AD7506 - Appendices

Summary of Relational Aesthetics

Classical painting versus live historical re-enactment? Traditional sculpture versus staged dinner for twenty? Still life photograph versus activist advertising campaign? When French curator Nicolas Bourriaud first coined the term Relational Aesthetics in 1996, the art world already had a long history of exploring questions surrounding what constitutes art. Art had journeyed over the centuries from being, initially, a presentation of physical objects for mere beauty to a complex genre containing many modes of articulating creative concepts. At the term’s inception, Relational Aesthetics essentially encompassed work that sought to produce a temporary environment or event in which viewers could participate in order to assimilate and comprehend the artist’s specific impetus or message; interactivity and experience becoming more central while material, content, and form are less prioritized. Although critically this distillation remains ambiguous in its open-endedness, it does reflect an important evolution in a long lineage of art that values social encounter over product.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

Works of Relational Aesthetics are typically based upon the artist’s communication of his or her mission in a public, as opposed to institutional, space where the viewing population is not limited to the traditional art spectator. Thus, by expanding the works’ exposure to a more far-reaching viewership, these pieces are often considered examples of temporary democracies.

Bourriaud called relational artists and their audiences “microtopias,” in that the communal bonds that are formed from these experiences create a temporary container for experiencing human connectivity within the social context of the works. Because of this, it’s no surprise that much of this art evokes political conscientiousness and inspires change.

Oftentimes, relational pieces evoke “witnessing publics,” considered provocative in that they allow unrelated individuals to participate in a common feeling or event they might not otherwise experience collectively.

An artist’s subjectivity is often eschewed in the presentation of relational works. Instead, the experience itself and the people participating combine in a present time to determine the overarching tone and evoke the work’s ultimate meaning.

Bourriaud, N. (2003) Relational aesthetics. Les Presse du Reel.

(this is the 2003 republished version, but this was originally published in 1998)

This iconic book by French philosopher, writer and curator Nicholas Bourriaud, can in some ways quite timeless in the sense that parts of it still seem very relevant today, despite the fact that it was originally published in 1997/8! (around the same time as the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy!).

The books broader importance is that it introduced us to the now widely used term ‘Relational aesthetics’. The other reason that this is an important book is that it is both much celebrated, as well as much contested! Particularly by prominent women writers, for example Clare Bishop.

The term Relational Aesthetics is defined on the Tate pages as…

‘The tendency to make art based on or inspired by human relations and their social context’.

‘A set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure, the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space’ (Tate Online).

We briefly discussed key texts by Claire Bishop, starting with her (highly controversial at the time) 2004 article entitled Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, which directly critiqued both Bourriaud’s creation of the term itself, and his 1998 publication more broadly. Further writings by Bishop we discussed are listed below.

Bishop, C. (2004), Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, October 1 (110), pp. 51–79.

Claire Bishop, The Social Turn: Collaboration and its Discontents (2006) – Artforum – Vol 44, No 6.

Bishop, C. (2012) Artificial hells: Participatory art and the politics of spectatorship

Participation, Edited by Claire Bishop (2006) – From Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art (MIT Press)

Audience Engagement & Promotion