Social Art (Don't Call it Relational Aesthetics)
I'm going to write about the closing of Danish artist Berit Nørgaard's residency to introduce the subject of an interesting art movement that may define experimental art for the next decade. (See MCA show Conversations about Iraq)
Unfortunately, they had to give this type of art the worst name ever: Relational
Aesthetics. Even "Relationship Art" would have been better, because I understand what "aesthetics" means as an art term, but sometimes it's used in reference to monks and then I'm totally lost. Anyway, as Nørgaard put it, "it's a terrible name, because if you're working with the public, you want to call it something that people are going to understand."
Amen. So Social Art it is.
Nørgaard recommended a book for me, "Conversation Pieces" by Grant Kester. I've started reading it, and so far it's not only a only a really good book, but to use "converstion pieces" as the name for Nørgaard's residency artwork would be applicable, because her artwork is the dialogue that's created.
Installation detail, Berit Norgaard, "If I can do it, you can do it"
Her project's premise is to ask the public a simple question, "What would you like someone to teach you?" (Immediately "ratios" came to my mind). So anyone can put themselves and what they'd like to learn on the list, and then Nørgaard runs around like a maniac trying to make it happen during her residency (which ends in a few days).
The magic (read art) happens when the two people meet. The art is the bringing together of strangers who engage in a dialogue that wouldn't have otherwise happened. Nørgaard's goal is for people to look at meetings with strangers as positive experience, rather than a reluctant, or threatening one. It's about connecting through sharing the unique knowledge each of us has.
So that's the primer to set the stage for other posts on the way. Conversation Pieces (Relational Aesthetics) is probably a subsection of Social Art, which can get broader and include social interactions beyond dialogue. So in the next posts we'll look at Faheem Majeed, Barbara Jones-Hogu and Theaster Gates and see how these all tie into each other (and I'll fill in those three links once I upload the posts).
And Nørgaard says she knows someone in Copenhagen who could teach me ratios.
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7 Comments
djTA630 said:
Does Berit have a web page?
...and what part of Holland is she from?
Kathryn Born said:
http://www.beritnoergaard.dk/
Abraham Ritchie said:
Bourriaud never was one to make things super accessible.
Nice ascetic pun BTW
djTA630 said:
Oh! She's Danish not Dutch. I see, now.
Thanks!
Kathryn Born said:
Whoops. Corrected above.
passerby said:
A couple thing to point out.
1. This type of art with a social sphere was influential on the last decade. You can already see its influence fading, actually.
2. Relational aesthetics does not relate or overlap really with the type of work Kester writes about, or the type described above. Relational Aesthetics is not really about projects that have a social dimension, or social interaction, and not about projects that go out into the real world, but a subset in that group. Nor is the point of the argument in the terrible book by Bourriaud really about relationships. The work he speaks about uses design and transformation of spaces, particularly gallery or institutional spaces for possibilities for social relations: an aesthetics of interaction. Hence the name.
Neither point above is to say current social practices are irrelevant, just that this has been in the air since 1995. Nor is this to demean the project, which is quite fine. Last, I'm not a fan of the term relational aesthetics, it has been so misused and overused, particularly in the states. but misconstruing the term, shortchanging it to define and describe projects it does not describe, doesn't help it be understood either.
Kathryn Born said:
I know it's been around for a while, but I have high hopes for it.
Thank you for the information about nomenclature. That does help clarify. And thank you for contributing to the comments, crowdsourcing is the only hope for this blog.
To get off topic and look at it linguistically, I always go back to my first point about language - that language is a social institution. It's why I connect with words more than images, probably. But when a word like Relational Aesthetics keeps getting co-oped, it's probably because the word is needed. Technically, if enough people use it "wrong" for long enough, it becomes "right". Look at Asprin, and Xerox begging everyone not to call it "Xeroxing" - because they were at legal risk of losing their word simply by people using it too broadly.
Everyone uses the term "ironic" wrong because we really do need a word to describe the feeling of 10,000 spoons, when what we need is a knife. We need a word for that, and "isn't it funny" doesn't cut it. So we steal the next closest word.
So ... the point... my question is always "What does this art have to do with real life" and I think "conversation pieces" and relationship pieces are going to be important as long as our culture believes that what people need to do, in order to solve the world’s problems, is sit down and talk.
Now I just curated a show called "Communication is Overrated" because I believe that dialogue doesn't solve everything and can sometimes make things worse. But I am largely alone in my thinking :)
People think that dialogue is the answer, especially the dialogue between unlike parties. And that's what this art is really about, this core faith in communication. As far as I've gotten in the book (if I waited until it was done with it to write, Berit would have long left the country) it really feels like it's all political art.
It’s also culturally reflective in that it’s reluctant to measure success. I don’t know how you would begin to critique it. I don't know when the moment of art-making happens. Or if the conversations are dry and sputter and stall, then who or what failed?
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