Relational vs dialogical practice:

PAPASTERGIADIS's aricle, whilst doesn't mention the writing of Kester, did remind me of some topics outlined in his book, 'Conversation pieces' where he differenciates Bourriaud's relational practice from dialogical practice...

·      Bourriaud’s relational projects remain essentially choreographed or staged; they still operate within what Kester terms a ‘textual’ register, in which the work of art, whether it’s an object, a space, or an event, is programmed ahead of time and then set in place before the viewer.

·      Kesters dialogical art involves a more open-ended form of participatory interaction, drawn out over extended periods of time. These frequently use the workshop to frame creative labour, or they involve the tacitical mobilistion of craft traditions.

·      Dialogical aesthetics explicitly address the ethical relationship between the artist and his or her collaborators.

·     His evaluative model for these practices involves research at the interstices (small intervening spaces) of the aesthetic, the ethical and the tactical (actions carefully planned to gain a specific end)

·      Bourriaud tries to create a conventional avant-garde genealogy (a line of descent traced continuously from an ancestor). He overlooks traditions of activist and community based practise.

·      If the artist under industrial production had the job of creating complex or well constructed objects as an antidote to mass-produced dreck, then the post-industrial artist must now create alternative models of sociality to challenge the instrumentalizing of human social interaction in a post-industrial system. (Kester)

·      The recent proliferation of collaborative practises marks a cyclical shift within the field of art, even as the nature of this shift involves a re-articulation of aesthetic autonomy and an increasing permeability between art and other zones of symbolic production (architecture, ethnography, environmental activism, radical social work etc).  Aesthetic autonomy is being recoded or renegotiated in these projects.

·      Collaborative work questions the implied linkage of aggression and creativity (agonistic democracy).

  This is outlined in detail in the chapter 'dialogical aesthetics' within the book 'Conversation pieces'.