Relational Aesthetics does not posit itself within the historical field of ‘beauty’, but instead exists as a tract to consider it’s inherent ties with the ‘outside’ world. It is not a new field of aesthetic purism but an ‘extra’ aesthetics. It is an aesthetics in general that relates to the ‘other’, to the space outside of, and is somewhat untouched or un-determined by meaning and form. This shift in proposition allows RA to question the idea of the ‘essence’ of art and to undo its limitations, whereby creating a critical strategy in which it can move beyond the strictures of historical ‘truth’.
In The Will to Power (p.453) F. Nietzsche states, “Art is worth more than truth” because it is ‘the only superior counterforce to all will to denial of life’’. Given that he was relating the ‘denial of life’ to that of religion and nihilism, the underlying rationale has similarities to notions that are adopted within RA - the importance of openenedness and pushing at the closures of the ‘essential’ (or Art proper).
However, as Claire Bishop points out, there are a few problems that can occur as a result of openenedness and a generalized aesthetics. Often RA interventions, or what Bishop terms an “experience economy”, tread the line of being almost indiscernible from a purely market or entertainment based practice. Thus causing what may be thought of as an obliteration of the potential of art and/or a reinscription of "being into having’’. This critique of the ambiguous nature of RA work needs to be acknowledged, yet it should not cause a fault in the overall motivation. A weariness of these problems can, as a sceptical eye in any discipline can, lead to a greater understanding of the premises of art and incite a more productive, energetic and critical potential.
Furthermore doesn’t Guy Debord say, in The Society of the Spectacle, that “the spectacle is the chief product of present-day society..... a faithful mirror held up to the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers” (p.16)?
On a similar vein to Debord’s idea that the world is mere appearance and that as ‘being in itself’ it is unaviodable, Moses Herzog in Saul Bellows’ Herzog refers to himself as “a prisoner of perception, a compulsory wittness” to a world rich in detail and riddles.
Finally, in response to the question of who created who? the chicken or the egg..
Autopoeisis - ‘“auto self creation”, coined as a system description for the nature of living things by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varel.
Autopoesis is the transforming and degenerating matrix of production of components that are perpetually regenerating and registering the processes that produce them.
Art/Culture is both a reflection and production of society.
In The Will to Power (p.453) F. Nietzsche states, “Art is worth more than truth” because it is ‘the only superior counterforce to all will to denial of life’’. Given that he was relating the ‘denial of life’ to that of religion and nihilism, the underlying rationale has similarities to notions that are adopted within RA - the importance of openenedness and pushing at the closures of the ‘essential’ (or Art proper).
However, as Claire Bishop points out, there are a few problems that can occur as a result of openenedness and a generalized aesthetics. Often RA interventions, or what Bishop terms an “experience economy”, tread the line of being almost indiscernible from a purely market or entertainment based practice. Thus causing what may be thought of as an obliteration of the potential of art and/or a reinscription of "being into having’’. This critique of the ambiguous nature of RA work needs to be acknowledged, yet it should not cause a fault in the overall motivation. A weariness of these problems can, as a sceptical eye in any discipline can, lead to a greater understanding of the premises of art and incite a more productive, energetic and critical potential.
Furthermore doesn’t Guy Debord say, in The Society of the Spectacle, that “the spectacle is the chief product of present-day society..... a faithful mirror held up to the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers” (p.16)?
On a similar vein to Debord’s idea that the world is mere appearance and that as ‘being in itself’ it is unaviodable, Moses Herzog in Saul Bellows’ Herzog refers to himself as “a prisoner of perception, a compulsory wittness” to a world rich in detail and riddles.
Finally, in response to the question of who created who? the chicken or the egg..
Autopoeisis - ‘“auto self creation”, coined as a system description for the nature of living things by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varel.
Autopoesis is the transforming and degenerating matrix of production of components that are perpetually regenerating and registering the processes that produce them.
Art/Culture is both a reflection and production of society.
As a side note; i am in no way trying to elevate art to a some super status. When F.N says 'truth' it is meant in an entirely moral sense (the principles of right and wrong in human behavior) and has a human construct.
"Power, Tragedy and Affirmation –
ReplyDeleteTo consider existence from the viewpoint of perspectivism is to discover will to power at the heart of every concept, image and condition of life. This view enables us to abjure the vulgar impression of will to power as merely a psychological expression of violent domination; it appears instead as a vision of the emergence of states of being and forms of truth. The coupling of 'being' and 'truth' is not arbitrary: Nietzsche consistently links will to power to what he calls the 'will to truth' in order to underline his contention that 'truth' describes the reinterpretation and creative ordering of the world rather than the discovery of a series of 'natural' facts. 'Truth', Nietzsche reminds us in The Will To Power, is 'not something there, that might be found or discovered – but something that must be created and that gives a name to a process, or rather to a will to overcome that has in itself no end' (1968:298). Truth, in fact, is 'a word for the will to power'. The more powerful a force of life becomes, the greater its capacity to impose the 'truth' of its vision of existence upon the world (p.299). What Nietzsche calls a 'value', does not correspond to an objective or absolute truth: it represents the 'highest quantum of power' that a being can incorporate before it is transformed into something else (p.380). Values, in this sense, always have a reactive dimension because they are ways of preserving a condition of life. The metaphysical belief in truth is fundamental to the consolidation of values because 'truth' consists in the transformation of 'quantities' of force into moral and ethical 'qualities'. The simplest way for a conditional value to become authoritative, after all, is for it to repress the history of its emergence and present itself as a 'quality' of 'man' and a timeless truth." (Lee Spinks, Friedrich Nietzsche, 2003. p.144-5)
I can see the validity and relative link with Nietzsche's conception of the will to power or so called will to truth in relation to Borriaud's proposal of the term 'Relational Aesthetics' too. I see this kind of Nietzschean 'truth' (or maybe it's a foil) aspect very much in the artist Pierre Huyghe's work with his representations of intersecting subjective perspectives, play on forms that lead to 'scenario' constructs of 'potentiality/of possibility'. George Baker's 'Interview with Pierre Huyghe', and also Tom McDonough 'No Ghost' critical essay both in October 110 are complex yet revealing and worthwhile reads on Huyghe and his discourse.