Great to see that, through The Tanks and the next Turbine Hall installation, Tate Modern is to feature more relational art, much of it also being art which critiques commercialisation. So, Charlotte Higgins writes in the guardian:
'The desire for live encounters, by both artists and audiences, was partly a reaction to the economic and political climate, said Dercon. Artists and audiences were expressing a disillusion with the impersonal systems that dominate modern life, and reaching for the human encounter.
"I'm not going to talk about politicians and banks, but we are completely surrounded by systems that do things to us and at us. Performance proposes a new form of interconnectivity."
The desire to focus work without physical form, that cannot straightforwardly be bought and sold, may also express a wider dissatisfaction among the art world for the vagaries of the art market and the extreme commercialisation of art before the financial crash of 2008.
According to Catherine Wood, Tate's curator of contemporary art and performance, "there is a desire for community among artists, and a desire to get away from the dominant news story about art, which is 'Damien Hirst sells for £50m'".
Serota added: "At a time of austerity, people are rethinking their values and looking at art that doesn't straightforwardly have a market … Artists want to make work that engages directly with audiences and is not so susceptible to commercial development."
Tino Sehgal, whose Turbine Hall commission will be unveiled next week, says in his guardian interview:
"Our culture is hung up on and overemphasises what can be derived from material objects," he says. "I think this is something quite new, over the past 200 or 300 years – that life has become about accumulating material wealth. The 21st century is not about accumulating material wealth like the 20th century. It's already eroding. I'm not against material things – I just don't work with them."
Objects, he suggests, offer false promises of stability and security ..."
Higgins explains that:
"Sehgal did not train as an artist: instead he studied dance and political economy, in tandem, in Berlin and Essen. A peculiar combination, you might think, but for him each unlocks the other. The paradox of economics, he believes, is that "we derive income from transforming the earth into goods, but you can't keep on transforming the earth. I felt I wanted to study that." And dance? "Dance for me was a solution. In the sense that I could solve this paradox at least for myself. It was about how I can derive an income from something that does not involve this material transformation. At the same time, I'm not against the economy or the idea of the product. Art is essentially something that is produced. What I think is overestimated is the power and potential of things. My work is a product, though – not a thing."
Still, Sehgal belongs in the art world rather than in the world of the performing arts: museums rather than theatres provide the best environment for tackling the kinds of questions that interest him. "The museum is a place where we think about how to produce material things. That is my question – not the question of choreography, which is 'How can a body move?', but 'What can we do instead of producing objects?'"
The paradox which doesn't seem to be fully addressed, however, is that it is commercial activity (galleries and sponsors) which funds much of the art which critiques commercialisation. Sehgal may dispense with contracts when he sells his works (that is, the right to perform them) to museums but they sell nevertheless for five-figure sums, something that, as Higgins notes, has prompted his critics to cry emperor's new clothes. Similarly, Tate director Nicholas Serota has praised non-doms who donated money to the Tanks at Tate Modern - saying: 'It's a very visible answer to the criticisms that have come from government and others about non-dom taxpayers not making a contribution to the cultural life of the country' - while using the money they provide to show art which critiques the commercialisation from which, in the main, their money derives. There are unresolved or unacknowledged issues here - having your cake and eating it - particularly where art which has become accepted by the cultural and critical establishment is presented as though it remains defiantly avant-garde.
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Mumford and Sons - Whispers in the Dark.
Showing posts with label relational aesthetics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label relational aesthetics. Show all posts
Wednesday, 18 July 2012
Tuesday, 3 April 2012
The art of embodied experience
Transpositions has an excellent post today by Peter Phillips entitled Embodying Art: Renewing Religion?
Phillips argues that "the Church in the West faces continued decline until it reverses its rejection of artists who can frame and present their own embodied experience and draw their audience into an embodied understanding of the world in which they live or hope to live."
This is because "everything we experience has to be embodied ... every experience we have can only be perceived, received, experienced by a sentient, embodied individual." Art also needs to be experienced; art makes its own statement regardless of its audience but "the produced data (visual, verbal, aural, oral, plastic, moving, multimedia, monomedia) is usually meant to be experienced through the locus of embodiment."
"This was a truth which the medieval European Church understood" that, at its heart:
"religion is better understood as embodied experience than by rational assent. Think of all the sense images in Christianity alone: blood, wine, bread, flesh, sacrifice, baptism, circumcision, eating, drinking, purification, washing, meals, healing, touch, kiss, embrace, bite, devour, the word of God made flesh."
Therefore, "Art embodied, ‘live’ or digital, in all its forms offers an iconographic entry point into a multisensory embodied experience of Christianity itself."
Nicolas Bourriaud argued that relational art takes “as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” and that a work of art, if it is to be successful, “will invariably set its sights beyond its mere presence in space” by being “open to dialogue, discussion, and that form of inter-human negotiation that Marcel Duchamp called “the coefficient of art”.”
Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics suggests that “Art is a state of encounter” and that the role of artworks is that we learn “to inhabit the world in a better way” through participating in “arenas of encounter”, created by the artworks themselves, in which momentary micro-communities are formed:
“Today’s art, and I’m thinking of [artists such as Gonzalez-Torres, ... Angela Bulloch, Carsten Höller, Gabriel Orozco and Pierre Huyghe] as well as Lincoln Tobier, Ben Kinmont, and Andrea Zittel, to name just three more, encompasses in the working process the presence of the micro-community which will accommodate it. A work thus creates, within its method of production and then at the moment of its exhibition, a momentary grouping of participating viewers.”
What such artists produce, Bourriaud argues, “are relational space-time elements, inter-human experiences ... of the places where alternative forms of sociability, critical models and moments of constructed conviviality are worked out.” In other words, such artworks create “relations outside the field of art”: “relations between individuals and groups, between the artist and the world, and, by way of transitivity, between the beholder and the world.”
Richard Davey has a marvellous phrase for the network of relationships which form around any artwork; “respect for the work of art as an object itself made by an embodied human being for embodied human beings."
As Phillips notes in his post, 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 significant works of relational art such as Rikrit Tiravanija's shared meal installation.
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. These are embodiments of the Kingdom. 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 are 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.
All this is ultimately about the reality and necessity of incarnation. As Rhidian Brook once said on Thought for the Day:
"... there is no substitute for being there - incarnate or, literally, in the flesh. No amount of words sent by post or by telephone or over social networking sites - can ever match the visceral reality of presence. Face to phone or face to screen will never match face to face."
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Evanescence - Tourniquet.
Phillips argues that "the Church in the West faces continued decline until it reverses its rejection of artists who can frame and present their own embodied experience and draw their audience into an embodied understanding of the world in which they live or hope to live."
This is because "everything we experience has to be embodied ... every experience we have can only be perceived, received, experienced by a sentient, embodied individual." Art also needs to be experienced; art makes its own statement regardless of its audience but "the produced data (visual, verbal, aural, oral, plastic, moving, multimedia, monomedia) is usually meant to be experienced through the locus of embodiment."
"This was a truth which the medieval European Church understood" that, at its heart:
"religion is better understood as embodied experience than by rational assent. Think of all the sense images in Christianity alone: blood, wine, bread, flesh, sacrifice, baptism, circumcision, eating, drinking, purification, washing, meals, healing, touch, kiss, embrace, bite, devour, the word of God made flesh."
Therefore, "Art embodied, ‘live’ or digital, in all its forms offers an iconographic entry point into a multisensory embodied experience of Christianity itself."
Nicolas Bourriaud argued that relational art takes “as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” and that a work of art, if it is to be successful, “will invariably set its sights beyond its mere presence in space” by being “open to dialogue, discussion, and that form of inter-human negotiation that Marcel Duchamp called “the coefficient of art”.”
Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics suggests that “Art is a state of encounter” and that the role of artworks is that we learn “to inhabit the world in a better way” through participating in “arenas of encounter”, created by the artworks themselves, in which momentary micro-communities are formed:
“Today’s art, and I’m thinking of [artists such as Gonzalez-Torres, ... Angela Bulloch, Carsten Höller, Gabriel Orozco and Pierre Huyghe] as well as Lincoln Tobier, Ben Kinmont, and Andrea Zittel, to name just three more, encompasses in the working process the presence of the micro-community which will accommodate it. A work thus creates, within its method of production and then at the moment of its exhibition, a momentary grouping of participating viewers.”
What such artists produce, Bourriaud argues, “are relational space-time elements, inter-human experiences ... of the places where alternative forms of sociability, critical models and moments of constructed conviviality are worked out.” In other words, such artworks create “relations outside the field of art”: “relations between individuals and groups, between the artist and the world, and, by way of transitivity, between the beholder and the world.”
Richard Davey has a marvellous phrase for the network of relationships which form around any artwork; “respect for the work of art as an object itself made by an embodied human being for embodied human beings."
As Phillips notes in his post, 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 significant works of relational art such as Rikrit Tiravanija's shared meal installation.
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. These are embodiments of the Kingdom. 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 are 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.
All this is ultimately about the reality and necessity of incarnation. As Rhidian Brook once said on Thought for the Day:
"... there is no substitute for being there - incarnate or, literally, in the flesh. No amount of words sent by post or by telephone or over social networking sites - can ever match the visceral reality of presence. Face to phone or face to screen will never match face to face."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Evanescence - Tourniquet.
Monday, 7 June 2010
Trinitarian aesthetics
In Has Moderism Failed? Suzi Gablik poses the question, ‘Art for Art’s Sake, or Art for Society’s Sake?’ Her question neatly juxtaposes the two key opposed aesthetic arguments of late modern and contemporary art.
On one side has been ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ which, in its purest form as articulated by the art critic Clement Greenberg, “rejected the notion that there is any higher purpose to art, or any “spiritual” point to its production”:
“Art only does what it does: its effect is limited and small. It is there to be aesthetically “good.” Only the “dictates of the medium” – pure paint and the flatness of the picture plane – were held to be worthwhile concerns for painting. The very idea of content was taken to be a hindrance and a nuisance, and looking for meaning was a form of philistinism. The work is a painted surface, nothing more, and its meaning is entirely an aesthetic one.”
On the other side (‘Art for Society’s Sake’), developing a direction signposted by Gablik, has been Nicolas Bourriaud, whose Relational Aesthetics is equally prescriptive. So, Bourriaud argues that relational art takes “as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” and that a work of art, if it is to be successful, “will invariably set its sights beyond its mere presence in space” by being “open to dialogue, discussion, and that form of inter-human negotiation that Marcel Duchamp called “the coefficient of art”.”
Both sides of the argument are presented in terms which exclude the possibility of the other’s existence or validity. Gablik, in addressing the opposed positions of Socialist Art and aesthetic formalism, suggested that what “is required is some sort of reconciliation – not a fixture at either pole”; in other words, to “find a position of equilibrium between the two extremes.” I want to suggest in this article that one such ‘position of equilibrium’ can be found by applying a Trinitarian aesthetics to Art.
This should not come as a surprise as conceptions of the Trinity have often been expressed in artistic terms and Trinitarian conceptions have been helpfully applied to the Arts and other aspects of society. Both C. S. Lewis and Stephen Verney, for example, have written of the inter-relations within the Trinity as being a kind of dance. Dorothy L. Sayers, within The Mind of the Maker (1941), described the creative act itself in the Trinitarian terms of Idea (Father), Energy (Son), and Power (Spirit). A similar approach - in terms of Plan (Father), Do (Son), and Evaluate (Spirit) - was later adopted by Christian Schumacher for his creative consultancy work of restructuring workplaces.
A different approach to understanding and applying the concept of inter-relations within the Trinity was developed by Colin Gunton in The One, the Three and the Many (1993). Gunton used his theology of creation to identify three concepts that he called (drawing on the thinking of Samuel Taylor Coleridge) ‘open transcendentals’. That is, “possibilities for thought which are universal in scope yet open in their application.” Gunton’s three open transcendentals are: relationality (“all things are what they are by being particulars constituted by many and various forms of relation”); perichoresis (“all things are what they are in relations of mutual constitutiveness with all other things”); and substantiality (all things are “substantial beings, having their own distinct and particular existence, by virtue of and not in the face of their relationality to the other”).
Gunton argues that the transcendentals “qualify people and things, too, in a way appropriate to what they are.” In sum, he suggests, “the transcendentals are functions of the finitely free relations of persons and of the contingent relations of things.” These are, therefore, notions which are “predicated of all being by virtue of the fact that God is creator and the world is creation.” As such “they dynamically open up new possibilities for thought” enabling Christian theology to make “a genuine contribution ... to the understanding and shaping of the modern world.” If this is so, then art criticism would be one arena in which the concept of open transcendentals could be explored.
Exploring the substantiality of an artwork would involve describing and assessing its distinct and particular existence; what it is as, for example, pure paint and a flat picture plane. We could talk, for example, in terms of ‘truth to materials’, a phrase that emerged from the Arts and Crafts Movement through its rejection of design work (often Victorian) which disguised by ornamentation the natural properties of the materials used. The phrase has been associated particularly with sculptors and architects, as both are able to reveal, in their way of working and in the finished article, the quality and personality of their materials; wood showing its grain, metal its tensile strength, and stone its texture.
Henry Moore, for example, wrote in Unit One that, “each material has its own individual qualities … Stone, for example, is hard and concentrated and should not be falsified to look like soft flesh … It should keep its hard tense stoniness.” Juginder Lamba is one example of a contemporary sculptor for whom ‘truth to materials’ is significant. Many of his works began with the artist searching through piles of joists and rafters looking for salvaged timber that would speak to him of its creative potentialities. His sculptures retain the personality and characteristics of the salvaged wood even at the same time as they are transformed into characters and forms of myth and metaphor.
Exploring the substantiality of an artwork is to recognise that an artwork is an object in its own right once created and, as such, has a life beyond that which its maker consciously intended. Artists sometimes express this sense themselves when they talk about seeing more in the work as they live with it than they were aware of intending during its creation. For some, this is an indication of some sort of spiritual dimension or dynamic at play in the work.
Exploring the relationality of an artwork would involve describing and assessing the many and various forms of relation by which the work was constituted. Among these could be the relationship of the artwork to: the artist who created it; other artworks formed of similar materials or with similar content; the space in which it is being exhibited (both the physical and social space); and those who come to view it.
Artists have their own intentions when creating and are aware of and use (play with) the associations and emotions evoked by the materials and images used in the making. These associations and emotions are as much a part of the work of art as the materials and images (this is particularly so in conceptual and symbolist art, as both begin with the idea or concept) and are present whether the viewer or critic responds to them or not; in the same way that Biblical allusions exist in Shakespeare's plays whether contemporary students recognise them or not. Just as Andrew Motion has argued regarding Shakespeare that our understanding and appreciation of the plays is reduced if we don't recognise the allusions, so our understanding of visual art that uses or plays with associations, emotions and ideas is diminished if we fail to respond.
The reality of the art work as an object in its own right once created and, as such, with a life beyond that which its maker consciously intended also hands a creative role to those who view it. Accordingly, Alan Stewart has written:
"An artist will of course set out to say something particular, but once their work becomes public, it assumes its own life. Therefore each fresh encounter will produce a new conversation between the art and the viewer, resulting in a whole host of possible interpretations, none less valid than the other. Appropriating our own personal meaning from another person’s work doesn’t diminish it, if anything it enlarges it. We might even want to say that in re-imagining and re-investing something with new meaning, we may in fact in some cases redeem it or re-birth it."
Interpretation, to have validity however, has to fit with and follow the shape, texture, feel, colour, images, content, associations and emotions of the work itself. Richard Davey has a marvellous phrase for the network of relationships which form around any artwork; “respect for the work of art as an object itself made by an embodied human being for embodied human beings."
Exploring the perichoresis of an artwork is to recognise what the artwork is in its relations of mutual constitutiveness with all other things. Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics is particularly helpful here in suggesting that “Art is a state of encounter” and that the role of artworks is that we learn “to inhabit the world in a better way” through participating in “arenas of encounter”, created by the artworks themselves, in which momentary micro-communities are formed:
“Today’s art, and I’m thinking of [artists such as Gonzalez-Torres, ... Angela Bulloch, Carsten Höller, Gabriel Orozco and Pierre Huyghe] as well as Lincoln Tobier, Ben Kinmont, and Andrea Zittel, to name just three more, encompasses in the working process the presence of the micro-community which will accommodate it. A work thus creates, within its method of production and then at the moment of its exhibition, a momentary grouping of participating viewers.”
What such artists produce, Bourriaud argues, “are relational space-time elements, inter-human experiences ... of the places where alternative forms of sociability, critical models and moments of constructed conviviality are worked out.” In other words, such artworks create “relations outside the field of art”: “relations between individuals and groups, between the artist and the world, and, by way of transitivity, between the beholder and the world.”
Critiquing artworks in terms of substantiality, relationality and perichoresis could create a unique means of reconciling formalist and relational aesthetics and could form a fascinating and distinctively Trinitarian approach to art criticism.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Flyleaf - Beautiful Bride.
On one side has been ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ which, in its purest form as articulated by the art critic Clement Greenberg, “rejected the notion that there is any higher purpose to art, or any “spiritual” point to its production”:
“Art only does what it does: its effect is limited and small. It is there to be aesthetically “good.” Only the “dictates of the medium” – pure paint and the flatness of the picture plane – were held to be worthwhile concerns for painting. The very idea of content was taken to be a hindrance and a nuisance, and looking for meaning was a form of philistinism. The work is a painted surface, nothing more, and its meaning is entirely an aesthetic one.”
On the other side (‘Art for Society’s Sake’), developing a direction signposted by Gablik, has been Nicolas Bourriaud, whose Relational Aesthetics is equally prescriptive. So, Bourriaud argues that relational art takes “as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space” and that a work of art, if it is to be successful, “will invariably set its sights beyond its mere presence in space” by being “open to dialogue, discussion, and that form of inter-human negotiation that Marcel Duchamp called “the coefficient of art”.”
Both sides of the argument are presented in terms which exclude the possibility of the other’s existence or validity. Gablik, in addressing the opposed positions of Socialist Art and aesthetic formalism, suggested that what “is required is some sort of reconciliation – not a fixture at either pole”; in other words, to “find a position of equilibrium between the two extremes.” I want to suggest in this article that one such ‘position of equilibrium’ can be found by applying a Trinitarian aesthetics to Art.
This should not come as a surprise as conceptions of the Trinity have often been expressed in artistic terms and Trinitarian conceptions have been helpfully applied to the Arts and other aspects of society. Both C. S. Lewis and Stephen Verney, for example, have written of the inter-relations within the Trinity as being a kind of dance. Dorothy L. Sayers, within The Mind of the Maker (1941), described the creative act itself in the Trinitarian terms of Idea (Father), Energy (Son), and Power (Spirit). A similar approach - in terms of Plan (Father), Do (Son), and Evaluate (Spirit) - was later adopted by Christian Schumacher for his creative consultancy work of restructuring workplaces.
A different approach to understanding and applying the concept of inter-relations within the Trinity was developed by Colin Gunton in The One, the Three and the Many (1993). Gunton used his theology of creation to identify three concepts that he called (drawing on the thinking of Samuel Taylor Coleridge) ‘open transcendentals’. That is, “possibilities for thought which are universal in scope yet open in their application.” Gunton’s three open transcendentals are: relationality (“all things are what they are by being particulars constituted by many and various forms of relation”); perichoresis (“all things are what they are in relations of mutual constitutiveness with all other things”); and substantiality (all things are “substantial beings, having their own distinct and particular existence, by virtue of and not in the face of their relationality to the other”).
Gunton argues that the transcendentals “qualify people and things, too, in a way appropriate to what they are.” In sum, he suggests, “the transcendentals are functions of the finitely free relations of persons and of the contingent relations of things.” These are, therefore, notions which are “predicated of all being by virtue of the fact that God is creator and the world is creation.” As such “they dynamically open up new possibilities for thought” enabling Christian theology to make “a genuine contribution ... to the understanding and shaping of the modern world.” If this is so, then art criticism would be one arena in which the concept of open transcendentals could be explored.
Exploring the substantiality of an artwork would involve describing and assessing its distinct and particular existence; what it is as, for example, pure paint and a flat picture plane. We could talk, for example, in terms of ‘truth to materials’, a phrase that emerged from the Arts and Crafts Movement through its rejection of design work (often Victorian) which disguised by ornamentation the natural properties of the materials used. The phrase has been associated particularly with sculptors and architects, as both are able to reveal, in their way of working and in the finished article, the quality and personality of their materials; wood showing its grain, metal its tensile strength, and stone its texture.
Henry Moore, for example, wrote in Unit One that, “each material has its own individual qualities … Stone, for example, is hard and concentrated and should not be falsified to look like soft flesh … It should keep its hard tense stoniness.” Juginder Lamba is one example of a contemporary sculptor for whom ‘truth to materials’ is significant. Many of his works began with the artist searching through piles of joists and rafters looking for salvaged timber that would speak to him of its creative potentialities. His sculptures retain the personality and characteristics of the salvaged wood even at the same time as they are transformed into characters and forms of myth and metaphor.
Exploring the substantiality of an artwork is to recognise that an artwork is an object in its own right once created and, as such, has a life beyond that which its maker consciously intended. Artists sometimes express this sense themselves when they talk about seeing more in the work as they live with it than they were aware of intending during its creation. For some, this is an indication of some sort of spiritual dimension or dynamic at play in the work.
Exploring the relationality of an artwork would involve describing and assessing the many and various forms of relation by which the work was constituted. Among these could be the relationship of the artwork to: the artist who created it; other artworks formed of similar materials or with similar content; the space in which it is being exhibited (both the physical and social space); and those who come to view it.
Artists have their own intentions when creating and are aware of and use (play with) the associations and emotions evoked by the materials and images used in the making. These associations and emotions are as much a part of the work of art as the materials and images (this is particularly so in conceptual and symbolist art, as both begin with the idea or concept) and are present whether the viewer or critic responds to them or not; in the same way that Biblical allusions exist in Shakespeare's plays whether contemporary students recognise them or not. Just as Andrew Motion has argued regarding Shakespeare that our understanding and appreciation of the plays is reduced if we don't recognise the allusions, so our understanding of visual art that uses or plays with associations, emotions and ideas is diminished if we fail to respond.
The reality of the art work as an object in its own right once created and, as such, with a life beyond that which its maker consciously intended also hands a creative role to those who view it. Accordingly, Alan Stewart has written:
"An artist will of course set out to say something particular, but once their work becomes public, it assumes its own life. Therefore each fresh encounter will produce a new conversation between the art and the viewer, resulting in a whole host of possible interpretations, none less valid than the other. Appropriating our own personal meaning from another person’s work doesn’t diminish it, if anything it enlarges it. We might even want to say that in re-imagining and re-investing something with new meaning, we may in fact in some cases redeem it or re-birth it."
Interpretation, to have validity however, has to fit with and follow the shape, texture, feel, colour, images, content, associations and emotions of the work itself. Richard Davey has a marvellous phrase for the network of relationships which form around any artwork; “respect for the work of art as an object itself made by an embodied human being for embodied human beings."
Exploring the perichoresis of an artwork is to recognise what the artwork is in its relations of mutual constitutiveness with all other things. Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics is particularly helpful here in suggesting that “Art is a state of encounter” and that the role of artworks is that we learn “to inhabit the world in a better way” through participating in “arenas of encounter”, created by the artworks themselves, in which momentary micro-communities are formed:
“Today’s art, and I’m thinking of [artists such as Gonzalez-Torres, ... Angela Bulloch, Carsten Höller, Gabriel Orozco and Pierre Huyghe] as well as Lincoln Tobier, Ben Kinmont, and Andrea Zittel, to name just three more, encompasses in the working process the presence of the micro-community which will accommodate it. A work thus creates, within its method of production and then at the moment of its exhibition, a momentary grouping of participating viewers.”
What such artists produce, Bourriaud argues, “are relational space-time elements, inter-human experiences ... of the places where alternative forms of sociability, critical models and moments of constructed conviviality are worked out.” In other words, such artworks create “relations outside the field of art”: “relations between individuals and groups, between the artist and the world, and, by way of transitivity, between the beholder and the world.”
Critiquing artworks in terms of substantiality, relationality and perichoresis could create a unique means of reconciling formalist and relational aesthetics and could form a fascinating and distinctively Trinitarian approach to art criticism.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Flyleaf - Beautiful Bride.
Monday, 14 December 2009
Steve Scott dialogues 1 - Nicholas Bourriaud
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."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Scott - No Memory of You.
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."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Steve Scott - No Memory of You.
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