abramovic!

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

The (Necessary) Dissolution of Avant-Garde Art

Avant-gardes have only one sole moment; and the best that can happen to them is,
in the fullest sense of the term, for them to have made their moment
– Guy Debord

I would like here for us to pause and reflect on the problematic of avant-garde art. Here, I will use the term "avant-garde" as defined by the art theorist Peter Bürger in his Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974). For Bürger, there is a necessary distinction to be made between “modernist art” and “avant-garde art.” For Bürger, the latter should be applied only to a discussion of the revolutionary avant-garde movements that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century, such as Futurism, DADA, Surrealism, and Constructivism. What distinguishes these movements from earlier ones such as Symbolism or Fauvism, etc., is the desire of the members of these various movements to break down the barrier between art and life and, in the process, to break down the barrier between artwork and receiver. Rather than attempt to remove themselves from the commercial, market-driven world ushered in by capitalism, these groups saw that it was precisely in this terrain that the battle must take place – precisely because it was the commercial/industrial realm that worked to transform life into something shriveled and small, so that, for example, a factory worker came to feel as though his or her life only had meaning (gained value) to the extent that they worked, to the extent that they labored for another.

While modernist artists favored a retreat from the banality and alienation of everyday life, these avant-garde movements, according to Bürger, embraced elements of popular culture and attempted to re-appropriate these elements for alternative (subversive) purposes. These movements were thus less interested in promoting a specific artistic style than in formulating a series of aesthetic strategies or techniques to provoke the spectator and provoke themselves.

Let’s consider quickly one well-known example from DADA: Marcel Duchamp’s urinal. Duchamp takes an object (a urinal, which he purchases in a shop), gives it a title (Fountain) and submits it to an art exhibition. By doing so, Duchamp questions both the concept of the artist and the artwork. To the question "What is art" he says: art is what the artist says is art (and it doesn’t even need to be made by the artist, just give it a name and a signature); more importantly, art is what the museum says is art, for even if Duchamp wished to give a porcelain urinal the status of art it would have failed if the museum did not confirm his claim. Whatever we think about the various readymades and like-minded objects that would follow in the wake of Duchamp’s “sculpture”, this gesture in the 1920s (especially when combined with other DADA activities) was truly subversive, not to mention extremely funny. All our assumptions about craftsmanship and self-expression in the work of art – not to mention the supposed "neutrality" of the museum space itself as a repository of culture – are flushed down the toilet, so to speak. These were the types of questions that were meant to be provoked by this work, and they did.

But the museum space proved itself quite adept, in its own way, in transforming subversive/radical art into art proper. Even though audiences to this day stare at such works with either bemusement or (more likely) bewilderment, they still managed to enter into the canon of Western art. In these terms, Surrealism was the biggest failure of the groups associated with the 1920s avant-garde, since it was also paradoxically the most commercially successful; the Surrealists failed precisely by allowing their aesthetic strategies to devolve into a style.

It was this turn of events that led later avant-garde movements like the Situationist International (SI) to formulate new methods or strategies for combating the forces of reification or commodification. What Guy Debord, leader of SI, wanted was to extend the radical possibilities of surrealism without falling into the same traps: capitalist appropriation, absorption into the museum, reduction to style. And the way to evade these traps, he came to believe, was to do away with art, or "works of art." As long as one drew a distinction between "art" and "life," art was always assimilable to commodity exchange. As Anselm Jappe writes, “There was," – for Debord – "no longer any place for the work of art that sought to ‘fix emotions’ and strove to endure.” Instead of the creation of artworks, we have the “construction of situations,” the “conscious construction of new affective states” (1999: 57 and 65). The emphasis on concrete situations points to their main goal: the revolutionary transformation of everyday life.

In the Sixties, the SI became primarily an underground movement, a “provisional microsociety,” exhorting the populace-at-large to revolt against the alienation of everyday life and to invent experimental modes of living (Jappe 1999, 68). Although Situationists groups would briefly emerge in a number of countries including Italy, Scandinavia, the UK and the US, Debord’s group remained autonomous and inviolate. In Paris, Debord and the SI did not attempt to recruit more members. They stayed true to their belief that a revolutionary avant-garde movement must remain clandestine, must provide underground agitation. A revolutionary avant-garde movement must supply provocation without succumbing to the desire for social legitimacy. Years later Debord would say, “We did not go on television to say what it was that we had understood. We did not hanker after grants from the scientific research bodies, nor for praise from newspaper intellectuals. We brought fuel to the flames” (emphasis mine). He adds, “It is wonderful to see that disturbances with the tiniest and most ephemeral of origins have eventually shaken the order of the world” (qts. in Jappe 1999, 45 and 46).

The legendary status of SI today is the result, in part, of the instigatory role the group played in the political events that took place in France in spring 1968 and culminated in May '68. What began as student protests/demonstrations became a general wildcat strike involving ten million factory workers. The strikes and demonstrations would continue for two weeks, paralyzing the country. May 1968 was not provoked by a specific incident but by a general sense of discontent. It was a kind of spontaneous revolution. As Jappe notes, May ’68 “showed beyond a doubt that a very large number of people yearned inwardly for a completely different life and that this desire, once it found expression, could quickly bring a modern state to its knees: exactly what the SI had always said.” “May 1968 was indeed proof that something very much like revolution could occur in modern societies, and in a form very closely resembling the SI’s predictions” (1999, 100-01).

Increasingly, the association between art and politics takes on a different value or tenor in the 1960s. The SI, for their part, would assert in their journal “that Dada’s true heir was not American Pop Art but the spontaneous revolt of the Congolese people”, and other such revolutionary insurrections (Jappe 1999, 96). In the 1970s, the logic of such claims would perhaps be taken to their limit with the emergence of terrorist cell groups like Red Army Faction (RAF) who carried on the spirit of the avant-garde in their own way. (I won’t dwell on this here, but I do think that one of the better sections of Simon Sullivan’s essay on “Art and the Political” is his brief consideration of RAF in the context of political art practice and D&G’s notion of “minor literature.”)

Andreas Huyssen, in an essay about Peter Bürger and avant-garde movements, concludes his survey with this observation: “Today the best hopes of the historical avantgarde may not be embodied in art works at all, but in decentered movements which work toward the transformation of everyday life. The point then would be to retain the avantgarde’s attempt to address those human experiences which either have not yet been subsumed under capital, or which are stimulated but not fulfilled by it” (1986, 15). This, in fact, is what we find in the art practices described in Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics. The question, I suppose, is to what extent these practices are a continuation of the radical project of the avant-garde and to what extent are they merely a pale (rote) imitation of the "work" of their predecessors?

An additional question would be: to what extent was the dissolution of the object the correct strategy for the avant-garde, and, more importantly, is it the only strategy left to such politically-minded groups at a time when global capitalism steadily and inexorably colonizes the world? Is the only option left, for those who wish to bridge the gap between art and life: to choose life over art (to the extent that art is equated with a commodifiable object)? And how to do so exactly – to choose life over art – in an era when television gives us its own nihilistic version of this dissolution or merger? Television teaches us not to see life so much as a practice of art as to see life as a form of serial television (with commercial breaks!). Reality TV, indeed.

S I-G

References

Bürger, Peter. Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1986.

Jappe, Anselm. Guy Debord. Trans. Donald Nicolson-Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Sullivan, Simon. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006.

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

Fluxus Movement as Precursor to Relational Aesthetics

In the last class we had a short discussion about the Fluxus movement and its accordance with Bourriaud‘s ideas about the contemporary aesthetics. Therefore, in order to continue discussion online, I decided to post a few facts that clearly describe the Fluxus movement and also accentuate its similarities to the contemporary relational art practices.

The Fluxus movement, which was influenced by Lithuanian-born artist George (Jurgis) Maciunas, emerged in New York in the 60's, moving to Europe, and eventually to Japan. The movement encompassed a new aesthetic that had already appeared on three continents. That Fluxus aesthetic includes part Dada, part Bauhaus and part Zen, and presumes that all media and all artistic disciplines are fair game for combination and fusion. Fluxus valued simplicity over complexity. This movement of art included a strong current of anti-commercialism and an anti-art sensibility, disparaging the conventional market-driven art world in favor of an artist-centered creative practice. Creative forms that have been adopted by Fluxus practitioners include fluxus performances (events), collage, sound art, music, video, and poetry. In terms of an artistic approach, Fluxus artists preferred to work with whatever materials were at hand, and either created their own work or collaborated in the creation process with their colleagues.

The main features of Fluxus movement include:

1. The Unity of Art and Life
The unity of art and life is central to Fluxism. When Fluxus was established, the conscious goal was to erase the boundaries between art and life. That was the sort of language appropriate to the time of pop art and of happenings. The founding Fluxus circle sought to resolve what was then seen as a dichotomy between art and life. For instance, some Fluxus performances were intended to blur the line between performer and audience.

2. Chance
One key aspect of Fluxus experimentation is chance. The methods and results of chance occur repeatedly in the work of Fluxus artists.

3. Playfulness
Playfulness has been part of Fluxus since the beginning. Part of the concept of playfulness has been represented by terms such as jokes, games, puzzles and gags.
When Fluxus emerged, art was so heavily influenced by rigidities of conception, form and style that the irreverent Fluxus attitude could be understandable. The most visible aspect of the irreverent style was the emphasis on the humor.

4. Simplicity
Simplicity of means and perfect attention distinguish this concept in the work of the Fluxus artists.

5. Presence in Time
Many Fluxus works take place in time. The ephemeral quality is obvious in the brief Fluxus performance works, where the term ephemeral is appropriate, and in the production of ephemera, fleeting objects and publications with which Fluxus has always marked itself. Fluxus performances were usually brief and simple. The Event performances sought to elevate the banal, to be mindful of the mundane, and to frustrate the high culture of academic and market-driven music and art.

In my opinion, the aforementioned features of Fluxus movement (especially, a time based non-formalistic approach to the artworks, a critique of the institutional market-based art system and a participatory character of the Fluxus events) let us question the novelty of contemporary relational art practices described by Bourriaud in his book Relational Aesthetics. On the other hand, Fluxus movement was very broad and diverse (the discussion about its time and geographic limits is still viable among the art critics), so its description is relative and can hardly be terminative.

Lukas Brasiskis

References:

1. Friedman K. Forty Years of Fluxus, The Fluxus Reader, 1998

2. http://www.fluxus.org

3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluxus

4. Williams E., Noel A., Ay-O (eds.) Mr. Fluxus: A Collective Portrait of George Maciunas 1931-1978, 1998

The Issue of Form in Bourriaud’s Texts

When I first had read both Bourriaud’s texts I felt slightly confused because of difficulties to understand why the author in each text proposes different approach to contemporary art. For instance, in his first book Bourriaud advocates that contemporary artwork does not have a static form anymore. He states that it is in the constant state of fluidity now. According to Bourriaud, contemporary artwork gets a temporal form only in relation to other human. But then, in Postproduction the author claims that “all observed artistic practices […] have in common the recourse to already produced forms” (Bourriaud 2001, 16) and so, in my opinion, have a formalist nature.

But then I decided do not take into account these probably natural differences (because of slightly different art examples he gives in each text or slightly different time he observes) and, instead, I tried to find the significant similarities in Bourriaud’s approach to contemporary art.

“The new is no longer a criterion”, Nicolas Bourriard writes about the significant changes in the contemporary art in the introduction of his Relational Aesthetics (Bourriaud 1996, 13). Later in Postproduction Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, French art critic goes further and points out that contemporary artist is not obliged anymore to create something originally new in terms of the raw material or system of signs, but, rather, works as editor or DJ who mixes pieces from the old artworks puts them in the new contexts and, finally, gets the new meanings. Both, in his earlier book Relational Aesthetics and in Postproduction Bourriaud quotes Deleuze in Negotiations: “grass does not grow from the roots or from the top, but from the middle” (Bourriaud 1996, 14 and Bourriaud 2001, 17) and explains that this describes the situation in which contemporary artist is. This means to Bourriaud that artist is not able to make something new anymore, he can only deal with forms that surround him in the present moment.

After I had read Bourriaud’s works I remembered a short video project “Revisiting Solaris” by well-known contemporary Lithuanian video artist Deimantas Narkevicius. Following the narrative of Stanislaw’s Lem’s book Solaris, Lithuanian artist shot the additional scene which was excluded during the book’s adaption in the famous Andrej Tarkovsky’s film. The scene is based on the last chapter of Lems’ book, which had been left out of Tarkovskij’s version. In this scene, the main protagonist Kris Kelvin reflects on his short visit to the planet Solaris shortly before his return from the space mission. In Narkevicius project Kelvin is acted by the same Lithuanian actor Donatas Banionis, who is 30 years older now. Furhermore, the setting of the planet Solaris is created using the photos and paintings of the most known Lithuanian painter and composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis. Ciurlionis was a modern symbolist who in his paintings usually was dealing with the topic of the mysterious relation between space and nature.

In my opinion, “Revisiting Solaris” confirms Bouriard’s argument elaborated in his book Postproduction. Deimantas Narkevicius really makes use of three different existing narratives or mediums (using the words of Bourriard): existing paintings and photos, existing book and existing film, mixing them together and creating new artwork, which is also is extension of the previous. Citing Bouriard: “In this new form of culture […] each exhibition encloses within the script of another; each work may be inserted into different programs and used for multiple scenarios. The artwork is no longer an end point but a simple moment in an infinite chain of contributions” (Bourriaud 2001, 20). Narkevicius in his video installation “Revisiting Solaris” did exactly that.

Though Narkevicius video installation was really impressive, on the other hand, while reading Bourriaud I was thinking how we can talk about the perception of the artworks from the standpoint of Bourriaud? And how we can define a quality (both in terms of form and content whose are interchangeable) of the contemporary artworks? For instance, if we are taking into account the aforementioned video instalation by Narkevicius, despite that it is extends the narrative of Tarkovsky’s film, this video work is certainly becomes more representational than Tarkovsky’s film was. The author of “Revisiting Solaris” uses already known story (the narrative of the film) and already seen images (the main actor, similar setting, known photos and paintings) in order to create an extension of the Tarkovsky’s story. Thus, my following question is: could a post-produced artwork still move us towards the realm of the un-thought, which leads to a new image of thought (as Tarkovsky’s time-images definitely do)?

Lukas Brasiskis

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

Max Neuhaus and Sound Installation

When dealing with Relational Art and Relational Form one artist that immediately comes to mind is the American composer, and later sound artist, Max Neuhaus. Neuhaus was a pioneer in the realm of contemporary art and his innovative Sound Installations echo many of Bourriaud's theories on form and aesthetics. In Relational Art the viewer (or listener in this case) is a collaborator in the artist's creative process. The ongoing collective response of the audience is necessary for the artwork to exist. It's meaning is achieved through the new social environment that is manufactured by the dynamic between the artwork and the receiver.

Neauhaus' Sound Installations were designed to perpetually produce sound in public spaces without a visual component to draw attention to it. There were no commemorative plaques or labels; even the source of the sound was often hidden to public view. By doing this Neuhaus created artwork that is not only extremely accessible to the average citizen, but also accessible in most cases oblivious to the viewer.

A great example is Neuhaus’ Sound Installation piece in the heart of Times Square, New York City. A series of bell-like drones is emitted from a large speaker underneath a grid of subway grating. In the midst of the frenzy that is Times Square, one will seldom see a bystander stop to enjoy or even acknowledge the work. To Bourriaud’s point, the piece literally does not exist until someone responds to it. The sound is produced 24 hours a day and is always accessible to those willing to hear it. It is also a true social artwork in that its effect immeasurably changes with the changing environment surrounding it.

– Jonathan Masino

Tino Sehgal – "This Immanence"

In thinking about Nicolas Bourriaud's "Relational Aesthetics" an artist by the name of Tino Sehgal comes to mind. Tino is currently showing an exhibit called "This Progress" (along with "Kiss") at the Guggenheim in New York. While I am no art historian (nor do i know very much about the contemporary art world), I do know that Tino is particularly apt when discussing the transitory, the interactive, the relational, and the immaterial within the traditional museum and gallery space. Tino's goal with his pieces is to "free art from the material of overproduction." [1] It is for this reason that his pieces are all immaterial and in fact he himself, even in his business dealings, does not deal in the material (accept for receiving the money of course). He does not actually frabicate any tangible thing, but that does not stop his pieces from being sold- in fact the MOMA owns "The kiss" (they own the performance, they own the event). [2] The kiss is a choreographed make-out session of sorts that lasts the entire time frame that the museum is open and the couple often pause for moments to reinact poses from famous scenes throughout the history of art.

"This progress" on the other hand is a much less condensed piece and, as explicated in the New York Times article below [2] leaves you with no formal conclusions or answers of any sort- simply relations (?). I should point out that I have not actually been to the exhibit- I saw "The Kiss" from outside and I couldn't bring myself to spend 18$ to go in or to wait in line for 45 minutes in order to get in for free (what this demonstrates I am not sure). I have, on the other hand, had several conversations with a person who is an "interpreter" in the piece and as she explained it to me- the piece is about conversation and communication (mildly choreographed discussions and relationships). Essentially, upon entering the exhibit you are greeted by a child and from then on you are greeted by other "interpreters" all discussing things along the topic of "progress." Most importantly, THERE IS NOTHING ON THE WALLS. The museum is striped of it's material art and what is left are these transitory, fleeting, and wholly immaterial dialogues.

Much more could be said of Tino's work but suffice it to say that his goal of "administrating cultural values, and the real politics would be to work on those cultural values and to bring up new ideas of how things could be done." [1] has much in common with the kind of "relational aesthetics" discussed by Bourriaud- "[...] creating and staging devices of existence including working methods and ways of being, instead of concrete objects which hitherto bounded the realm of art, they use time as a material. The form holds sway over the thing, and movements over categories. The production of gestures wins out over the production of things." (p. 103) [3] And this is what you get (and pay for) with Tino Sehal- "Staged Situations" [1] and gesture (but what else is there?).



(p.s. I am not sure what is up with the end of the video...)

Vanessa Meyer

Sources:

[1] NYTimes.com. Anne Midgette. you can't hold it But you can own it. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/arts/design/25midg.html

[2]NYTimes.com. Holland Cotter. in the naked museum: talking, thinking, encountering.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/arts/design/01tino.html?pagewanted=1

[3] Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (Paris: Les Presses du réel, 2002)