We Are Living in a Material World...

Relational Aesthetics is a term coined by art critic Nicolas Bourriaud to describe the kind of art wherein the medium of creativity is not marble or paint or sound or even words, but the interaction between human beings. It's not a completely new idea; Duchamp was talking about it in the 1950s: "The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world."

But Bourriaud takes it a step further, questioning even the importance of a legible "work" at all. What if all that is made is a convivial, participatory experience? The notion of Relational Aesthetics makes even blurrier the line we sometimes draw between life and art, and is ultimately aligned with the project of collectively sculpting culture itself: "the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist" (Bourriaud).

Responses to this provocative idea are manifold. Jacques Ranciere, a French philosopher, believes Bourriaud sells short the importance of the audience's act of viewing. In his book The Emancipated Spectator, Ranciere asks whether or not complete entanglement of audience, artist, and artwork is necessary for a real engagement to take place. Isn't watching, thinking, and considering a work of art also a shared experience? Are we ignoring the very real, if subtle, labor performed by the attentive spectator by demanding that she jump into the active space of convivial relationship? What would we lose in giving up the quiet receptivity of watching?

I find both of these positions compelling. I can't choose between them. I want a world filled with art that does both. I want art that demands I engage completely with it (like this, this and this) and I also want works that invite me to surrender to the experience of viewing, where I can fall into the sea of perception - not just the sea they've crafted for me, but the deeper waters of my own experiences, ideas, beliefs, and feelings to which I compare the world that they present to me.

I offer to you a snippet of a performance piece I made with some of my favorite collaborators in response to my readings on Relational Aesthetics and its discontents. This is only a portion of our piece, which involved fishing good-luck coins from a fountain, financial negotiations with our audience over rental of their footwear, and ritualistic foot-washing in preparation for performance. Playful and presentational, our silly dance number was a prefabricated gift to the audience as well as an attempt to collaborate on the continuous project of coexistence.