NOTES
Glossary
- Globalisation – The act of connecting networks of production towards a worldwide scale
- Cross-cultural – The relationship of different cultural perspectives to each other
- Hybridised – The forming of something new from selected strands of knowledge
- Discipline – An individual creative area such as Fine Art, Music, Creative Writing etc.
- Interdisciplinary – Integrating the study of two or more disciplines with concepts from both the arts and broader global views
- Multidisciplinary – Working with different areas of study at the same time and as separate entities.
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Nicolas Bourriaud
Relational form
pp. 11-24
Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002) Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Presses due riel
NOTES
-The 20th century was thus the arena for a struggle between two visions of the world: a modest, rationalist conception, hailing from the 18th century, and a philosophy of spontaneity and liberation through the irrational (Dada, Surrealism, the Situationists), both of which were opposed to authoritarian and utilitarian forces eager to gauge human relations and subjugate people.
-What used to be called the avant-garde has, needless to say, developed from the ideological swing of things offered by modern rationalism; but it is now re-formed on the basis of quite different philosophical, cultural and social presuppositions. It is evident that today’s art is carrying on this fight, by coming up with perceptive, experimental, critical and participatory models, veering in the direction indicated by Enlightenment philosophers, Proudhon, Marx, the Dadaists and Mondrian.
-Otherwise put, the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realties, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist.
– Nowadays, modernity extends into the practices of cultural do-it-yourself and recycling, into the invention of the everyday and the development of time lived, which are not objects less deserving of attention and examination than Messianistic utopias and the formal “novelties” that typified modernity yesterday.
-. The general growth of towns and cities, which took off at the end of the Second World War, gave rise not only to an extraordinary upsurge of social exchanges, but also to much greater individual mobility (through the development of networks and roads, and telecommunications, and the gradual freeing-up of isolated places, going with the opening-up of attitudes).
-What is collapsing before our very eyes is nothing other than this falsely aristocratic conception of the arrangement of works of art, associated with the feeling of territorial acquisition. In other words, it is no longer possible to regard the contemporary work as a space to be walked through (the” owner’s tour” is land to the collector’s). It is henceforth presented as a period of time to be lived through, like an opening to unlimited discussion.
– One of the virtual properties of the image is its power of linkage (Fr. reliance), to borrow Michel Maffesoli’s term: flags, logos, icons, signs, all produce empathy and sharing, and all generate bond!. Art (practices stemming from painting and sculpture which come across in the form of an exhibition) turns out to be particularly suitable when it comes to expressing this hands-on civilisation, because it tightens the space of relations, unlike TV and literature which refer each individual person to his or her space of private consumption, and also unlike theatre and cinema which bring small groups together before specific, unmistakable images.
– . Art is the place that produces a specific sociability. It remains to be seen what the status of this is in the set of “states of encounter” proposed by the City.
-mercantile nature and its semantic value, the work of art represents a social interstice. This interstice term was used by Karl Marx to describe trading communities that elude the capitalist economic context by being removed from the Jaw of profit: barter, merchandising, autarkic types of production, etc.
. Contemporary art is definitely developing a political project when it endeavours to move into the relational realm by turning it into an issue.
-. When Jens Haaning broadcasts funny stories in Turkish through a loudspeaker in a Copenhagen square (Turkish Jokes, 1994), he produces in that split second a micro-community, one made up of immigrants brought together by collective laughter which upsets their exile situation, formed in relation to the work and in it.
-. As a human activity based on commerce, art is at once the object and the subject of an ethic. And this all the more so because, unlike other activities, its sole function is to be exposed to this commerce. Art is a state of encounter.
-Marx: the human essence is the set of social relations.
-. There is no such thing as any possible “end of history or end of art, because he game is being forever re-enacted, in relation to its function, in other words, in relation to the players and the system which they construct and criticise.
-. What today’s informed public understands by “keeping together” is not the same thing that this public imagined back in the 19th century. Today, the “glue” is less obvious, as our visual experience has become more complex, emitted by a century of photographic images, then cinematography (introduction of the sequence shot as a new dynamic unity), enabling us to recognise as a “world” a collection of disparate element (installation, for instance) that no unifying matter, no bronze, links.
-an artwork is a dot in the line.
-There are no forms in nature, in the wild state, as it is our gaze that creates these, by cutting them out in the depth of the visible. Forms are developed, one from another. What was yesterday regarded as formless or “informal” is no longer these things today. When the aesthetic discussion evolves, the status of form evolves along with it, and through it.
– When the individual thinks he is casting an objective eye upon himself, he is, in the final analysis, contemplating nothing other than the result of perpetual transactions with the subjectivity of others.
-Each particular artwork is a proposal to Iive 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.
-We are in the presence of a prosecutor’s aesthetics, here, for which the artist confronts the history of art in the autarky of his own persuasions. It is an aesthetics that reduces artistic practice to the level of a pettifogging historical criticism. Practical “judgement”, thus aimed, is peremptory and final in each instance, hence the negation of dialogue, which, alone, grants form a productive status: the status of an “encounter”.
-summed up by a binomial: someone shows something to someone who returns it as he sees fit. The work tries to catch my gaze, the way the new-born child “asks for” its mother’s gaze.
-. In Daney’s thinking, “all form is a face looking at me”, because it is summoning me to dialogue with it. Form is a dynamic that is included both, or turn by turn, in time and space. Form can only come about from a meeting between two levels of reality. For homogeneity does not produce images: it produces the visual, otherwise put, “looped information”.
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