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.

"Be Friends!" Or, love and collaboration

Beckett's radio play Words and Music concerns the collaboration between the titular characters, who work together to satisfy the musical desires of their lord. Commissioned by the BBC in 1962, it was a collaboration between Beckett and his cousin, the composer John Beckett. The project was apparently somewhat fraught, and after the original recording, John withdrew his score.

My girlfriend, who also happens to be one of my closest artistic collaborators, spent eight hours today remixing excerpts from Holst's "The Planets" into 33 distinct sound cues for our version of Words and Music. Sometimes I count the number of hours she spends designing and wonder why the director gets top billing. At 10pm, we tech'd through the cues. Despite the late hour and our limited vocabulary discussing symphonic music, we fell into a productive and pleasurable rhythm: "I think it should cut off after the 'dum dum dum!'" "The first 'dum dum dum' or the second one?" "Well, definitely before that xylophone comes in," "Yeah, there's no xylophone in Beckett."

For me, love and collaboration go hand in hand. Finding someone I click with creatively is like finding a new lover. When I feel that spark lit, I start fantasizing about when we can next work together and on what source text. Like with a romantic relationship, you can't fake a good collaboration. Trust and communication can be built over time, but it all starts with a recognition and a pull, the thrill of similarity glimpsed across difference.

Words says to Music at the top of the play: "How much longer cooped up here in the dark? With you!" But by the middle of the piece they are singing together, breathing meaning into sound, improvising a new path through the dark space between them.