some questions for the gardeners

·      What are their aims?

·      How will they gauge the success of this experiment?

·      Is it more relational? (it is done within an institution, with no implications unto the community existing outside of this microtopia?)

·      How will they orchestrate participatory involvement?

·      Are they to take a back seat and pass on authorship to the participants who will tend the garden, or will they involve themselves in a collaborative dialogue with ‘the SCA community and beyond’? The outcome of which may in some way change the make up of the institution.

I want to highlight these questions before we engage with Lucas Ihlein and Diego Bonetto in the talk, so that we can engage with them and determine for ourselves, what kind of project this is, and what implications it will have for  the student community at SCA.

Grant Kester, in his book ‘Conversation Pieces’ outlines elements of evaluation for participatory/community art projects. These basically throw out a series of questions, some of which I’ve pointed out above.

An important element is that of change. Kester studies community art projects and evaluates them in regards to how participants/audiences are changed as a result of them. This can be from an observers point of view, as our outlooks are challenged and maybe changed. Or it can be the change of the artist or specific community that has been worked with. This is just one element, and one which I find fascinating. IN terms of this garden project, I would like to know what kinds of changes will happen as a result of it.

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'.

Histrionics

Before I introduce an Australian concept group, I would like to quote a couple of lines from the video that Matty posted on Laibach this week:

‘To truly subvert the system you must take the system more seriously than it takes itself’

A key Laibach strategy – brings to light hidden transgressions of the system.

The histrionics are an art rock covers group based in Melbourne, and fronted by Danius Kesminas. They are represented in Sydney by Darren Knight gallery. From their myspace:

The Histrionics are a “Concept-Art-(Heritage)-Rock-Cover-Band”.

The central premise of The Histrionics’ project is the synthesis of the attributes of rock music culture with the concerns of visual art discourse. Rock/pop classics are re-interpreted by means of novel lyrics that re-contextualise each song within the history, discourse, theory and controversy surrounding the visual art-world.

Where as Laibach seem to solely reference music, slightly or overtly altering in their own versions, the Histronics use pub rock songs as a basis to change the lyrics completely to recontextualise the song into one that explores themes within the visual arts.

The Histronics attempt to transgress – or in other words, go beyond the bounds of established behavior within both the music and visual arts realm in order to make their point.  

Histionics myspace 

Another great read by Kester

Lessons in Futility: Francis Alys and the Legacy of May '68

Grant Kester

Third Text, Volume 23 Issue 4 July 2009 , pages 407 - 420

I just read an article that I think is relevant to the concepts we have learnt so far in this course. Kester wrote the book Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art in which the introduction was last weeks reading covering dialogical art and the WochenKlauser collective.

It outlines writings by Jean Luc Nancy and his idea of human labour as aggressive, Claire Bishop (a good revision of her article in October Magazine) and then a detailed explanation of Aly’s work ‘When Faith Moves Mountains. Specifically, Kester discusses the artists intent and the experience of the volunteers involved.

What also is fascinating is an explanation of why the May 68 revolutions failed – with an explanation first of Schillers Letters on the aesthetic education of man. Schiller wrote that man was incapable of self-governing and that what was required was an encounter with an autonomous work of art – where the viewer could retreat from life into the ‘protected enclave of the canvas’. (Add a bit of Greenbergian critique here too). 

May 68’s attempts to challenge entrenched power only ended up inadvertently reproducing it (Peter Starr). The ‘Third Way’ is also explained – ‘a new form of oppositional intelligence that would abjure the mechanisms of the state, the party or the union, assuming an entirely new counter-institutional form’. This form would not risk the inevitable compromise that would result from direct involvement with the mechanisms of social or political change. 

This third way is via the arts and literature. Here some of Barthes is explained too.

It’s a really great read so I’ll copy the link below. The article is downloadable as a PDF.

THE ARTICLE

'Problems and transformations in critical art'

Jaques Ranciere
Problems and transformations in critical art, 2004.

Ranciere writes about the problems of didactical critical art as well as the ‘spectacularisation’ of relational art that seeks to repair the social bond.
He says that the mixture of high art with popular culture is indebted to surrealist collage. Newspaper cut outs and cloth where used to mix the strangeness of aesthetic experience with the becoming-life of art with the becoming-art of ordinary life. Collage reveals one world hidden beneath another: capitalist violence behind the happiness of consumption, market interests and violent class struggle behind the apparent serenity of art. An example is Krzysztof Wodiczko’s projections of homeless people onto American monuments (denouncing the expulsion of the poor from public space).
In the society of the spectacle Debord says that the ‘spectacle’ is the way in which the state maintains its control over us. The Situationist International (S.I) began as an avant-gardist art collective, but eventually Debord realised that to revolutionise life, an art practice had to be abandoned as ‘art is removed from life’ so the SI turned into a political agitation troop who had an important role in the May 1968 uprisings.
Ranciere writes that if art products do not cease to cross into the domain of commodities, then commodities and functional goods do not stop crossing the border in the other direction. So all objects are available to art and for subversion.
This crossing of borders constitutes a ‘third way’ of micropolitics of art – between the opposed models of art becoming life and art as resistant form. This process underpins performances of critical art and helps us to understand its contemporary transformations & ambiguities.
Ranciere finishes the paper by offering a reason why relational and critical art has come about - due to a shrinking 'public space' and an effacement of political inventiveness in a time of consensus. This has given a substitutive political function to the mini-demonstrations of artists.

Debord film.

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectace Pt.1

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle Pt.2

Society of the Spectacle is a 1973 film by Situationist Guy Debord based on his 1967 book of the same title, using detourned images accompanied by his own voice-over and quotations from Hegel, Marx, and others.

relational art - outside of criticism?

Relational art – outside of criticism?

The Social turn: collaboration and its discontents.

Claire Bishop, Art Forum, NY Feb 2006 Vol 44 Issue 6 pg 178

The article begins by describing the ‘stand off’ between nonbelievers (aesthetes who reject relational art as marginal, misguided, lacking artistic interest) and the believers (activists who reject aesthetic questions as synonymous with cultural hierarchy and the market).

Bishop says the former condemns us to a world of irrelevant painting and sculpture, & the latter have a tendancy to self-marginalise to the point of inadvertently re-inforcing arts autonomy, preventing productive rapprochements between art & life.

Bishop asks: Is there a ground on which the 2 sides can meet?

She also discusses criteria to critically assess this type of art. Here are her criteria:

-an ethical turn in art criticism

- attention to how a collaboration is undertaken

- artists are judged by their working process to assess whether they supply good or bad models of collaboration

- they are criticised for any hints of exploitation which fails to fully ‘represent’ the subject

-process over product approach

An example: Oda Projesi (3 women artists from Turkey) “exchange not change” – a typical relational practise of workshops and activities. They consider aesthetic ‘a dangerous word’ not to be brought into discussion.

The Swedish curator Maria Lind calls them better artists because of the equal status they give their collaborators. Lind’s criteria for assessment is ‘authorial renounciation’ – they are judged on the artists relationship with the collaborators.

Hence authorial intentionality is privelaged over a discussion of the works conceptual significance as a social and aesthetic form. Since they are praised for authorial renounciation they are largely exempt from art criticism as responsibility is shifted away from the author onto the viewer/reader/participant.

Biship finishes by stating that the best collaborative practises address the contradictory pull between autonomy and social intervention and reflect on this autonomy in the structure of the work and in the conditions of its reception.

Umberto Eco 'The Poetics of the open work' 1962

Umberto Eco
The Poetics of the open work 1962
‘A number of recent pieces of instrumental music are linked by a common feature: the considerable autonomy left to the individual performer in the way he chooses to play the work. Thus, he is not merely free to interpret the composers instructions following his own discretion (which in fact happens in traditional music), but he must impose his judgement on the form of the piece, as when he decides how long to hold a not or in what order to group the sounds: all this amounts to an act of improvised creation.’ (pp20 Participaton. Bishop, 2006)
Eco was a theorist of reader response theory and he wrote about the notion of the ‘open work’. This is the open ended nature of modern music – as well as art and literature.
I think her book ‘Participation’ is a relevant book to be reading alongside our other texts for social relations and critical spaces. In her chapter on Echo, Bishop’s writing expands from the realm of the visual arts to explain how participatory practice developed during modernism amongst other fields of practise (in this case music).
The musician interpreting the composers instructions is the same as the viewer participating in the work of a contemporary visual artist. Similar problems could emerge as in Bishops other article and its responses by Liam Gillick – as in the case of Tiravanija’s work at one instance only the art crowd where participating. The musical ‘open work’ once again could only include participation from a person trained in music to be able to play the instrument and attempt the piece in the first place.

Example of relational practice and a video.

Firstly, as a response to Luke Calarco’s post – esp where he states:

“…now I guess if people were making these kinds of works they would need another element. I'm not actually sure if anyone is making these kinds of works these days, but I hope not.”

From what I gather in the first section , Participation and Transivity, relational aesthetics can be used as a framework in which to read artworks. Many works might be defined as relational. There are heaps of works which study relations external to those within the art world. A recent example that comes to mind is the ‘Snail Piece’ presented last weekend by the Wollongong collective Appelspiel for Underbelly Festival. Their work relied on relationships which evolved during audience members for the piece – that determined its ending. The full work is on the Appelspiel blog. 

The work is relational because explores subjective relations between positions – in this case it got stuck on positions of ethics and animal cruelty (you had to decide whether the artist should smash a snail with a brick).

I also think its hard to imagine a contemporary work which doesn’t acknowledge/exploit/parody a tradition. That’s the nature of contemporary work.

Ok, if you want to be super nerdy – here a half hour video that critic Ben Lewis makes where he tries to find out if relational art is an ‘ism’. It’s a nice little introduction to the topic and he interviews relational artists such as Rirkrit Tiravanija. It helped me understand the terms introduced in the reader.

Art Safari - Relational Art: Is It An Ism?

Here's another one for nerds! You can buy the book here for about $25 including postage.