Relational Aesthetics
Personally, I was very inspired by Lucas Ihlein's lecture. Not just because I want to be an artist but because coming from some background in psychology and philosophy, the artworks he spoke about seem to resonate on many different levels with me. Audience- inclusive artwork seems to be something fairly new, I suppose it took a while for acceptance of "performance art", now we're asking people to actually participate.
I moseyed on down to the MCA and have been helping Lucas with his latest work, an ongoing investigation into the environmental impacts of the exhibition which it is a part of. That's meta-art if I ever saw it. Some of the discussions from random visitors have been very interesting from design obsolescence to whether we use more electricity sharing light and heat in a museum than if we stayed home. The point is, everyone seems enthusiastic to add their part.
As Lucas mentioned yesterday, the inclusion of the audience isn't restricted to art, but it's everywhere now. That's why reality TV is popular, why adverstising often asks you for your input - it's all about putting your vote in, feeling included. I wonder if this can be traced back to psychology and self-importance. I'm sure Freud would have something interesting to say about it. I'm looking forward to exploring some more of this in my essay on the topic.
One of my favourite books around this subject - which I'm always trying to get my friends to read but they never do - is called "We Want Some Too: Underground Desire and the Reinvention of Mass Culture" by Hal Niedzviecki. In it, the author posits that the main driving force behind activism and subculture is not to "smash the state" but merely to participate in it. It's a basic human social need to be included in the goings-on of mass society. Naturally, many activists don't like Niedzviecki's thesis, and there are of course holes in his argument, (this review finds a few:http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/viewArticle/1243/1229) but I do think it's an interesting one.
ReplyDeleteAnother great book on this subject is "Conceptual Art and the Politics of Publicity" by Alexander Alberro. In this book, Alberro critiques the standard assertion of conceptual artists that they were offering an alternative to the market-driven artworld by producing experiences rather than objects. As Alberro writes, in fact, this more or less mirrored the movement of advertising and marketing to the "experience economy" in the wider capitalist system, and so it could in fact be seen as aligned with a rather avant-garde trend in consumption.
I reckon the move towards "relationality" could probably be seen in a similar way. The drive to include the audience's participation in artwork, and the drive towards the exact same thing in reality television, shows that relational art does not in its essence possess any greater claims to radical subversion of the status quo than any other kind of art.
Of course, that's not to say that any particular examples of relational projects can't transcend this situation...