If you’ve ever been troubled by what they call a ‘postmodern moment’ – disorientated, disconnected and detached – worry no more, write Monika Parrinder + Colin Davies. Postmodernism is over, according to Nicholas Bourriaud the French writer and curator behind the current Tate Triennial 2009.
read on here
The full article can be read on eye, the international review of graphic design, blog
‘Relational art’ and ‘relational aesthetic’ are commonplace terms in contemporary art discourse. Defined as a ‘set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space and as an aesthetic theory consisting in judging art works on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt’. In such an aesthetics, art is seemingly required to act as a replacement for the binding of the community through the rituals of religion.
Non-relational Aesthetics proposes that all discourse involves alterity, difference and deferral. Non-relational Aesthetics offers a concept of art as an ethical encounter with the other, and the idea of art as ‘hospitality’ is anticipated as an alternative to that of ‘relational aesthetics.’
- from
Non-relational Aesthetics (Transmission: the Rules of Engagement)
Charlie Gere and Michael Corris
Artwords Press 2008
ISBN 9781906441043
/MLA 24/02/2009
The link isn’t working to the right book and so I will have to look at this later, but it sounds as if this taps into Claire Bishops’s critique of Relational Aesthetics as politically ineffectual because it seeks to resolve difference in a like-minded community rather than allow it to disrupt. Bishops thinking is underpinned by the notion of agonism which is drawn out in the polical philosopy of Chantal Mouffe. Laclau and Mouffe write that “it is vital for democratic politics to acknowledge that any form of consensus is the result of hegemonic articulation, and that it always has an ‘outside’ that impedes its full realization”. For Bishop, the human relations that Relational Aesthetics seek to prompt are those of consensus through shared meals in a galleries and so on - such a hegemonic context is antithetical to real democracy or political integrity. A good example was in New York when a homeless person had tried to make the reconstruction of Rirkit Tiravanija’s appartment in a New York gallery and was evicted - the gallery hours which had been extended to 24 hours were subsequently reduced to day time only. It seems that this was too much alterity. And it certainly tested relational aesthetics against its own (to be honest less fore-grounded) ethical claims.
I am interested in how your Non-relational Aesthetics preserves alterity within the idea of art as ‘hospitality’? Bourriaud seems to have addressed this problem in the Altermodern manifesto by taking concerns addressed originally within the frame of the proximinal encounter and re-locating them in the dispersed and nomadic global matrix. The connections he charges his artists with making are more about making sense of alterity and difference (preserving it) rather than ‘managing’ it (negating it). Hospitality seems to still be attached to the latter. I am interested to hear more.
/Ruth Ellery 25/02/2009
Seen the show. Terrible art. Can’t see how it connects with Altermodern. M/M (Paris’) graphics are good but hardly instrumental in pulling it together or ‘connecting’ it.
A famous philosopher - deleuze? - pointed out that philosophy does not get the art it deserves. Indeed.
/Jack O'Neill 04/03/2009
note: Bachelard! Try this in parody of B.: “Shall we say…that contemporary art does not have the philosophy it deserves”. (Elie During).
/Alistair Johns 05/03/2009
Rick Poyner re-presents some of the points raised here (1) while aligning himself to Bishop’s position (outlined above).
‘If this is the era of relational design and if graphic design really is a part of it, then Bishop’s clear-sighted question—what types of relations, for whom, and why?—remains the one we need to answer’
http://www.printmag.com/design_articles/observer_strained_relations/tabid/519/Default.aspx
(1) Which can be linked to:
http://www.limitedlanguage.org/discussion/index.php/archive/re-writing-graphic-design-history-part-one/
http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature.php?id=130&fid=573
/MLA 14/05/2009
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Postmodernism is dead? Really?
/Art Criticism 13/02/2009