Relational Aesthetics, a Debate: Thomas O. Haakenson and Sheila Dickinson
Thomas O. Haakenson: The Façade of a Radical Theory
Nicolas Bourriaud’s idea of “relational aesthetics” has become something of a theory du jour in certain art and academic circles. The problems with the theory are manifold, however, and artists and academicians using it have only made the theory’s ridiculous foundational assumptions seem somehow chic, hip, and new with their uncritical embrace of Bourriaud’s rather superficial, old, and reactionary ideas.
Ever since Bourriaud began publishing on the topic in the 1990s, most notably in the periodicals Documents sur l’art and various exhibition catalogs, including the catalog for the 3rd Lyon Contemporary Art Biennial in 1995, to speak of “relational aesthetics” has suggested one is anti-consumerist, anti-capitalist, and pro-community. The various essays Bourriaud has written about relational aesthetics have since been collected in a single, French-language volume – Esthétique relationnelle (1998) – and translated into English in 2002 as Relational Aesthetics. The collected volume does nothing to address the theory’s problems.
In what follows, I want to explore the pseudo-revolutionary impulse of Bourriaud’s ideas by highlighting (at least) three key themes. First, Bourriaud uncritically — and irresponsibly — promotes what I would describe as a “utopia of ambiguity.” In his reactionary position against the rationalist impulse of the Enlightenment project, he encourages a break with teleology in the service of a (presentist) theory of future potential: “It is not modernity that is dead, but its idealistic and teleological version.”1 Second, Bourriaud presents a critique of consumerism on art as if that idea is itself somehow radical and innovative. Figures such as Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno and their theory of the “culture industry,” an explicitly Marxist-influenced idea that would seem fundamental to Bourriaud’s critic of capitalism, receive little to no acknowledgement. Finally, Bourriaud conflates the site of the art object with the aesthetic experience itself in order to postulate the artist as him- or herself engaged not in making art, but rather in creating community. The conflation of the non- phenomenological with the phenomenological leads to a mythology of innovation that can only be equated with the kind of destruction engendered by the Enlightenment’s most conservative “cult of genius” impulses.
Let me turn to my first concern: Bourriaud’s promotion of what I’ve called the “utopia of ambiguity.” Bourriaud is clear to suggest that relational aesthetics concerns an art that takes “as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” (14; emphasis in original). Willfully failing to identify clearly the kinds of spaces in which relational aesthetics occurs, Bourriaud is able to privilege a supposedly open concept of an experience that can happen anywhere — and possibly at any time — without recognition of the very material conditions of constraint that limit artists, viewers, and critics alike. The most dismissive engagement with materialism cannot help but render the elitism of the author as a kind of American exceptionalism. “You can do it,” Bourriaud’s approach to relational aesthetics seems to suggest, “you just have to be in the right place.” And, as in most of his approach, that place is not that only Bourriaud — and his select artists — seem to create and identify, which does not strike me as all that liberating for “human interactions.”
My second issue with Bourriaud concerns his critique of the role of consumerism on art. He notes, rightly so, that the “general mechanisation of social functions gradually reduces the relational space” (17). It is unclear from Bourriaud’s formulations how this concern is radically different from early-twentieth-century critiques of the culture industry by Frankfurt-school figures Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. In their 1947 chapter, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” from The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that capitalism functions analogically to fascism in so far as both systems of social control seek to eliminate any form of dissent by effectively colonizing the existing means of productions as well as an innovations that, despite the suffocating nature of both systems, manage to appear: in the arts, the sciences, and beyond. Adorno’s follow up radio address, published some twenty-years later, makes clear the difference between “mass culture” and “the culture industry,” noting that while the former appears to offer liberation from the system, mass culture forms are nevertheless derivatives of the system, the scraps of possibility in the face of full defeat. If Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics is heir to Adorno and Horkheimer’s theory of the culture industry, he certainly doesn’t find it important to make that history clear to his readers. That history remains unrecognized in Bourriaud’s theory of relational aesthetics should come as no surprise, for what would giving a history to a theory that is avowedly anti-historical say about relational aesthetics itself?
My final concern with Bourriaud’s theory–at least for the purpose of this essay– is his impulse toward a return to the “cult of genius,” by which I mean the way in which his theory can only default to the artist-as-innovator, to the artist-as-beyond-explanation in light of relational aesthetic’s amorphous claims. In Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud suggests that artists today are “learning to inhabit the world in a better way, instead of trying to construct it based on a preconceived idea of historical evolution” (13; emphasis in original). Bourriaud continues on to suggest that what he means by “historical evolution” here is something like “imaginary and utopian realities” as opposed to what the art of relational aesthetics focus on: “to actually be ways of living and models of action with in the existing real” (13). The criteria for these “more honest” models, however, is vague and exceptionally subjective. Indeed, what does Bourriaud actually mean by “in the existing real”? And whose “real” is this, really? This lack of qualifiers, and this excessive privileging of synchronous experience–what we might call a “cult of presentism”–can mean nothing other than the artist him- or herself becomes the bearer of the “truth” of the work of art, even as these figures supposedly reject any meaning participants, viewers, and critics give to and get out of the work. Isn’t a lack of meaning just as universalizing as a universal as the most dogmatic of universalisms? But here it is the artist who discovers this new-found utopia: Quite literally, a non-place.
While my three concerns with Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics may strike some as unfounded, others as misplaced, the danger of this uncritical embrace of the uncritical is the most dangerous game any theoretician–and any artist–can play. There is no art without meaning, no meaning without thinking.
Sheila Dickinson: A Rebuttal
Bourriaud is not a theorist as such, although he develops a theory about the “aesthetics” of a current trend of art production that values the relational over and above other concerns, such as the formal visual attributes of an original object. One would think the art object and its form would be of little concern to art of the relational. However, Bourriaud states, “relational aesthetics does not represent a theory of art,…but a theory of form” (19). It is how we as critics, viewers, and art producers understand form, what sorts of forms engender quality art, and what propositions decide our standards for quality, that ultimately allows for relational art to be accepted within the institution as art.
What Bourriaud does is put art that optimizes and strengthens relations between people as descendent of modernist anti-institutional critique and in opposition to the relative superficiality of post-modern art.
This is unexpected, because for so long we have seen the form of the art object as the outcome of formal modernist aesthetics rather than as the outcome of episodes of intense relations of artistic confluence. Thus relational aesthetics cannot be anti-form but rather reconstitutes what form is within the art world. Form must unhinge itself from the notion of historical evolution and come to terms with the current world in which art is situated. Form becomes necessarily the structure of relations rather than the composition of material form or objecthood, “rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” (14). The form moves from being about the sign and signature of what one individual artist makes, and becomes the glue, the bonding agent that creates a structure of relations in opposition to the dominant mode of encounter imposed on/by? society.
Increased inter-subjectivity is the new measure of quality, found in the newly created modes of encounter, thus moving art away from individual, solitary creation of the discreet art object and into the live, real, and breathing encounter amongst a collective, a group, or a random collection of people. This freedom from the burden of production of a static, solid art artifact allows artists to propel their work forward into the new aesthetic needs of the relational, social interstice, regardless of what final “form” the artwork takes. Once the viewer experiences art that achieves productive relational form and artists find themselves successful in producing such art, there is little relevance, substance, depth, or purpose in traditional, “formal” aesthetics anymore.
I will close my brief argument with a nod to the increased globalization of the art world and burgeoning interest in relational aesthetics, and why it makes sense that the two go hand-in-hand. Countries of wealth, primarily on the American-European axis, have been able to collect valuable individual artworks that contain the unique subjectivity and aura of the artist. But most countries outside of this axis have no Pollock’s or Picasso’s to view in their public art institutions. These same countries by and large also have a different culture around the relational, often prioritizing social relations over individual productive work in their every day society. Instead, how well one interacts and interrelates with others becomes of primary concern, not how hard one works, or how many objects one produces, or how much one consumes, or how much one acquires. Being in the center of a powerful economic political engine that praises work and rugged individualism over the less tangible interrelations between a de-categorized and un-boxed populace is the art cross Minnesotans bear and of which they are blithely unaware.
Thomas O. Haakenson: Relational Aesthetics as Theory: A Response to Sheila Dickinson
In response to Sheila Dickinson’s comments in defense of relational aesthetics — and of Nicolas Bourriaud — I need to clarify and question a few things. In the interest of brevity, I want to focus on two claims Dickinson makes in her defense of relational aesthetics–first, that Bourriaud is not a theorist and, second, that the focus of the (non-)theory of relational aesthetics is communal relations.
Let me begin with the idea of “theory.” Dickinson argues that Bourriaud is not “a theorist as such.” While I’m not quite sure what the “as such” means — are there still individuals writing about art today who are detached from the real-world implications of aesthetic experience? — the aside Dickinson introduces — ”although” — would seem to suggest an implicit apologia, something along the lines of “forgive him, for he knows not what he does.” Placing the onerous on the everyone but Bourriaud — ”critics, viewers, and art producers” — Dickinson suggests that what really is at stake in relational aesthetics is our understanding of form, which is really what Bourriaud’s (non-)theory is about — ergo, and in contrast, it is not about the art object itself.
We might turn to the hair-splitting that the terms “aesthetics” and “theory” represent here to bolster my concerns and my claims that Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics is a theory of art. As its Greek origins suggest, the word “aesthetics” emphasizes “perception by the senses.” “Theory,” in comparison, while also having Greek roots, emphasizes a framework for viewing (in a non-visual sense) or contemplation. If Bourriaud’s (non)theory is about a privileged corporeal knowing — a “perception by the senses” — then it remains unclear how he supersedes the mind / body dualism of the Enlightenment project. If, on the other hand, his theory accounts for the acculturation of sensory knowledge — the fact that none of us operate as tabula rasa in our encounters with the world, that even our body learns how to respond — it remains unclear why his (non)theory should not be called a theory after all. In short, either relational aesthetics is simply modernity rephrased in fancy 21st-century clothes — and, as such, not that radical at all — or it simply is a theory of explaining how the (individual) body relates an aesthetic encounter to itself and to others.
My second point supports my trouble with Dickinson’s generous reading of “relational aesthetics” even further. While Dickinson celebrates Bourriaud’s anti-post-modernist focus on “relations between people,” it seems that the kind of emphasis on a cult of individualism — it isn’t the theory, but we viewers / makers / critics who are in charge here — represents the worst kind of hyper-individualism evidenced in the most egocentric theories of postmodernism, from Foucault to Baudrillard and beyond. In other words, and in opposition to Dickinson’s celebration of relational (non-)theory’s “community” impulse, I want to make clear that the foundational claim of this supposed (non-)theory of togetherness is precisely an individual who exists beyond culture, politics, and material constraints, but nevertheless has the understanding, interest, and access to the staging of the relational encounter.
This second concern with Dickinson’s representation of Bourriaud returns us to one of the fundamental problems I have with Bourriaud’s approach, a problem I mentioned in my initial essay: the “cult of genius” that the theory — and, yes, it’s a theory — reintroduces, albeit implicitly and uncritically, into the discussion of artistic practice today. What other qualifiers does Bourriaud himself employ in Relational Aesthetics than the names of particular artists — Rirkrit Tiravanija, Philippe Parreno, Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan — to testify to their important interventions in the name of relational aesthetics? And, given this constellation of “genius” figures, it should come as no surprise that one of them — Cattelan — invokes Hitler as the modus operandi for his creations. After all, what better way to subvert the idea of “the collective” than by invoking one of its most destructive manipulators — Cattelan’s famous if diminutive HIM — for supposedly collective contemplation and realization? Public art as criticism — or artist as protegeé of the “cult of genius”? I’m not sure if anyone needs to be reminded that Hitler was a bad man. So who wins here, but Cattelan-as-creator?
This isn’t a theory of art today. It’s a theory of art that looks to me to be at least centuries — perhaps even millenia — old.
Relational Form Leaves Behind the Senses: A Response to Thomas Haakenson
By Sheila Dickinson
My rebuttal to Haakenson’s response to my statements in favor of relational aesthetics requires me to reposition the notion of Bourriaud as a theorist within the conversation of contemporary art critics. I believe this is where Haakenson and I have found ourselves at an impasse.
For when I began my previous writing, I stated Bourriaud was not a theorist and now can see that I should have qualified that statement with “like the high caliber, full-time theorists Foucault and Baudrillard.” What I meant in my questioning of Bourriaud’s position as theorist was that he is a curator and an art critic, whose primary focus has not been on writing theory. He would be more accurately aligned with key contemporary art writers, such as Hal Foster, Donald Kuspit, Rosalind Krauss, Arthur Danto, and the like. The result is that Bourriaud operates in the fashion of all artworld people: he name-drops a lot (Haakenson criticizes this in concluding his last argument). Right in the middle of making a theoretical argument, he will throw in a discussion of several prominent artists that support his claims of a trend that he notices in artistic development. Genuine theorists do not operate like this, reinforcing that Bourriaud is of the art world not the world of academics. Perhaps my view is colored by an experience of hearing Bourriaud speak in 2005 in Dublin, when he surprised many of us by not mentioning relational aesthetics, but rather discussing his work founding the Palais du Tokyo and showing images from recent exhibitions there.
Now, I sound as if I have turned to support the opposing team. On the contrary, now that I have cleared up my contested claim that Bourriaud is not a theorist “as such”, I can move forward and refute several of Haakenson’s misunderstandings regarding what relational aesthetics actually is.
I want to restate the quote I used in my previous writing on this topic, “relational aesthetics does not represent a theory of art…but a theory of form” (Bourriaud 19). This is such an important quote because it repositions relational art outside of the remit of aesthetics, therefore unconcerned with classical definitions of it and unconcerned with the “perception of the senses.”
Art that adheres to and aims to create relational form does not preoccupy itself with the senses, not even the sense of sight. The form of the art concerns itself with the byproduct of created intersubjective relations. The material form that the art object takes, Bourriaud says, “is a linking element, a principle of dynamic agglutination. An artwork is a dot on a line” (21). The line is the constant meeting and re-meeting of subjects with subjects and subjects with objects that produce meaning far beyond the reductive “thing” that is the outcome of artistic actions. The “glue”, as Bourriaud calls it, cannot adhere to a specific aesthetic as it once was able because the signs and symbols are currently too much in flux. When classically aesthetic pieces come together, when their formal attributes adhere into a whole, as in an artwork, the result becomes static, no longer applicable to the current social and sensory situation. Relational aesthetics, as a result, seeks to discern the form that the artist/agent uses to bring usually disparate elements to meet, that might not otherwise meet. The artists act as those agents that incur meetings, that produce glue that is relational form.
The artist, his or her name, operates as a signature on the form, whether there is an object as product or not, and this is a left over from heralded individualism of the Modernist artist. Hence, it may seem as if the rise of acceptance and popularity of artists who employ relational form in their work, continues a push toward “hyperindividualism” and that critics like Bourriaud ride piggy-back on their success. Despite decades of artists hacking at the walls of the institution of art, they cannot forego the cult of personality, the celebrity machine that propels the market. I just don’t think artists and critics have much control over that unwieldy machine. The market demands the “cult of genius” Haakenson finds so deplorable. But such cynicism regarding art that battles this type of materialism in its quest for the fetish object and instead nurtures the immaterial bonds between people constantly wedged apart by new gadgets and what we own, is detrimental to the future of art education. Cynicism and easy critique actually deny agency, despite any pure aims of critical theory at its core.
Images:
Fig. 1. Rirkrit Tiravanija, Rirkrit Tiravanija, “Untitled (the raw and the cooked),” 2002. Photo © Kioku Keizo, via www.operacity.jp. 27 November 2010. <http://blog.art21.org/2009/12/02/antidiets-of-the-avant-garde/>
Fig. 2. Still of screening of Stories are propaganda, a film by Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija, shot in 35mm in China in 2005, transferred on DVD and of a duration of 8mn40s. 27 November 2010. <http://www.airdeparis.com/parreno/stories/stories.htm>
Fig. 3. Vanessa Beecroft, VB52 performance documentation, 2003. 27 November 2010. <http://zine.artcat.com/2007/11/>
Fig. 4. Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled (2008). Dogs and chick, taxidermy on fiberglass. Real size. Photographer: Markus Tretter. Copyright of image: Markus Tretter. 27 November 2010. <http://bradleyduncan.blogspot.com/2009/05/la-biennale-di-venezia-5-7-09-11-22-09.html>
Fig. 5. Maurizio Cattelan, HIM (2001). Wax, human hair, suit, polyester resin. © Maurizio Cattelan Archive. Ph. Zeno Zotti. PALAZZO GRASSI, VENICE, François Pinault collection innauguration. 27 November 2010. <http://www.flickriver.com/photos/zenzott/260663106/>
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