In 1996, seven years earlier, the fall of the Berlin Wall fractured the World Order, creating anxiety and geopolitical uncertainty following its consequences. In its revolutionary exhibition Traffic AT The Capc Museum of Contemporary Art in Bordeaux,, The curator Nicolas Bourriaud gives life to his idea that only temporary artistic installations – reflecting a status quo in flow – could create a meaning by uniting the spectator with the experience.
Thus began the use of its term ”Relational aesthetic“Founders the tradition of the solitary museum to set a stagnant work on a static wall. Bourriaud and artists in Traffic Demonstrated that in times of upheavals, collective experience itself is an artistic medium.
Almost three decades later, it is normal that the artist and scholar Craig Smith revisits the movement in Relationship art: a guided tour (2024), a very intentional but unequal book that allows us to recognize a convuling world, then as now, in search of a temporary space for connectivity, the community and the meaning.
The digitization of art, social networks and new media such as podcasts, short content and live streaming include A kind of ephemeral exhibition space where the public can commit. They promote public participation and the production of collective art. Bourriaud would have called these “micro-utopia” social interstices, transposed into the Digisphère. But have recently Verification of abandoned facts on its platformsMeta is part of a multitude of technological companies that are more and more dangerous and unreliable for connectivity, compete with conspiracy theory and propaganda. On the other hand, relational artistic projects offer pure and transparent space to make sense and community.
In case studies mainly from the 2000s, Smith discusses “interhume activity” and “computer interactivity to human”. He quotes a pioneer project of digital art Peter Halley, of which Explosive cell At the Museum of Modern Art in 1996 was one of the first to illustrate this interactivity. Within the pre-programmed limits, viewers used a computer and a mouse to refer one of the nine moving images of Halley to their liking. Once finished, they were invited to place their signature alongside the artist. For Smith, peripherals in Explosive cell are “interface tools” that allow the artist and the spectator to create “digital aesthetics”.
For all that Smith is going well, he is mistaken in a few things – images, for one. All are in black and white, which is a shame in an art book, and he himself took and appeared in too many of them, either as an artist Bored, bored, bored at the Musée de l'Orangerie, for example, or photographer under study for Thames Whale. In addition, my copy was printed upside down by mistake, which did not help things; The publisher had deliberately forced readers to reactivate the book on the right to engage with him, well, well, that would have been a bit intelligent in relational art. Finally, Smith quotes Bourriaud so largely that the whole of the conservative treaty could just as well have appeared in the appendix.
There is also a lack of a discussion of two fundamental artists of the movement: Rirkrit Tiravanija and Liam Gillick. In the installation of Tiravanija in 1992 “Unitled (Free)”, the first in what was going to become an iterative work, he transformed a Soho gallery into a kitchen and served the free Thai curry and rice to spectators whom he invited to participate in the act of artistic manufacture by eating and socializing. British artist dining table Liam Gillick (What If If? Trafficincluded a blue ping-pong table without a net covered with silver sequins. Visitors interacted with the installation both by following the glitter on the whole floor of the gallery and by composing their own rules of the game.
The conceptual framework that underlies these works of Tiravanija and Gillick embodies the spirit of origin of interconnection among foreigners, which is often rare. Today, the world flows to the right in antagonism, division and belligerent – not to mention war and genocide. The voices are silenced; censorship abound. The spirit of relational aesthetics with its connectivity and its community, in question in Smith's book, could be an antidote of our disorder and our distance, a prism through which we could see how an old movement can say new truths.
Relationship art: a guided tour of Craig Smith (2024) By Craig Smith is published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts and is available online and via independent booksellers.
