CLAIRE BISHOP - ANTAGONISM

Summary:

Bishop defines relational aesthetics through the lense of critic/analyst Nicolas Bourriaud, and concludes after respectfully explaining his (and other related) descriptions of and rationales for relational art with the deeper question:

“If relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are bing produced, for whom, and why?”  Put another way, is dialog for dialog’s sake always good? Is more always better?

 Outline:

In this essay, discussion of relational aesthetics is anchored by examination of Nicolas Bourriaud’s 1997 collection of essays Esthetique Relationnel , which Bishop says represents an important first step in identifying recent tendencies in contemporary art. It came at a time when many academics in Britain and the U.S. were reluctant to move on from the politicized agendas and intellectual battles of 1980s art and were condemning everything from installation art to ironic painting as “depoliticized celebrations of surface, complicitous with consumer spectacle.” Bishop says the book redefines the agenda of contemporary art criticism, with the starting point that we can no longer approach these works from behind the shelter of sixties art history and its values.“

 In it, Bourriaud writes that newer 1990s-era works are no less politicized, but along different lines.

 For Bourriaud, 1990s art is:

. relational art, whereby

. ‘meaning’ is interpreted collectively, socially, rather than intimately or individually…

. entirely beholden to environment and audience…

. the viewer not simply addressed, but allowed/encouraged to be or start a community or take an action…

. thus “relational aesthetics’…

. this relational art is a direct response to shift to service-based economy, virtual relationships and the web, and globalization …

. and ushers in a shift in attitude toward art for social change: “Instead of trying to change their environment, artists today are simply learning to inhabit the world in a better way.”

. such works insist upon use, as opposed to contemplation, in viewing art

. artist as DJ or programmer, rather than creator/initiator

. relational art is a direct outgrowth of installation art

 “A do-it-yourself, microtopian ethos is what Bourriaud perceives to be the core political significance of relational aesthetics,” Bishop says, citings examples to flesh out discussion of what such work does and does not achieve.

 Example one:

The Palais de Tokyo, opened 2002 by Jerome Sans and Nicolas Bourriaud in Paris. Displays “ideological exhibitions” … “the hang sought to reinforce or epitomize the ideas contained within the work…”

 This style of curating is direct reaction to type of art produced in 1990s:

–       open-ended

–       interactive

–       no sense of closure, in that the work appears to be in-progress rather than completed

–       rather than interpretation of a piece being constantly open to reassessment (adaptability, versatility in receipt), the piece itself is perpetually in flux

 Bishop identifies problems with this:

1)    there is relevant distinction between a work “willfully unstable” versus just not finished (in thought or literally in production)

 and

 2)    art exhibit space transforming into social space achieves what? Art spaces such as Palais de Tokyo become spaces for leisure and entertainment (bars, coffee rooms, physical chat places, etc.) amid or near art, as opposed to heretofore traditional dedicated art space within which a viewer may  receive something that a piece or installation is giving off or communicating, pro or con

 Bishop: “What the viewer is supposed to garner from such an ‘experience’ of creativity, which is essentially institutionalized studio activity, is often unclear.”

 Example two:

Rirkrit Tiravanija, NY-based artist of Argentinian/Thai parentage whose work is hybrid installation, often cooking for art patrons who attend and the materials, cook space, area to be cleaned up is considered the art experience. Based, Bishop says, on a  “you are all artists” mentality.

 Example three:

Liam Gillick, British artist whose work is interdisciplinary but in all media, is thematically based on production of relationship through environment, especially social relationship. His art is a backdrop to activity, and “doesn’t necessarily function best as an object for consideration alone.”

 Gillick uses “scenario thinking” as a way to envisage change in the world, not as a targeted critique of the present order so much as  “an examination of extent to which critical access is possible at all.” Says Gillick: “My work is like the light in the fridge; it only works when there are people there to open the fridge door.”

 Example four:

Umberto Eco’s1962 The Open Work regarding modernist literature, music, and art. “Eco regarded the work of art as a reflection of the conditions of our existence in a fragmented modern culture; Bourriaud sees the work of art as producing these conditions,” Bishop writes. “The interactivity of relational art is therefore superior to optical contemplation of an object, which is assumed to be passive and disengaged, because the work of art is a ‘social form’ capable of producing positive human relationships. As a consequence, the work is automatically political in implication and emancipatory in effect.”

 Bishop concludes not with a suggestion that relational art needs to develop greater social conscience, so much as raising the cautionary note that while all relations which produce “dialog” are automatically assumed to be democratic and therefore good, “what does democracy really mean?” and ending with the question at the start of this post.

 Then the concept of antagonism is introduced as a definer of democracy, and antidote to the overly-utopian and simplified goal for art provided it by the relationalists. “Conflict, division and instability do not ruin the democratic public sphere” but are conditions of its fully functioning existence,” citing the work of two additional artists – Thomas Hirschhorn and Santiago Sierra  as ‘relational antagonists:” more realistic in their application to work of relational aesthetics. Both artists set up relationships emphasizing dialog and negotiation in their work, but do so utilizing unease and sustained tension as much as belonging and feel-goodism of the prior artists examined.

 Sierra, from Spain, makes complicated, controversial work using people as performers for pay, often interpreted as examinations of social and political condition which permit disparity in people’s prices to submit to, participate in or condone certain activities (lines of people being paid to be tattooed, to masturbate, to have their hair dyed blonde, lending his allocated exhibition space Venice Biennale to street vendors, etc.)

 “I can’t change anything. There is no possibility that we can change anything with our artistic work. We do our work because we are making art and because we believe art should be something, something that follows reality. But I don’t believe in the possibility of change.” Sierra

 Hirschhorn reasserts the autonomy of artistic activity. He uses sculpture to reinvent monument, pavilion, altar …at times emulating memorials made at accident sites, erecting makeshift television studios in abandoned shacks, stranding public visitors at remote outdoor sites for a time, etc. Viewers are asked only to be thoughtful and reflective – if at times disturbed – visitors.

 “I am not an animator, teacher or social worker. I do not want to invite or oblige viewers to become interactive with what I do; I do not want to activate the public. I want to give of myself, to engage myself to such a degree that viewers confronted with the work can take part and become involved, but not as actors.” Hirschhorn

 Bishop judges Hirschhorn and Sierra to both be remote from the socially engaged public art projects that have sprung up since the 1980s, and to be making better art not simply for being better politics, but for acknowledging the limits of what is possible as art, concluding:

 “If relational aesthetics requires a unified subject as a prerequisite for community-as-togetherness, then Hirschhorn and Sierra provide a mode of artistic experience more adequate to the divided and incomplete subject of today. This relational antagonism would be predicated not on social harmony, but on exposing that which is repressed in sustaining the semblance of this harmony. It would thereby provide a more concrete and polemical grounds for rethinking our relationship to the world and to one another.”