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| Here is a pdf of the full book |
Here is a more contemporary attempt to explain Relational Aesthetics in a video....😉
Tuesday, October 24, 2017
Week 6 Readings
For the coming week we will read Miwon Kwon's essay called One Place After Another from 1997 which was the precursor to her very influential book on the history of site specific art by the same name published in 2002.
Our second reading is an excerpt from the slim but frequently referenced book Relational Aesthetics by European curator Nicolas Bourriaud, published in French in 1998 and in English in 2002.
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Kwon, page 110
ReplyDelete“The globe shrinks for those who own it; the displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers.-Homi Bhaba Today’s site-oriented practices inherit the task of demarcating the relational specificity that can hold in tension the distant poles of spatial experiences described by Bhaba.”
Kwon, page 96
“...Current forms of site-oriented art...are seen as a means to strengthen art’s capacity to penetrate the sociopolitical organization of contemporary life with greater impact and meaning. In this sense the possibilities to conceive the site as something more than a place - as repressed ethnic history, a political cause, a disenfranchised social group - is a crucial conceptual leap in redefining the “public” role of art and artists.”
Bourriaud, page 7
“As with one of Gonzalez-Torres’ piles of sweets, there can be abn ideal balance between form and its programmed disappearance, between visual beauty and modest gestures, between a childlike wonder at the image and the complexity of the different levels at which can be read.
QUESTIONS
From Kwon:
-Why must Ukeles be separated as a woman artist?
-From this quote on page 95, “Nonetheless, this move away from a literal interpretation of the site and the multiplicitous expansion of the site in locational and conceptual terms seems more accelerated today than in the past.” I need help in getting some clarity on this move away from the literal.
From Bourriaud:
-Are do these exchanges that are created outside of the system sustain themselves? Is it okay if they do not?
“The seemingly benign architectural features of a gallery/museum, in other words, were deemed to be coded mechanisms that actively disassociate the space of art from the outer world, furthering the institution's idealist imperative of rendering itself and its hierarchization of values "objective," "disinterested," and "true."”
ReplyDelete-Miwan Kwon, pg. 88
I was just thinking about this odd feeling of disconnectedness between art objects and the living humans that create them last weekend while visiting LACMA. The pristine environment of the museum is so different from the actual setting where most of these works were most likely made. How can this be creatively addressed in a museum setting, and is there any interest in doing so, in curatorial culture?
Does “un-hinging” the work from a physical site and into a discursive or other non-physical realm actually lend itself more to commodification? (ex. Fred Wilson and Mining the Museum)
“The artist as an overspecialized aesthetic object maker has been anachronistic for a long time already. What they provide now, rather than produce, are aesthetic, often "critical artistic," services.”
-Miwan Kwon, pg. 102
“[T]he elaboration of place-bound identities has become more rather than less important in a world of diminishing spatial barriers to exchange, movement and communication.
-David Harvey” (Miwan Kwon) pg. 107
I love this Harvey quote – he’s a staple in Urban Studies! Regarding the proceeding paragraphs, which deal with commissioned site-specific art at the service of neoliberal place branding, what are some ways that place-based art can evade that kind of commodification? Or is it necessarily harmful? Could a project that aims to uplift a marginalized community directly contribute to their displacement (yes), and how can that be avoided? This is of direct interest to my work.
Nicolas Bourriaud
ReplyDelete…when we look at relational artists, we find ourselves in the presence of a group of artists who, for the first time since the emergence of conceptual art in the mid-1960’s, simply do not take as their starting point some aesthetic movement from the past. Relational art is neither a “revival” of some movement nor the return of a style. It is born of the observation of the present and of a reflection on the density of artistic activity.
Nicolas Bourriaud
The first thing that strikes me about this generation of artists is that they are inspired by a concern for democracy. For art does not transcend our day to day preoccupations; it brings us face to face with reality through the singularity of a relationship with the world, through a fiction.
Miwon Kwon
…the guarantee of a specific relationship between an art work and its “site” is not based on a physical permanence of that relationship, but rather on the recognition of its unfixed impermanence, to be experienced as an unrepeatable and fleeting situation. (91)
Questions:
How can artists better communicate the impermanence of the site/event that reflects cultural permanence?
What is meant by “face to face with reality…through a fiction”?
In regards to relational art, do artists exchange information/knowledge that viewers can utilize in their day to day lives? Is it important to assimilate such an exchange, does the artist take authorship and responsibility?
Kwon p106
ReplyDeleteSignificantly, the appropriation of site-specific art for the valorization of urban identities comes at a time of a fundamental cultural shift in which architecture and urban planning, formerly the primary media for expressing a vision of the city, are displaced by other media more intimate with marketing and advertising. In the words of urban theorist Kevin Robins, "As cities have become ever more equivalent and urban identities increasingly 'thin,'. ..it has become necessary to employ advertising and marketing agencies to manufacture such distinctions. It is a question of distinction in a world beyond difference.” Site specificity in this context finds new importance because it supplies distinction of place and uniqueness of locational identity, highly seductive qualities in the promotion of towns and cities within the competitive restructuring of the global economic hierarchy. Thus, site specificity remains inexorably tied to a process that renders particularity and identity of various cities a matter of product differentiation.
Kwon p 110
Homi Bhabha has said, "The globe shrinks for those who own it; for the displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers." Today's site-oriented practices inherit the task of demarcating the relational specificity that can hold in tension the distant poles of spatial experiences described by Bhabha. This means addressing the differences of adjacencies and distances between one thing, one person, one place, one thought, one fragment next to another, rather than invoking equivalencies via one thing after another. Only those cultural practices that have this relational sensibility can turn local encounters into long-term commitments and transform passing intimacies into indelible, unretractable social marks-so that the sequence of sites that we inhabit in our life's traversal does not become genericized into an undifferentiated serialization, one place after another.
Questions/Thoughts:
Gentrified downtowns are generic; so is most of modern architecture. But are peoples’ lives within those spaces also becoming generic? Does white and middle/upper class equal generic? Or are we really talking about power—who has the power to command the attention of advertising, commerce and legislation? And who has the power to create a global “culture” in their own image? The suburbs are becoming home to the less-wealthy, less-white communities who are being driven out of urban centers. Where is cultural difference and place-specificity thriving? Where and how am I connected to unique communities where I can fully participate as a creative person and not be a colonizer?
[I had to split this into two comments because it was too long]
[Oh and this]
DeleteHow much is the nomadic practice of contemporary site-specific artists dictated by the available sources of support for artists, and how much is it a creative strategy or an appealing choice?
Bourriaud p 5-6
ReplyDelete…modernism was steeped in an “oppositional imaginary,”… It was based on conflict, whereas the imaginary of our period is concerned with negotiations, links and coexistence. We no longer try to make progress thanks to conflict and clashes, but by discovering new assemblages, possible relations between distinct units, and by building alliances between different partners. Like social contracts, aesthetic contracts are seen for what they are: no one expects the Golden Age to be ushered in on this earth, and we are quite happy to create modus vivendi that make possible fairer social relations, more dense ways of life, and multiple, fruitful combinations of existence. By the same criterion, art no longer tries to represent utopias; it is trying to construct concrete spaces [... ]
Questions/Thoughts: Bourriaud writes using the universal modernist “we”, and it seems he is partly right—hardly anyone writes manifestos anymore. Is it really true that there are no artists currently working in an oppositional model? Or is it just that those artists are dismissed by the Art World? He’s essentially arguing for reformism over revolution. In some ways I agree with him about trying to create smaller-scale utopian scenarios rather than making a bunch of symbolic noise about “the” Utopia. But I also am personally inspired by artists who do directly confront power in various ways. How do these practices fit in with posi-core social practices?
One Place after Another: Notes on Site Specificity - Miwon Kwon
ReplyDelete“For example, what is the status of traditional aesthetic values such as originality, authenticity, and uniqueness in site-specific art, which always begins with the particular, local, unrepeatable preconditions of a site, however it is defined? Is the artist's prevalent relegation of authorship to the conditions of the site, including collaborators and/or reader-viewers, a continuing Barthesian performance of "death of the author" or a recasting of the centrality of the artist as a "silent" manager/director? Furthermore, what is the commodity status of anti-commodities, that is, immaterial, process-oriented, ephemeral, performative events? ….Is the unhinging of site specificity, then, a form of resistance to the ideological establishment of art or a capitulation to the logic of capitalist expansion?” (p. 13)
“The consequences of this conversion, effected by object-oriented de-contextualizations in the guise of historical re-contextualizations, are a series of normalizing reversals in which the specificity of the site is rendered irrelevant, making it all the easier for autonomy to be smuggled back into the art work, with the artist allowed to regain his/her authority as the primary source of the work's meaning.” (p. 15)
“"[s]ubversion in the service of one's own convictions finds easy transition into subversion for hire; 'criticism turns into spectacle."' - Isabelle Grew
“Within the present context of an ever-expanding capitalist order, fueled by an ongoing globalization of technology and telecommunications, the intensifying conditions of spatial indifferentiation and departicularization exacerbate the effects of alienation and fragmentation in contemporary life.” (p. 23)
“The understanding of identity and difference as being culturally constructed should not obscure the fact that the ability to deploy multiple, fluid identities in and of itself is a privilege of mobilization that has a specific relationship to power.” (p. 26)
Questions:
Based on Kwon’s overview of phenomenological, social/political, and discursive definitions of place, how would you define a “site”? What are some key qualifiers you feel site-specific art require in order to exist in this realm?
Buren is quoted as stating that “Art, whatever else it may be, is exclusively political.” (p. 5). The political nature of art is often debated and art critics such as Claire Bishop seem to stand on the opposite end of this debate, that making art political may take away from the purpose or autonomy of art. Would you agree or disagree that art is always political? In what instances, if ever, could art be apolitical? How does this relate to site-specific art practice?
Kwon claims that “Artists, no matter how deeply convinced their anti-institutional sentiment or adamant their critique of dominant ideology, are inevitably engaged, self-servingly or with ambivalence, in this process of cultural legitimation” (p. 15), do you feel this is true? Why or why not?
In the past we have discussed issues in how we conceptualize or define the “artist”; how do you feel about the idea proposed concerning “the centrality of the artist as the progenitor of meaning. This is true even when authorship is deferred to others in collaborations, or when the institutional framework is self-consciously integrated into the work, or when an artist problematizes his/her own authorial role. ” Does this seem like a fair distinction or does it once again place too much authoritarian power in the hands of artists, especially when considering social practice?
Nicolas Bourriaud - Excerpts from Relational Aesthetics, 1998
Social interstice: social interstices refers to a space that facilitates human social interaction. Marx refers to the term interstice as a pocket of trading activity that stands outside the capitalist framework.
-Kayla
QUOTES
ReplyDeleteKwon P109: "It is perhaps too soon and frightening to acknowledge, but the paradigm of nomadic selves and sites may be a glamorization of the trickster ethos that is in fact a reprisal of the ideology of "freedom of choicen-the choice to forget, the choice to reinvent, the choice to
fictionalize, the choice to "belong" anywhere, everywhere, and nowhere. This choice, of course, does not belong to everyone equally. The understanding of identity and difference as being culturally constructed should not obscure the fact that the ability to deploy multiple, fluid identities in and of itself is a privilege of mobilization that has a specific relationship to power."
Kwon P96: "In addition, current forms of site-oriented art, which readily take up social issues (often inspired by them), and which routinely engage the collaborative participation of audience groups for the conceptualization and production of the work, are seen as a means to strengthen art's capacity to penetrate the sociopolitical organization of contemporary life with greater impact and meaning. In this sense the possibilities to conceive the site as something more than a place-as repressed ethnic history, a political cause, a disenfranchised social group-is a crucial conceptual leap in redefining the "public" role of art and artists."
Bourriaud P3: "Almost thirty years ago, Felix Guattari was already recommending the neighborhood strategies on which contemporary artistic practices are based: “Just as I think it is illusory to count on the gradual transformation of society so I believe that microscopic attempts - communities, neighborhood committees, organizing crèches in universities - play an absolutely fundamental role.”"
QUESTIONS:
Kwon P96: "what is the commodity status of anti-commodities, that is, immaterial, process-oriented, ephemeral, performative events?... Is the unhinging of site specificity, then, a form of resistance to the ideological establishment of art or a capitulation to the logic of capitalist expansion?"
Bourriaud P7: "“How can you bring a classroom to life as though it were an artwork?” asks Guattari. By asking this question, he raises the ultimate aesthetic problem. How is aesthetics to be used, and can it possibly be injected into tissues that have been rigidified by the capitalist economy?"
Do these privileged experiences (or site-specific artworks) hosted in museums and galleries actually critique capitalism? Is there usefulness in temporary utopias they propose? Or do they just re-enforce power structures by creating situations for the social elites to role play? Is this institutional support actually a way to appropriate critique and to make the privileged feel good about themselves for "getting it"?
Quotes:
ReplyDelete1. "The first thing that strikes me about this generation of artists is that they are inspired by a concern for democracy. For art does not transcend our day to day preoccupations; it brings us face to face with reality through the singularity of a relationship with the world, through a fiction." (Bourriaud)
2. "Furthermore, unlike previous models, this site is not defined as a precondition. Rather, it is generated by the work (often as "content"), and then verified by its convergence with an existing discursive formation" (Kwon, 92).
3. "{The functional site} is an informational site, a locus of overlap of text, photographs and video recordings, physical places and things... It is a temporary thing; a movement [...] Corresponding to the pattern of movement in electronic spaces of the Internet and cyberspace, which are likewise structured to be experienced transitively, one thing after another, and not as synchronic simultaneity, this transformation of the site textualizes spaces and spatializes discourses." (Kwon, 95)
Questions:
1. Is it possible to have "site specific" art on the internet, what would it look/be like?
QUOTES:
ReplyDeleteKwon
"Under the pretext of their articulation or resuscitation, site-specific art can be mobilized to expedite the erasure of differences via the commodification and serialization of places." p106
"This means addressing the differences of adjacencies and distances between one thing, one person, one place, one thought, one fragment next to another, rather than invoking equivalencies via one thing after another. Only those cultural practices that have this relational sensibility can turn local encounters into long-term commitments to transform passing intimacies into indelible, unretractable social marks- so that the sequence of sites that we inhabit in our life's traversal does not become genericized into an undifferentiated serialization, one place after another." p110
Bourriaud
"Does it allow me to exist as I look at it or does it, on the contrary, deny my existence as a subject and does its structure refuse to consider the Other? Does the space-time suggested or described by this artwork, together with the laws that govern it, correspond to my real-life aspirations? Does it form a critique of what needs critique? If there was a corresponding space-time in reality, could I live in it?" p6
QUESTIONS:
These articles were both written in the late 1990's. How have the particular questions raised about site specificity changed in the proceeding 20 years? Especially with the boom of the internet?
Kwon seems to end on the proposition that we need to continue to emphasize specificity in creative practice/making in order to avoid commodifying and serializing places. Do you agree? Is this the only way? How specific is specific enough?
In response to the Bourriaud quote/question I ask: Do you think these are the right questions to ask to see if a work is "quite simply human?"
Are there examples of art practices that are acknowledged as art through a historical lens but avoid contributing to a capitalized art market? Examples?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI made a separate post
ReplyDeletehttps://hsp2017psu.blogspot.com/2017/10/michael-readings-week-6.html