As a result of an enquiry about commission4mission I've been dialoguing recently with artist and musician Steve Scott. Steve has agreed to samples of our musings being posted here, hopefully in order to initiate wider conversation on the ideas we are discussing.
Our discussions were kicked off by my providing links to information about commission4mission plus links to my Airbrushed from Art History series and posts on the public art projects involving local churches with which I have been involved.
Steve replied with information about the Christian Artist's Networking Association, two of his books (Crying for a Vision and Like a House on Fire) plus the CD from his collaboration with painter Gaylen Stewart some years back consisting of Stewart's paintings and collages and Steve's poetry over sound loops of synthesizers and digitally manipulated birdsong.
Steve also sent a magazine piece from 2007 which drew upon CANA's 2005 conference in Bali for its discussion of the place(s) of the arts in the church and asked whether I was familiar with Nicolas Bourriaud whose Relational Aesthetics appeared in 2002. Steve noted that while he's published more work since, his main claim to fame these days is that he is the Gubelkian Curator of Contemporary Art at Tate Britain. He said that he regards "the overlap of `relational' / `social aesthetic' theories and the public art projects and move towards community regeneration somewhat auspicious."
I responded that I'm aware of Bourriaud without having read any of his books. I'm also interested in relationality and interconnectivity generally and relational aesthetics is clearly in that ball park. More recently Bourriaud has been asking what is relationality and connectivity for; which would seem a question that Christians might well want to answer. I would agree with you that relational aesthetics has interesting connections to public art as Bourriaud talks about "art that allows its audience to exist in the space opened up by it". The idea that "art is a space of images, objects, and human beings" would also have resonance in a Christian sense in terms of the space of participation that worship can offer. All this talk of the space created by art seems to link with your summary of David Summers' book (Real Spaces) while your emphasis, in your Radix article, on the use of art in community transformation would also seem relevant to the idea that the viewer participates in the space opened up by the art and can, in some fashion, complete the work.
When I was corresponding with Richard Davey he argued that relational aesthetics was part of an art world which sees the world as a hyper-real, space of irony - something which is antipathetic to a perspective intrigued by transcendent possibilities. But when Bourriaud asks the 'What for' question - "The question we might raise today is, Connecting people, creating interactive, communicative experience: What for? What does the new kind of contact produce? If you forget the "what for?" I'm afraid you're left with simple Nokia art--producing interpersonal relations for their own sake and never addressing their political aspects" - he doesn't seem to be speaking ironically.
Steve responded with a reference to Bourriaud's `post production' book, the one in which he, sort of `redeems' or at least acquiesces to the idea that we have no privileged or primary relationship with `nature' (contra the Romantic/Modernist perspective) but argues that its all `mediated' and socially constructed. His optimal artist has learned how to surf (as it were) the somewhat constructed nature of things (his paradigms are the computer programmer and the mix and mash turntablist DJ) to make a somewhat fluid globally relatable art.
His recent `Altermodernities' at Tate Britain pushed the idea and the theory further and he's arguing for an `aesthetics of diversity' in the shadow of Victor Segalen (traveler/exote). Both positions; the relational aesthetic, and the altermodern are utopian (therefore doomed) but redeemable, Steve thinks, as metaphors for what `we' of the culturally diverse living temple (in which, according to Haggai, the glory of our latter days will exceed the former) can begin to accomplished, be it reformation, revival or renaissance.
Steve also sent a copy of a `relational paradise' paper which critiques Bourriaud in ways that resonated slightly with the way one of the sources (Spiked) quoted in my piece on art and regeneration took on the public art projects /funding in Barking.
I replied that I had skim read the 'relational paradise' paper and thought that Bourriaud's ideas as described in the paper held up more strongly than did the critique.
I gave a couple of 'off-the-top-of-the-head' thoughts in response. First, Bourriaud would initially have been responding to work by artists which seemed to him to be primarily about the exploration of relationships. Relational aesthetics would have begun as description and explanation of such works rather than being a theory which may or may not support Western capitalism. Bourriaud, in his writings over time, may well have developed 'relational aesthetics' into such a theory but I think Svetlichnaja has lost sight of its origins as a explanation of common elements in the works of individual artists.
Second, there would seem to be many resonances between what are essentially 'happenings' which involve the viewer as participant (indeed, which move those who are other than the artist from viewer to participant), the art created by 'relational' artists, and what happens in church services. The Eucharist is a happening which is only completed by the congregation becoming participants and which only has meaning as this occurs. The Eucharist can only proceed if the president receives responses from the congregation to the Eucharistic Prayer and the point and culmination of the Eucharist is when the congregation take the body and blood of Christ into their own bodies. A theological analysis of relationships at this point should conclude that the body of Christ has been both dispersed and gathered among and by the receiving church community. There are significant parallels to the description of Rikrit Tiravanija's shared meal installation in Svetlichnaja's paper.
It is my belief that as Christians we should be seeking to create temporary signs of the Kingdom of God which can be experienced by those in our community but which are only tasters for the fullness of the Kingdom which is yet to come. The Eucharist is the central example of such signs which, as David Jones consistently stated, have to participate in the reality which is being signed in order to have validity and meaning. Again, there would be significant parallels to Bourriaud's idea of an endless succession of actions (or 'space-time elements') in which a temporary collective is formed by means of which fairer social relations are permitted together with more compact ways of living and many different combinations of fertile experience. To critique this on the basis that it does not engage with anger and violence is to wilfully ignore its basis as a response to and reaction away from anger and violence. To create a means by which people experience an alternative to anger and violence would seem a wholly positive action, unless one is wedded to the benefits and emotions generated by anger and violence.
Steve replied: "I would agree with all this and like the fact that it is rooted in Christian mystery rather than the materialist framework that Bourriaud evinces. Bourriaud and co including the Thai artist echo something which is either a foretaste of or evidence of a hunger for something of relationality which is grounded in community (or becomes constituted as `sign' by community response) and also points beyond it and so, yes, in the background is David Jones who is offering the tribal diversites of pre Roman Britain as part of a sacramental re membering and also the late Peter Fuller's lament of the loss of a shared symbolic vocabulary in the arts that faith at one point provided (and the resulting vacuum led to a market driven `international style' and postmodern smorgasboard approach).
The people `spiked plus that critique paper' that try and punch holes in what they perceive as vulnerabilities in the model don't take into consideration the other dimensions of community, those provided by faith and/or signs, and therefore can't see or value what's in front of them."
He agreed that relational aesthetics would have begun as description and explanation of art works rather than being a theory which may or may not support Western capitalism: "Very true. He says as much in interviews. The stuff he wrote grew out of his experience as curator in the 90s. While he is popularly identified with framing the theory I think he would acknowledge that it was more ad hoc (`as you go') and also that there are precedents and parallels elsewhere. There's a Danish Curator, Lars Bang Larsen, who framed a `social aesthetic' and talked about community projects in Copenhagen, for example. Then there's the slightly different `Social Sculpture' of Joseph Beuys and, as we're `this side' of the overarching metanarratives it might be misguided of us to measure Bourriaud's developing theory and praxis in the shadow of an obsolescent social or economic theory.
He noted that rather than developing 'relational aesthetics' into a theory, Bourriaud actually moved on to `post production' and then `altermodernity' as takes on his thinking. But he thought that the drawing of a tentantive or context specific theory based on shared commonalities of case studies and then redeeming it, or re rooting it (as I did) in both community and `Coming Kingdom' soil is the way to go.
Also of interest to Steve at this point was Loraine Leeson's allusion in a recent interview to the profound impact that a conflict resolution workshop (offered in Newham, he thought) had on her approach to art. This seemed to resonate with my last point about alternative responses.
In replying I wondered whether the sense of redeeming a materialist theory or reading of art which we have been discussing doesn't help to do to fill the gap that Fuller laments (the loss of a shared symbolic vocabulary in the arts that faith at one point provided) and whether it links to Lesslie Newbigin's argument that conflict between two views “will not be settled on the basis of logical argument”. Instead “[t]he view will prevail that is seen to offer – both in theory and practice – the widest rationality, the greatest capacity to give meaning to the whole of experience”. I have posted a series on Newbigin's argument here under the heading of 'A plausible plausibility structure'.
I have argued that this wider rationality is what is found in the Bible and in the art of David Jones, T.S. Eliot and Marc Chagall where diverse fragments are linked together to form a whole that is more than the sum of its parts (I've explored this in a series of posts called 'Allusive and elusive' which can be found here). When this is the case, I think that the diversity which characterises postmodernism doesn't have to be viewed purely as a smorgasbord but can be understood as something more integrated - a mega-narrative providing a wider rationality - but without creating an overarching meta-narrative (see here).
Steve noted that Fuller was an atheist, a lapsed believer who had kicked free of what he felt was an unreflective childhood faith. He lamented it a bit in one of the essays included in in `Images of God.' He said that he had had an all too brief chat with Fuller at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1983. Fuller had been giving a talk with Roger Scruton. Fuller was well on his way `center of left' contra the marxism/sociology of art of the late 60s under John Berger. He was beginning (or perhaps was well into) articulating a bio social aesthetic - Italian thinker Timpanaro - while his critique of postmodernism (as it manifests in the arts) reminded Steve of what he'd read about the broad left approach to those ideas and practices (Fredric Jameson, Christopher Norris) and probably also resonates with where Bourriaud is coming from. Although I thought that Fuller would be upset at some of Bourriaud's choices re: `Altermodern' art.
The chat with Fuller was all too brief because Steve asked him if he'd heard of Hans Rookmaaker. Yes he had, no he wasn't (a believer), end of story, and very much the end of the conversation.
Another relevant writer that Steve mentioned at this point is Roger Grainger: "I have `Watching for Wings' and `Place like this' on my shelves from way back when but, on a whim, I just googled him and turned up a cornucopia of more recent stuff on drama, liturgy and the like."
I hadn't come across him before but had just been looking at the blurb for 'The Drama of the Rite' which looks very interesting and might connect with some of what we were discussing about the structure of and participation in the Eucharist.
Steve replied: "Amazing. Grainger came across my mind this morning, mainly in the context of his early work in doing theology in a psychological setting and now, latterly, I see a whole bunch of material on healing drama/liturgy and so on reminding me a little bit of the context and function of the Isenheim Altarpiece as described by Andrée Hayum in her book on Grünewald."
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Steve Scott - No Memory of You.
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