February 7, 2004
Hal Foster on relational aesthetics
In a recent review of three books--Relational Aesthetics and Postproduction by Nicolas Bourriaud and Hans-Ulrich Obrist's Interviews: Volume I--Hal Foster proves he's on top of the game with some astute points about the artists these books (and their curator-authors) champion. (The review may be accessible to LRB subscribers only; I'm not sure.)
In this time of mega-exhibitions the artist often doubles as curator. 'I am the head of a team, a coach, a producer, an organiser, a representative, a cheerleader, a host of the party, a captain of the boat,' Orozco says, 'in short, an activist, an activator, an incubator.' The rise of the artist-as-curator has been complemented by that of the curator-as-artist; maestros of large shows have become very prominent over the last decade. Often the two groups share models of working as well as terms of description.
And the meat of the review:
These possibilities of 'relational aesthetics' seem clear enough, but there are problems, too. Sometimes politics are ascribed to such art on the basis of a shaky analogy between an open work and an inclusive society, as if a desultory form might evoke a democratic community, or a non-hierarchical installation predict an egalitarian world. Hirschhorn sees his projects as 'never-ending construction sites', while Tiravanija rejects 'the need to fix a moment where everything is complete'. But surely one thing art can still do is to take a stand, and to do this in a concrete register that brings together the aesthetic, the cognitive and the critical. And formlessness in society might be a condition to contest rather than to celebrate in art - a condition to make over into form for the purposes of reflection and resistance (as some Modernist painters attempted to do). The artists in question frequently cite the Situationists, but, as T.J. Clark has stressed, the Situationists valued precise intervention and rigorous organisation above all things.
I'm right there with him on that point, though I wish he had cited counter-examples. (Felix Gonzalez-Torres is the first to come to mind: his art pre-dates Relational Aesthetics by a year or two yet there's something in his 'gift economy' that fits snugly with Bourriad's artists while maintaining a needle-sharp political side.) Here's Foster the cranky older critic razzing the younger curators:
Furthermore, when has art, at least since the Renaissance, not involved discursivity and sociability? It's a matter of degree, of course, but might this emphasis be redundant? It also seems to risk a weird formalism of discursivity and sociability pursued for their own sakes. Collaboration, too, is often regarded as a good in itself: 'Collaboration is the answer,' Obrist remarks at one point, 'but what is the question?' Art collectives in the recent past, such as those formed around Aids activism, were political projects; today simply getting together sometimes seems to be enough. Here we might not be too far from an artworld version of 'flash mobs' - of 'people meeting people', in Tiravanija's words, as an end in itself. This is where I side with Sartre on a bad day: at least in galleries and museums, hell is other people.
When I read Postproduction early last year, I marked it up extensively with the hope of one day commenting on it. But I need to revisit that text, as well as ingest Relational Aesthetics for the first time, before I do. To play fair, here's an Artforum interview with and a lecture by Nicolas Bourriaud (who is, by the way, curator of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris) where he gets space to elaborate some of his ideas.
Also, Postproduction was published by Lukas and Sternberg, a small press based in Berlin and New York whose thin, chapbook-style publications are worth checking out.