Writing
Degree show
When speaking about my degree piece, I look at it in the way of experience, where the viewer has the control to touch and delve into the land of sensory experience, I am taking that last sensation away- the experience of not experiencing.
Architecture is sexy, the sensory experience is erotic, the erotica of space, spatial plane and use of fabric, all compelling the viewer to experience and become apart of the visual imagery.
Visual Language, experience and excess
Everything is nostalgic and everything is modern and the way that art is curated presents a visual language to the viewer and spectators who involve and participate in the understanding and reading of the narrative. The framing and internal structure creates a symphony of speech without saying a physical sound, there are visual syllables that whisper meanings and exaggerated and conceptual pardons.
The development of curation reveals your personality of the artist, it is the quality of the affection that carves a shape in the mind, how that piece of artwork is curated and presented is the overall spectacle it creates, it is a visual excess, the rococo, the situation. The objective of the image combined with the setting and scene, design and set up and the layout all emphasises the context of the subjectivity of that artwork.
For example the way that artists Judd and Koons situate their work speaks a language of visual excess.
The development of curation reveals your personality of the artist, it is the quality of the affection that carves a shape in the mind, how that piece of artwork is curated and presented is the overall spectacle it creates, it is a visual excess, the rococo, the situation. The objective of the image combined with the setting and scene, design and set up and the layout all emphasises the context of the subjectivity of that artwork.
For example the way that artists Judd and Koons situate their work speaks a language of visual excess.
The situation of artworks - eg. Judd and his mirrors, Koons and his sexual confidence and outlandish compositions that both artists, situate and succeed.
Theorists in discussion: Roland Barthes and Antonio Negri
This shift from artists as being the sole factor to the meaning of an artwork has changed, the audience brings their own interpretation to the artwork. Theoretically articulated challenges to conformist ideas of individual authorship and identity heavy pieces within the practices of artists have dispersed and the revolution of spectatorship and intervention have succeeded. This prompts the question of authorship in relational art, are these artists creating these platforms for the audience to dance on, or are they simply curators allowing the magic of participation and choice become the never planned or articulated movements that form the social bonds and produce the end piece of artwork?
Barthes famously stated that the ‘author was dead and the reader had been born’. However this declaration that the author was dead doesn’t just imply that the reader had a greater influence over the meaning of a particular text or artwork. If you look at this with the operation that the modernist avant-garde set out, you can see that a form of social organisation or notion of authority can no longer be enforced on passive subjects; it is something that is created amongst a collaborative menu. The meta-modern author or artist, who develops within culture and philosophy, stepping through modernism and postmodernism, politics and aesthetics, authority and authorship is creating a space to question and provoke.
Political philosopher Antonio Negri said that contemporary artists are obliged to challenge a new set of questions about our current political and social climate. “How can the human being be entirely re-thought?” He asks. And as I spoke about before, we are gifted with the senses, we have our formal principles of human interaction, and our social psychology can be affected by how we communicate with one another. The artistic toil belongs to the sphere of bio-political production; this is the production of ideas, codes, images, affects and social relationships that looks at the essential elements of human subjectivity. Negri argues that subjectivity is established by our forms of contact and communication with others, so art can reconfigure the notion of the human being by embracing the values and devices of participation and collaboration, therefore his question shows the desired shift of artistic processes from the primarily material or visual to the social and relational.
In parallel to this, these artistic projects that deal with the sphere of human relations often suffer from the naivety and assume that interaction and participation automatically result in valued and equal human social relationships. Claire Bishop challenges this, and stipulates that the most rational question to ask is what ‘types’ of relations are being produced, for who and why? Negri states that
“the only artistic values which matter are those which anticipate the becoming the multitude- in its crises as much as in its advancement, in the conflict of singularities as much as in their happy arrangement within what is common”.
This can be described as a form of the social that recognises and accepts differences yet realises that all subjectivities are embedded in a common human sphere, giving emphasise to the importance of becoming over being, process over product and common freedom over private control, as bio-political producers artists have the task to try and explore this through their practices. These artistic projects are made to create post-biological relations that contribute towards the constitution of the communal and doing this, amplifying the possibility of creating an alternative society. The artists who design these collaborative networks are part of the authorship of the work but they are not the primary author; they enable the inter-subjective relationships between the participants, which form the central artistic content of the work. The authorship is circulated amongst everyone who participates in the creation of a social network and helped to create this new terrain of the common. The new subjective relations that arise from these artistic networks convert individual subjectivities and forms of communication. Negri explicates that, “only with our own transformation…can the practice of the multitude begin”. This new formation is like a creation of a new humanity and that is the ultimate act of political love loosing hierarchies, divisions and limits, artists in a sense can provide the foundation for the multitude and the communal to sustain an alternative political democracy. These artists are trying to work out how the human being can be re-thought; an exploration that seems to represent, not a post-humanism, but a re-humanism and this movement in which human selves are transformed through an upward spiral of collaboration and communication.
Barthes famously stated that the ‘author was dead and the reader had been born’. However this declaration that the author was dead doesn’t just imply that the reader had a greater influence over the meaning of a particular text or artwork. If you look at this with the operation that the modernist avant-garde set out, you can see that a form of social organisation or notion of authority can no longer be enforced on passive subjects; it is something that is created amongst a collaborative menu. The meta-modern author or artist, who develops within culture and philosophy, stepping through modernism and postmodernism, politics and aesthetics, authority and authorship is creating a space to question and provoke.
Political philosopher Antonio Negri said that contemporary artists are obliged to challenge a new set of questions about our current political and social climate. “How can the human being be entirely re-thought?” He asks. And as I spoke about before, we are gifted with the senses, we have our formal principles of human interaction, and our social psychology can be affected by how we communicate with one another. The artistic toil belongs to the sphere of bio-political production; this is the production of ideas, codes, images, affects and social relationships that looks at the essential elements of human subjectivity. Negri argues that subjectivity is established by our forms of contact and communication with others, so art can reconfigure the notion of the human being by embracing the values and devices of participation and collaboration, therefore his question shows the desired shift of artistic processes from the primarily material or visual to the social and relational.
In parallel to this, these artistic projects that deal with the sphere of human relations often suffer from the naivety and assume that interaction and participation automatically result in valued and equal human social relationships. Claire Bishop challenges this, and stipulates that the most rational question to ask is what ‘types’ of relations are being produced, for who and why? Negri states that
“the only artistic values which matter are those which anticipate the becoming the multitude- in its crises as much as in its advancement, in the conflict of singularities as much as in their happy arrangement within what is common”.
This can be described as a form of the social that recognises and accepts differences yet realises that all subjectivities are embedded in a common human sphere, giving emphasise to the importance of becoming over being, process over product and common freedom over private control, as bio-political producers artists have the task to try and explore this through their practices. These artistic projects are made to create post-biological relations that contribute towards the constitution of the communal and doing this, amplifying the possibility of creating an alternative society. The artists who design these collaborative networks are part of the authorship of the work but they are not the primary author; they enable the inter-subjective relationships between the participants, which form the central artistic content of the work. The authorship is circulated amongst everyone who participates in the creation of a social network and helped to create this new terrain of the common. The new subjective relations that arise from these artistic networks convert individual subjectivities and forms of communication. Negri explicates that, “only with our own transformation…can the practice of the multitude begin”. This new formation is like a creation of a new humanity and that is the ultimate act of political love loosing hierarchies, divisions and limits, artists in a sense can provide the foundation for the multitude and the communal to sustain an alternative political democracy. These artists are trying to work out how the human being can be re-thought; an exploration that seems to represent, not a post-humanism, but a re-humanism and this movement in which human selves are transformed through an upward spiral of collaboration and communication.
Artists in discussion: Rirkrit Tiravanija
This acknowledgment of the audience and their participation is something that artist Rirkrit Tiravanija plays on with his experimental and relational cooking pieces. He exploits the traditional gallery setting by turning it into a pop-up kitchen, he is contemporary and his practice loops the notion of cooking up an artistic experience. His installations appear in the form of stages or rooms, sharing meals, cooking and reading or playing music, they are congregations of living and socialising and these components are the fundamental basic structures throughout his work.
Tirvanija’s work is about bringing people together and the art of it, he is dwindling traditional art objects but using the fundamentals that are already there. His practice is interaction based and revolves around the notion of the exchange as the artwork is a visual account of everyday life. His work explores the role of the artist and is a direct evocative of the concept of relational aesthetics. Tiravanija has affiliated his artistic creation with an ethic of the social arrangement, inviting viewers to live and initiate his work. As an artist he ignored the given division between art and life, constructing communal settings that offer playful alternate venues for everyday activities and too offering a utilitarian quality. He invites the audience to take part in his work and this unremitting ability to physically engage is what gave him an international reputation. The worth of encouraging social interactions between people through art or food, underlines the central pull of his ideas.
Relational aesthetics best describes his methods, the term that refers to human relations and their social context, rather than the private space. You get the sense of an ideal that exceeds the rationalism and boundaries of art institutions through the individual experience of the communal. In the art world, he quizzes the conventional spatial appreciation and challenges the idea of possession and greed; one reason he cooks and offers food to people is to attempt fade this greed and selfishness’s that are so characteristic and prominent amongst us, allowing the audience to recognise that the simplicity of sharing gives warmth and a communal wealth. He considers these social constitutions and his art capitalises on relational aesthetics, targeting to dissolve the established barriers of passive gallery spaces.
The spectator’s role ceases to exist as Tirvanija’s performative art diminishes the typical limitations of spectatorship and challenges understanding through pleasures and conversation.
He said “it wasn’t so much to bring my house into the gallery but more to look at how to live with art in a sense.” These encompassing works grant the visitors to be a part of the installation, probing the public to see that what you do in the private can too be public. He has an interest in the social role of art and sets out to bring people from different backgrounds and cultures together.
”I am interested in making a condition or situation where people have to come and stand next to each other and look at something and deal with each other. I think it is quite important in the work, for me, that people participate in it or take action in it or are in it. Of course, there is harmony and there is chaos, and that is very true in an existence in the social structure.”
The way that he cooks up this experience is the way that our eyes feast on artwork, everything is an experience in itself and art is an experience that engulfs us as the spectators. It is sound and visuals, metaphorical and physically obtained through the concept of the gaze; a feast for the eyes, an entrée and main course. The way we recognise an image or in this case experience the live action of eating and become part of an installation is us understanding and accepting as we physically digest it. You take the time to soak up the information as the narrative within runs parallel to a play breaking the fourth wall of interaction. Relational artists craft works that are so densely woven with narrative and characters it is like pulling a thread from a jumper that unravels slowly and that is the spectator reading and understanding the meaning and perplexities of it, it is us consuming a banquet for the eyes and too for the mind. Cooking performances which Tiravanija has done for more than ten years in galleries and museums globally, are open to attracted viewers, art world workers, total strangers, and friends, and certainly generate experiences. But in a more important way his work reframes the experience of art, it is no longer suggested as a solitary, pensive relationship between an object and a viewer, but as a state in which audience participants are reminded that they are social beings coming into completion only in relation with one another. So in that sense the work is definitely characteristic of the aspects of interpersonal connectivity, which as stated, Bourriaud coined relational aesthetics.
As good as the ethics of his artwork may get, it always has the one spectator who chooses to rebel. In one of Tirvanija’s earlier cooking works he had all his ingredients laid out ready to cook and this one spectator grabbed the eggs and started to toss and smash them against the walls of the gallery. This nonchalant act of dis-authority was obviously meant to disrupt and ruin the stage Tirvanija had set, however he did not react to the man disrupting and he eventually stopped and left. This temporary act of defiance goes back to the question in hand of the good audience. The spectator is choosing to defy, and as relational art does not set boundaries there is no immediate challenging to commence, the audience can act in response however they desire. Of course there are basic levels of politeness that obtains from chucking the artists ingredients but it does add an air of excitement! The politics of his art, is to display the splendour of the commune and share experience without the material goods that are so often found in art, as said before, art was made for the wealthy so this modernist work of relational aesthetics is stripping back the value and blue chip commodities. So in a way, the act of defiance, could be interpreted as a spectator choosing to rebel like a capitalist merchant saying no, continue to gloat and study greed, but then slowly realising the smaller meaning underlying the project and then going on to achieve acceptance.
Tirvanija’s work does fall to critique however from theorist Claire Bishop. Bishop has an opposing view to relational aesthetics in her book ‘Artificial Hells’, speaking of participatory art and the politics of spectatorship she says,
“One could argue that this context project based works-in-progress and artists in residence begin to dovetail with an ‘experience economy’- the marketing strategy that seeks to replace goods and services with scripted and staged personal experience”.
It can be argued that as relational art revolves around dialogical exchanges and littoral art as a discursive aesthetic, where the artist primarily acts as a collaborator in dialogue rather than an expressive agent, the role the artist is altered and changed. So the significance lies on the reaction, not the formal integrity of a given artefact so the artists experience in producing it. Is it lazy? Bishop criticises Tirvanija by saying the work is benefiting from the “ubiquitous presence on the international art scene, and collapses into compensatory self-congratulatory entertainment.” however Tirvanija offers an experience of a structure where he prepares food, he isn’t doing a performance he is using the performance format.
His goal is to question these limits of art using forms that served to interrogate, so you cannot solely judge his work on the artwork but the social effect of it, and how can that be measured? You could even argue that everything in art has been done, but then art is about making a use for all existing modes for representational and all formal structures: it is a matter of seizing all codes of culture, all forms of everyday life and making them function. The value of the everyday is one that is well established, from Deluzian theories that opened the eyes of the spectator to how everything can be viewed in an alternative way. Like this, in abstraction, it is teaching us to perceive differently and not conceive the first understanding of an image. Tirvanija often cites Ludwig Wittgenstein's phrase: "Don't look for the meaning, look for the use." The contemporary work of art does not position itself at the front of the creative process, but as a source of navigation, a generator of activities. In this new form of culture, which is a culture of use and a culture of activity, the artwork is functioning as the temporary source for a network of interconnected elements, like a chain or a narrative that spreads and reinterprets past narratives within it.
Tirvanija’s work is about bringing people together and the art of it, he is dwindling traditional art objects but using the fundamentals that are already there. His practice is interaction based and revolves around the notion of the exchange as the artwork is a visual account of everyday life. His work explores the role of the artist and is a direct evocative of the concept of relational aesthetics. Tiravanija has affiliated his artistic creation with an ethic of the social arrangement, inviting viewers to live and initiate his work. As an artist he ignored the given division between art and life, constructing communal settings that offer playful alternate venues for everyday activities and too offering a utilitarian quality. He invites the audience to take part in his work and this unremitting ability to physically engage is what gave him an international reputation. The worth of encouraging social interactions between people through art or food, underlines the central pull of his ideas.
Relational aesthetics best describes his methods, the term that refers to human relations and their social context, rather than the private space. You get the sense of an ideal that exceeds the rationalism and boundaries of art institutions through the individual experience of the communal. In the art world, he quizzes the conventional spatial appreciation and challenges the idea of possession and greed; one reason he cooks and offers food to people is to attempt fade this greed and selfishness’s that are so characteristic and prominent amongst us, allowing the audience to recognise that the simplicity of sharing gives warmth and a communal wealth. He considers these social constitutions and his art capitalises on relational aesthetics, targeting to dissolve the established barriers of passive gallery spaces.
The spectator’s role ceases to exist as Tirvanija’s performative art diminishes the typical limitations of spectatorship and challenges understanding through pleasures and conversation.
He said “it wasn’t so much to bring my house into the gallery but more to look at how to live with art in a sense.” These encompassing works grant the visitors to be a part of the installation, probing the public to see that what you do in the private can too be public. He has an interest in the social role of art and sets out to bring people from different backgrounds and cultures together.
”I am interested in making a condition or situation where people have to come and stand next to each other and look at something and deal with each other. I think it is quite important in the work, for me, that people participate in it or take action in it or are in it. Of course, there is harmony and there is chaos, and that is very true in an existence in the social structure.”
The way that he cooks up this experience is the way that our eyes feast on artwork, everything is an experience in itself and art is an experience that engulfs us as the spectators. It is sound and visuals, metaphorical and physically obtained through the concept of the gaze; a feast for the eyes, an entrée and main course. The way we recognise an image or in this case experience the live action of eating and become part of an installation is us understanding and accepting as we physically digest it. You take the time to soak up the information as the narrative within runs parallel to a play breaking the fourth wall of interaction. Relational artists craft works that are so densely woven with narrative and characters it is like pulling a thread from a jumper that unravels slowly and that is the spectator reading and understanding the meaning and perplexities of it, it is us consuming a banquet for the eyes and too for the mind. Cooking performances which Tiravanija has done for more than ten years in galleries and museums globally, are open to attracted viewers, art world workers, total strangers, and friends, and certainly generate experiences. But in a more important way his work reframes the experience of art, it is no longer suggested as a solitary, pensive relationship between an object and a viewer, but as a state in which audience participants are reminded that they are social beings coming into completion only in relation with one another. So in that sense the work is definitely characteristic of the aspects of interpersonal connectivity, which as stated, Bourriaud coined relational aesthetics.
As good as the ethics of his artwork may get, it always has the one spectator who chooses to rebel. In one of Tirvanija’s earlier cooking works he had all his ingredients laid out ready to cook and this one spectator grabbed the eggs and started to toss and smash them against the walls of the gallery. This nonchalant act of dis-authority was obviously meant to disrupt and ruin the stage Tirvanija had set, however he did not react to the man disrupting and he eventually stopped and left. This temporary act of defiance goes back to the question in hand of the good audience. The spectator is choosing to defy, and as relational art does not set boundaries there is no immediate challenging to commence, the audience can act in response however they desire. Of course there are basic levels of politeness that obtains from chucking the artists ingredients but it does add an air of excitement! The politics of his art, is to display the splendour of the commune and share experience without the material goods that are so often found in art, as said before, art was made for the wealthy so this modernist work of relational aesthetics is stripping back the value and blue chip commodities. So in a way, the act of defiance, could be interpreted as a spectator choosing to rebel like a capitalist merchant saying no, continue to gloat and study greed, but then slowly realising the smaller meaning underlying the project and then going on to achieve acceptance.
Tirvanija’s work does fall to critique however from theorist Claire Bishop. Bishop has an opposing view to relational aesthetics in her book ‘Artificial Hells’, speaking of participatory art and the politics of spectatorship she says,
“One could argue that this context project based works-in-progress and artists in residence begin to dovetail with an ‘experience economy’- the marketing strategy that seeks to replace goods and services with scripted and staged personal experience”.
It can be argued that as relational art revolves around dialogical exchanges and littoral art as a discursive aesthetic, where the artist primarily acts as a collaborator in dialogue rather than an expressive agent, the role the artist is altered and changed. So the significance lies on the reaction, not the formal integrity of a given artefact so the artists experience in producing it. Is it lazy? Bishop criticises Tirvanija by saying the work is benefiting from the “ubiquitous presence on the international art scene, and collapses into compensatory self-congratulatory entertainment.” however Tirvanija offers an experience of a structure where he prepares food, he isn’t doing a performance he is using the performance format.
His goal is to question these limits of art using forms that served to interrogate, so you cannot solely judge his work on the artwork but the social effect of it, and how can that be measured? You could even argue that everything in art has been done, but then art is about making a use for all existing modes for representational and all formal structures: it is a matter of seizing all codes of culture, all forms of everyday life and making them function. The value of the everyday is one that is well established, from Deluzian theories that opened the eyes of the spectator to how everything can be viewed in an alternative way. Like this, in abstraction, it is teaching us to perceive differently and not conceive the first understanding of an image. Tirvanija often cites Ludwig Wittgenstein's phrase: "Don't look for the meaning, look for the use." The contemporary work of art does not position itself at the front of the creative process, but as a source of navigation, a generator of activities. In this new form of culture, which is a culture of use and a culture of activity, the artwork is functioning as the temporary source for a network of interconnected elements, like a chain or a narrative that spreads and reinterprets past narratives within it.
Harmonising relational aesthetics and our sense of social psychology
To begin to understand relational aesthetics is to understand the value of sociability and communication. Relational art offers experiences rather than objects to be look upon and exhausted, the object is no longer materially or conceptually identified, but relationally. Bourriaud says “what is produced are connections with the world broadcast by object” meaning relational art is to be embodied collectively rather in the space of the individual and is constrained to the contingences of its environment and audience. It isn’t about the physical artwork in front of you anymore, it is about how you interact with it forming social bonds and relationships.
It is these relationships and bonds that challenge our social psychology and human makeup, our individual and subjective minds. As people we are gifted with the formal principles of human interaction, curiosity of which outplays most and it is our curiosity that intrigues us to interact, especially when approached with a more creative outlet. Our social psychology can be effected when we associate with one another, how we indulge one another in groups and end up influencing each other’s actions and attitudes. These elements, along with how people submit to direction, assume powerful roles and affect group decision making, all of which occur in relational art. The variable scenarios of communitive activities are all dependant on the audience and their emotional and social status. Social psychology is something that uses scientific and logical methods to recognize and explain how the thought, feeling and behaviour of individuals are swayed by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others or in this case in the curated presences formed by an artist. This social state of mind is being put into a mediated space and this crafted reality that is imitating a conventional everyday stage is creating a physical encounter and that encounter is what in turn, creates the art. It is that mystical perceptive moment when you connect with an object or space or undergo a physical activity and in turn are too becoming a part of the spectacle.
Relational art addresses a new sense of connection between artist and audience. It refers to an artwork that is open-ended, interactive and resistant to closure. Taking place in time and space and creating interactive expansive experiences and intersubjective meetings, where the meaning is then illustrated as a collective retort. In one way, relational art is nothing more than a scientific and moralistic experiment as the artist is formulating how an audience will react to a certain type of scenario. The artist is soaking up the information of our social culture and taking the taboos and unremitting issues that surround us, such as greed, transport and other typically basic frameworks then transforming them into socially based, communitive projects. These shared experiences are the introduction to society and show the things we often overlook such as the communal experience is an art and the means of interaction. Nicolas Bourriaud speaks about new relational models that are principled responses to real social misery and hostility. He recognises that the artists are not concerned with changing the real system of social relations, such as capitalism, but that relational artists accept this existing real and experiment with the social bond within the frame given. It can be argued that these replica experiences do create a real social experiences as being a part of an involvement laces the spectator with accountable emotive skills and moral coding, not to say they created them but simply add to the momentarily forgotten. They are an extra topping, as brief as the experience may be, the spectacle and ethics of it lives on.
Bourriaud describes the way in which relational aesthetics both rejects and accepts these significant themes modernity has exerted saying, “it is not modernity that is dead, but its idealistic and teleological version”. Art was intended to speak of a future world but now, is showing possible universes of authentic human sociability. Relational art is a result of the ideological and philosophical glitches of modernity, not just a reaction to human involvement and the participation and dialogue are the doctrines combing elements and social relations. It is a performative process-based approach orbiting around the public’s involvement, relying on human relations and social context rather than the physical art object. The social interactions between the viewer and a work of art explore and too exploit the affiliation amongst viewer, object and space.
The concern with relational art is always going to be with the outcome: with no one to interrupt and correct how you are responding to the piece, how can it be completely judged or even know when the compilation is complete? The dependency of it is entirely on the audience’s reaction, so it can be questioned, can relational art not go to plan? Of course! But the artists would never let that be known as point of the artwork to induce freedom to response.
Relational art may not be in the typical category of art and it is not that experiments of sociability are not needed though to be politically relevant and effective, the experiments need to be grounded or at least actively linked to social actions and struggles. There is no social progress without debate and struggle; this for us is a basic materialist truth. Often as a gallery based affair, relational practices are cut off by a debate of who can obtain them and who are the consumers of relational art? That is one of the questions that hinders this philosophy, who is the audience and are they empowered? This question of empowerment is what leads to many critiques of the subject however relational aesthetics does encourage and promote choice. This way of working is something that has been interpreted and shown similarities to in many different ways.
It is these relationships and bonds that challenge our social psychology and human makeup, our individual and subjective minds. As people we are gifted with the formal principles of human interaction, curiosity of which outplays most and it is our curiosity that intrigues us to interact, especially when approached with a more creative outlet. Our social psychology can be effected when we associate with one another, how we indulge one another in groups and end up influencing each other’s actions and attitudes. These elements, along with how people submit to direction, assume powerful roles and affect group decision making, all of which occur in relational art. The variable scenarios of communitive activities are all dependant on the audience and their emotional and social status. Social psychology is something that uses scientific and logical methods to recognize and explain how the thought, feeling and behaviour of individuals are swayed by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others or in this case in the curated presences formed by an artist. This social state of mind is being put into a mediated space and this crafted reality that is imitating a conventional everyday stage is creating a physical encounter and that encounter is what in turn, creates the art. It is that mystical perceptive moment when you connect with an object or space or undergo a physical activity and in turn are too becoming a part of the spectacle.
Relational art addresses a new sense of connection between artist and audience. It refers to an artwork that is open-ended, interactive and resistant to closure. Taking place in time and space and creating interactive expansive experiences and intersubjective meetings, where the meaning is then illustrated as a collective retort. In one way, relational art is nothing more than a scientific and moralistic experiment as the artist is formulating how an audience will react to a certain type of scenario. The artist is soaking up the information of our social culture and taking the taboos and unremitting issues that surround us, such as greed, transport and other typically basic frameworks then transforming them into socially based, communitive projects. These shared experiences are the introduction to society and show the things we often overlook such as the communal experience is an art and the means of interaction. Nicolas Bourriaud speaks about new relational models that are principled responses to real social misery and hostility. He recognises that the artists are not concerned with changing the real system of social relations, such as capitalism, but that relational artists accept this existing real and experiment with the social bond within the frame given. It can be argued that these replica experiences do create a real social experiences as being a part of an involvement laces the spectator with accountable emotive skills and moral coding, not to say they created them but simply add to the momentarily forgotten. They are an extra topping, as brief as the experience may be, the spectacle and ethics of it lives on.
Bourriaud describes the way in which relational aesthetics both rejects and accepts these significant themes modernity has exerted saying, “it is not modernity that is dead, but its idealistic and teleological version”. Art was intended to speak of a future world but now, is showing possible universes of authentic human sociability. Relational art is a result of the ideological and philosophical glitches of modernity, not just a reaction to human involvement and the participation and dialogue are the doctrines combing elements and social relations. It is a performative process-based approach orbiting around the public’s involvement, relying on human relations and social context rather than the physical art object. The social interactions between the viewer and a work of art explore and too exploit the affiliation amongst viewer, object and space.
The concern with relational art is always going to be with the outcome: with no one to interrupt and correct how you are responding to the piece, how can it be completely judged or even know when the compilation is complete? The dependency of it is entirely on the audience’s reaction, so it can be questioned, can relational art not go to plan? Of course! But the artists would never let that be known as point of the artwork to induce freedom to response.
Relational art may not be in the typical category of art and it is not that experiments of sociability are not needed though to be politically relevant and effective, the experiments need to be grounded or at least actively linked to social actions and struggles. There is no social progress without debate and struggle; this for us is a basic materialist truth. Often as a gallery based affair, relational practices are cut off by a debate of who can obtain them and who are the consumers of relational art? That is one of the questions that hinders this philosophy, who is the audience and are they empowered? This question of empowerment is what leads to many critiques of the subject however relational aesthetics does encourage and promote choice. This way of working is something that has been interpreted and shown similarities to in many different ways.
Discussions into relational art
Relational art is a sensory experience through touch, sight and mind to which the cognitive effect it has on the viewer is nothing but mesmerizing. When you experience a different plane of visual perception or physical activity or through listening to a sound or piece of music, feeling a textural or gestural artwork or materialistically heighten piece, you are experiencing something altogether new; you are leaving yourself for a moment and become immersed into that artwork. That experience is social, it is communicative and it is the art itself. The viewer is making the work and becoming a part of it by experiencing it, it is a beautiful medium that is made accessible through artists today and through the 1990’s as the genre began to blossom. This discussion will include artists who have significance in this genre of art and a reflection to if this style of art is something atypical, whether this set of specific rules that come as a domain are really set or whether they are infact an easy continuous flow of human emotions and set realities.
Revolving around the idea of participation, the question of audience is a major factor that sits with both parties, with relational art and immersive theatre the notion of an audience is what drives and runs the spectacle. You begin to question, is a good audience an empowered one? What defines this, what are its limitations and regulations and does this suggest a particular type of politics?
Both relational art and immersive theatre delve into neo-realistic spaces that inform perceptive minds, like a video game, where this self-fashioned world is something to be explored. It is an amazing style of work and when executed right brings a whole new plane of physical interaction. Is it out with the old and in with the new, or does this sector of performative art rely too much on spectatorship? Relational aesthetics has been something transferred into many activities and with theatre being one of them the comparisons are strong, this will be dialogue between them and the subjects along the way that have contributed to the debate of relational art.
Nicolas Bourriaud and Claire Bishop are names that main names that spring to mind when discussing this topic, with Bourriaud giving name to the genre as artworks continued to immerge through the artists becoming more aware of the characteristics and potential gain of audience participation and physical interaction with imagery, sculpture and installations. With names such as such as Vanessa Beecroft, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Maurizio Cattelan and Liam Gillick who are famed for creating works that used these mannerisms, Bourriaud coined the term that would define the practice from then on. Relational art is something that takes a set of artistic practices that look at the theoretical and practical points of departure, the human relations found within along with their social context, rather than an independent and private space such as a gallery or artist’s platforms. Bourriaud saw artists as the catalysts rather than the main focus of the art and regarded art as information exchanged between the artist and the spectator. The artist becomes more like the curator and the spectator is granted power.
The politics of this authorship then can be questioned as the artist can be more truthfully viewed as this catalyst, rather than being the full reason behind the artwork. This sense of authority is what changes the typical sense of viewing and perceiving images, leaving the space for staging activities and innovative ways to create art open to interpretation and experimentation. The audience is left with the means to curate their own relationship with the work making it subjective and personal to them.
The audience in art, has always been a key aspect in any way of viewing the imagery; art was made for the wealthy to be consumed and throughout history artistic styles evolved and became more decisive, artists continued to look for the most contemporary ways for the audience to experience and find meaning in their artwork. In every major field of art, the fluxes between spectator and artist have been different, whether to engage, to shock, to protest political stances or to utilize the emotional presence of a spectator standing infront of it, art has always been a communicative force to be reckoned with. It is powerful tool that speaks every language, it is limitless and limited, it is a means to attract and to obstruct, and it is a potency that does not seem to dampen or suffer. As wealth, war, health and disease strife our economy and world countries, art seems to always survive. With developments with the industrial revolution and the technological, relational aesthetics seems to be the next logical step for the ongoing turn of modernism and modernity. As virtual reality braces our screens and eye line, participatory and interactive art is in parallel with our ever embryonic world of technological leaps.
Relational art and aesthetics links many subgenres, topics and artists and is something that I have found to be so relative and intriguing in our current social culture. With the notion of sociability and communication being the principals of this philosophy, relational art becomes a ‘tenant of culture and social interstice’. The experiences formed from these works of art is something you cannot price, although criticized, still demands attention, the value to which will always amaze and is in fact ceaseless to end. There is a continuing development of relational art happening all over today’s art scene, with technology at its peak artists are able to curate works that step away from the traditional guild of painting and sculpture, bringing forth the surge of artists that create the sense of communal.
Revolving around the idea of participation, the question of audience is a major factor that sits with both parties, with relational art and immersive theatre the notion of an audience is what drives and runs the spectacle. You begin to question, is a good audience an empowered one? What defines this, what are its limitations and regulations and does this suggest a particular type of politics?
Both relational art and immersive theatre delve into neo-realistic spaces that inform perceptive minds, like a video game, where this self-fashioned world is something to be explored. It is an amazing style of work and when executed right brings a whole new plane of physical interaction. Is it out with the old and in with the new, or does this sector of performative art rely too much on spectatorship? Relational aesthetics has been something transferred into many activities and with theatre being one of them the comparisons are strong, this will be dialogue between them and the subjects along the way that have contributed to the debate of relational art.
Nicolas Bourriaud and Claire Bishop are names that main names that spring to mind when discussing this topic, with Bourriaud giving name to the genre as artworks continued to immerge through the artists becoming more aware of the characteristics and potential gain of audience participation and physical interaction with imagery, sculpture and installations. With names such as such as Vanessa Beecroft, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Maurizio Cattelan and Liam Gillick who are famed for creating works that used these mannerisms, Bourriaud coined the term that would define the practice from then on. Relational art is something that takes a set of artistic practices that look at the theoretical and practical points of departure, the human relations found within along with their social context, rather than an independent and private space such as a gallery or artist’s platforms. Bourriaud saw artists as the catalysts rather than the main focus of the art and regarded art as information exchanged between the artist and the spectator. The artist becomes more like the curator and the spectator is granted power.
The politics of this authorship then can be questioned as the artist can be more truthfully viewed as this catalyst, rather than being the full reason behind the artwork. This sense of authority is what changes the typical sense of viewing and perceiving images, leaving the space for staging activities and innovative ways to create art open to interpretation and experimentation. The audience is left with the means to curate their own relationship with the work making it subjective and personal to them.
The audience in art, has always been a key aspect in any way of viewing the imagery; art was made for the wealthy to be consumed and throughout history artistic styles evolved and became more decisive, artists continued to look for the most contemporary ways for the audience to experience and find meaning in their artwork. In every major field of art, the fluxes between spectator and artist have been different, whether to engage, to shock, to protest political stances or to utilize the emotional presence of a spectator standing infront of it, art has always been a communicative force to be reckoned with. It is powerful tool that speaks every language, it is limitless and limited, it is a means to attract and to obstruct, and it is a potency that does not seem to dampen or suffer. As wealth, war, health and disease strife our economy and world countries, art seems to always survive. With developments with the industrial revolution and the technological, relational aesthetics seems to be the next logical step for the ongoing turn of modernism and modernity. As virtual reality braces our screens and eye line, participatory and interactive art is in parallel with our ever embryonic world of technological leaps.
Relational art and aesthetics links many subgenres, topics and artists and is something that I have found to be so relative and intriguing in our current social culture. With the notion of sociability and communication being the principals of this philosophy, relational art becomes a ‘tenant of culture and social interstice’. The experiences formed from these works of art is something you cannot price, although criticized, still demands attention, the value to which will always amaze and is in fact ceaseless to end. There is a continuing development of relational art happening all over today’s art scene, with technology at its peak artists are able to curate works that step away from the traditional guild of painting and sculpture, bringing forth the surge of artists that create the sense of communal.
Carsten Höller - Slides
CARSTEN HOLLER
Art as the curator, audience as the art
The purpose of Relational Aesthetics is to explore art that concerns itself with creating encounters or moments of sociability with non-scripted social interaction. The key with this type of art is to lay the groundwork for the audience/spectator to continue and complete, where the social interaction compelled by the artwork leaves the spectator to communicate with others and the artwork, it is like putting a box down and the audience is there to open it and experience it.
Relational art is interesting as you are almost leaving clues for the viewer to take, the interactive part of this art is imperative as it relies on the social communication between audience and the artwork; often this type of art is through installations and sculptures where the viewer is asked to join in and fully immerse themselves within the design. The work by artist Carsten Höller who famously put the slide in the Tate modern is a fantastic example of artist who play with this genre of participatory art.
His work has taken advantage of the height of the Tate and the vast museum audience, to test a hypothesis he has been investigating for some time concerning the possible effects of sliding. What would be the result of sliding if it was part of the daily routine? Can slides become part of our experiential and architectural life?
“It is a sculptural work with a pragmatic aspect” Holler said. However, it would be a mistake to think that you have to use the slide to make sense of it. Looking at the work from the outside is a different but equally valid experience, just as one might contemplate The Endless Column 1938 by Constantin Brancusi. From an architectural and practical perspective, the slides are one of the building’s means of transporting people, equivalent to the escalators, elevators or stairs. Slides deliver people quickly, safely and elegantly to their destinations, they’re inexpensive to construct and energy-efficient. They’re also a device for experiencing an emotional state that is a unique condition somewhere between delight and madness. It was described in the fifties by the French writer Roger Caillois as ‘a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’.
The Turbine Hall installation is called Test Site because it enables visitors to test the functions of differently shaped slides, mainly to see how they are affected by them, to test what it really means to slide. This applies both for those who actively engage in the process of sliding and those who watch. People coming down the slides have a particular expression on their faces, they’re affected and to some degree ‘changed’. This is very spectacular, as, because the performers become spectators (of their own inner spectacle) while going down the slides, and are being watched at the same time by those outside the slides. The state of mind that you enter when sliding, of simultaneous delight, madness and ‘voluptuous panic’, can’t simply disappear without trace afterwards. In this sense the ‘test site’ isn’t just in the Turbine Hall, but is also, to an extent, in the slider or person watching who’s stimulated by the slides: a site within.
We conceived the Turbine Hall installation as a large-scale experiment to see how slides can be used in public spaces, how they’re received, and what they do to users and to viewers. It’s a ‘test site’ in the sense of a study using volunteers in a museum space. The tests are conducted by visitors themselves, there is no ‘objective’ authority taking measurements. It’s all personal experience. All these works, including the slides, are exploratory sculptures. They offer the possibility of unique inner experiences that can be used for the exploration of the self.
As you go down, you leave a lot behind you, principally, your dignity and any sense of being an adult, and all control. In the few seconds it takes to whoosh through one of these stainless steel and plastic tubes and re-emerge at the bottom of the Turbine Hall, you have been infantilised into a rumpled, red-faced and giggling. This piece is dealing with the verticality of the space, the experience of descent also gives you a moment of relief, and Holler said "It gives you the possibility to let some of those things go that you carry around as an adult. By letting yourself go you somehow get to the bottom of things."
This work is used to examine the interactive relationships between artist and participants mediated by the slides and its aesthetic quality. In order to approach an understanding of Carsten Höller’s Test Site, the work must not be understood as an object but as a platform of interaction sliding down, especially from the higher levels, was an experience that was both physically and psychically intense. Using people’s experience as what he calls his ‘raw material’, Höller has been making art since the late 1980s centred around, and dependent upon, visitor participation. Höller is known for staging quasi-scientific experiments that, by affecting altered states of perception, cause participants to question their relationship to their surroundings, each other and themselves. Characteristically playful and subversive, the experience that Höller affects in people is often ambivalently poised between the enjoyable and the unnerving. Spaces where social order is suspended and where people relate to each other freely and openly, without the baggage of acquired social roles and expectations. In his art Höller poses ‘a critique of the boring utilitarianism that increasingly governs our lives’ by asserting the value of ‘letting go’ as something inherently vitalising, liberating and life-affirming, which takes as its ‘theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context’. Bourriaud asserts the aesthetic nature of relational works, and hence their value as art, by identifying formal qualities in the interpersonal relationships that they engage. Furthermore, Bourriaud identifies political significance in these relationships as models of interaction that critically reflect upon wider society. Bourriaud argues that by setting up real interactive situations in the gallery, relational works of art do not ‘represent utopias’ but actualise them, creating positive ‘life possibilities’ as ‘concrete spaces’ rather than merely fictional ones. It’s looking at how art objects make things happen.
Art as the curator, audience as the art
The purpose of Relational Aesthetics is to explore art that concerns itself with creating encounters or moments of sociability with non-scripted social interaction. The key with this type of art is to lay the groundwork for the audience/spectator to continue and complete, where the social interaction compelled by the artwork leaves the spectator to communicate with others and the artwork, it is like putting a box down and the audience is there to open it and experience it.
Relational art is interesting as you are almost leaving clues for the viewer to take, the interactive part of this art is imperative as it relies on the social communication between audience and the artwork; often this type of art is through installations and sculptures where the viewer is asked to join in and fully immerse themselves within the design. The work by artist Carsten Höller who famously put the slide in the Tate modern is a fantastic example of artist who play with this genre of participatory art.
His work has taken advantage of the height of the Tate and the vast museum audience, to test a hypothesis he has been investigating for some time concerning the possible effects of sliding. What would be the result of sliding if it was part of the daily routine? Can slides become part of our experiential and architectural life?
“It is a sculptural work with a pragmatic aspect” Holler said. However, it would be a mistake to think that you have to use the slide to make sense of it. Looking at the work from the outside is a different but equally valid experience, just as one might contemplate The Endless Column 1938 by Constantin Brancusi. From an architectural and practical perspective, the slides are one of the building’s means of transporting people, equivalent to the escalators, elevators or stairs. Slides deliver people quickly, safely and elegantly to their destinations, they’re inexpensive to construct and energy-efficient. They’re also a device for experiencing an emotional state that is a unique condition somewhere between delight and madness. It was described in the fifties by the French writer Roger Caillois as ‘a kind of voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind’.
The Turbine Hall installation is called Test Site because it enables visitors to test the functions of differently shaped slides, mainly to see how they are affected by them, to test what it really means to slide. This applies both for those who actively engage in the process of sliding and those who watch. People coming down the slides have a particular expression on their faces, they’re affected and to some degree ‘changed’. This is very spectacular, as, because the performers become spectators (of their own inner spectacle) while going down the slides, and are being watched at the same time by those outside the slides. The state of mind that you enter when sliding, of simultaneous delight, madness and ‘voluptuous panic’, can’t simply disappear without trace afterwards. In this sense the ‘test site’ isn’t just in the Turbine Hall, but is also, to an extent, in the slider or person watching who’s stimulated by the slides: a site within.
We conceived the Turbine Hall installation as a large-scale experiment to see how slides can be used in public spaces, how they’re received, and what they do to users and to viewers. It’s a ‘test site’ in the sense of a study using volunteers in a museum space. The tests are conducted by visitors themselves, there is no ‘objective’ authority taking measurements. It’s all personal experience. All these works, including the slides, are exploratory sculptures. They offer the possibility of unique inner experiences that can be used for the exploration of the self.
As you go down, you leave a lot behind you, principally, your dignity and any sense of being an adult, and all control. In the few seconds it takes to whoosh through one of these stainless steel and plastic tubes and re-emerge at the bottom of the Turbine Hall, you have been infantilised into a rumpled, red-faced and giggling. This piece is dealing with the verticality of the space, the experience of descent also gives you a moment of relief, and Holler said "It gives you the possibility to let some of those things go that you carry around as an adult. By letting yourself go you somehow get to the bottom of things."
This work is used to examine the interactive relationships between artist and participants mediated by the slides and its aesthetic quality. In order to approach an understanding of Carsten Höller’s Test Site, the work must not be understood as an object but as a platform of interaction sliding down, especially from the higher levels, was an experience that was both physically and psychically intense. Using people’s experience as what he calls his ‘raw material’, Höller has been making art since the late 1980s centred around, and dependent upon, visitor participation. Höller is known for staging quasi-scientific experiments that, by affecting altered states of perception, cause participants to question their relationship to their surroundings, each other and themselves. Characteristically playful and subversive, the experience that Höller affects in people is often ambivalently poised between the enjoyable and the unnerving. Spaces where social order is suspended and where people relate to each other freely and openly, without the baggage of acquired social roles and expectations. In his art Höller poses ‘a critique of the boring utilitarianism that increasingly governs our lives’ by asserting the value of ‘letting go’ as something inherently vitalising, liberating and life-affirming, which takes as its ‘theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context’. Bourriaud asserts the aesthetic nature of relational works, and hence their value as art, by identifying formal qualities in the interpersonal relationships that they engage. Furthermore, Bourriaud identifies political significance in these relationships as models of interaction that critically reflect upon wider society. Bourriaud argues that by setting up real interactive situations in the gallery, relational works of art do not ‘represent utopias’ but actualise them, creating positive ‘life possibilities’ as ‘concrete spaces’ rather than merely fictional ones. It’s looking at how art objects make things happen.
Kierkegaard - Kanye - Lily
Kierkegaard / Kanye / relational art
Kierkegaard sees aesthetics as a component of human development, seeing human formation as interrational with aesthetics making art a vital dimension of human existence. He links this with Christianity but without stepping into those realms those principles of selfhood and art is what combines to make an artist. We search for self-formation through aesthetic expression and discovery.
This is how I am thinking Kanye west is so relevant to the concept of the aesthetic and to relational art. Through his constant viable imagery Kanye uses self-exploration to continuously curate himself to be the new found definition of the postmodern icon. He is a like a beam in the vantablack painted backdrop he performs in front of.
The concept of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic speaks of human development, aesthetics is a vital component of our makeup, we form these aesthetics as artists, we curate ourselves and who is it that curates themselves better than anyone in our current social climate, Kanye west. His extreme visual performances, outlandish speeches and comments are all a form of contemporary artwork. His persona is the living embodiment of the term aesthetic. His art isn’t just limited to music, it is through his value of aesthetic and dynamic presence.
If aesthetics is a component for human development than Kanye is up there with Jesus. He too has a fascination with death, him and Kierkegaard are the containing the interlinking contents of curation, relational art, aesthetics and the self.
Artists – as artists we need to find our aesthetic, we need to discover our muse and over whelm ourselves through expression. In my case it is through materiality and texture. My relational art is through the visual digestion of perception and discuss of touch. This is my aesthetic, my Kanye west, my horrible obsession with death.
The concept of touch is my relational art, my communication to an audience and my development through value and production. Through touch, sight, sense, sensory participation is my idea of relational art. Kanye’s is through his performance. Mine, through painting is about the social involvement and the act of the audience viewing and understanding.
The images I create stand against a background which have to physically stare and touch to absorb the sentiment and romanticism of it, to understand the notion of the brushstrokes and layers of materiality, texture and depth. The way in which Kierkegaard’s aesthetic talks about desire that is what an artist creates, our inners our illusionary self is plastered over a canvas or over a stage. It is all relational, all meaning something more than nothing. The defying point is how it is crafted, curated and responded to. It is an art
Relational art = curation, social communication = Kanye = principles of aesthetics = Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard sees aesthetics as a component of human development, seeing human formation as interrational with aesthetics making art a vital dimension of human existence. He links this with Christianity but without stepping into those realms those principles of selfhood and art is what combines to make an artist. We search for self-formation through aesthetic expression and discovery.
This is how I am thinking Kanye west is so relevant to the concept of the aesthetic and to relational art. Through his constant viable imagery Kanye uses self-exploration to continuously curate himself to be the new found definition of the postmodern icon. He is a like a beam in the vantablack painted backdrop he performs in front of.
The concept of Kierkegaard’s aesthetic speaks of human development, aesthetics is a vital component of our makeup, we form these aesthetics as artists, we curate ourselves and who is it that curates themselves better than anyone in our current social climate, Kanye west. His extreme visual performances, outlandish speeches and comments are all a form of contemporary artwork. His persona is the living embodiment of the term aesthetic. His art isn’t just limited to music, it is through his value of aesthetic and dynamic presence.
If aesthetics is a component for human development than Kanye is up there with Jesus. He too has a fascination with death, him and Kierkegaard are the containing the interlinking contents of curation, relational art, aesthetics and the self.
Artists – as artists we need to find our aesthetic, we need to discover our muse and over whelm ourselves through expression. In my case it is through materiality and texture. My relational art is through the visual digestion of perception and discuss of touch. This is my aesthetic, my Kanye west, my horrible obsession with death.
The concept of touch is my relational art, my communication to an audience and my development through value and production. Through touch, sight, sense, sensory participation is my idea of relational art. Kanye’s is through his performance. Mine, through painting is about the social involvement and the act of the audience viewing and understanding.
The images I create stand against a background which have to physically stare and touch to absorb the sentiment and romanticism of it, to understand the notion of the brushstrokes and layers of materiality, texture and depth. The way in which Kierkegaard’s aesthetic talks about desire that is what an artist creates, our inners our illusionary self is plastered over a canvas or over a stage. It is all relational, all meaning something more than nothing. The defying point is how it is crafted, curated and responded to. It is an art
Relational art = curation, social communication = Kanye = principles of aesthetics = Kierkegaard
Thinking about relational aesthetics and authoriship of your own aesthetic, who has the most vicarious aesthetic in our current social culture? Wake up Mr. West
The influence of Kanye West - Still Yeezy
The dialogue between spectator and the image, the idea is to use it to communicate. We create our visual identity, we also curate it.
We are all Kanye
As artists we curate ourselves and we sample art in our own lives, we create our own aesthetic.
Kanye’s ‘famous’ video has so much visual distinctiveness; it is the modern appropriation of Da Vinci’s last supper, the 12 characters fit so humbly sitting in bed, these celebrity faces are the complete composition and epitome of modernity and the social culture we absorb ourselves into. The figures that are influential to our time and he is stripping them to nothing, his conceptual ideas communicate, shock and motivate. Kanye’s yeezy collection is fluent with post modernism; his jacket is based off a homeless man’s attire, if his genius doesn’t scream conceptual artist just through the sheer irony I don’t know what does.
The evolution of his visual identity is as a presentation of the work of others, this reflects a growing trend on social media to which are of creation by curation.
Curation is vicarious curation is vital
The way to which I curate myself in the everyday is my physical Instagram. The paintings I paint are a chromatic portfolio and entity of my online presence. My relational aesthetic is constantly surrounding me through my perceptive and subjective mind. We have switched to the internet being our eternal reality and see our norm as a subjective alternative. Kanye west is like all of our extremities of social media personified into a physical presence. He is real but is he.
Anyone can manufacture an aesthetic through the lens of others. He uses the work he likes, artists seek interest and seek out the influences they like, these are mood boards; then present the final product through the act of art or presence or voice. Our identities automatically mould to be our idealistic existences that we want to suit us better than our typically awful selves.
We curate ourselves
An artist who curates and renovates themselves has to have one other subtle other seasoning, narcissism. The term Kanye loves Kanye is quintessential, he considers his tweets a form of contemporary art, the psychological leap to being the centre of creativity is a short one. Kanye believes that incorporating and sampling the works of others is his gift to give to the public, he is in fact the new-fangled Warhol.
Maybe he is the new Ayn Rand, maybe he is that materialistic echo in our heads that we all seek to be artists, we need that narcissistic belief that we will succeed. His relational art and extreme aesthetic is the power stance we need to take. His visual communication knows no depths, he is a provocateur of culture in a way, he is a current and visually perceptive piece of art himself that we long to stare at whilst he stares back at himself.
The philosophy of Kanye west
He says, I’m Socrates but way more chocolatey
Kanye has this fixation on death, it’s a live till you die, despair over death fixation on morality. A man may die but his ideas will live forever, he is part of the modern day bible. Kanye looks at aesthetic through the principles of the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, through the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious.
Kanye is the concept of conceptual art, he is congruent to post modernism: he is outlandishly public yet craves privacy, embracing the notion of death yet living forever. Kierkegaard says we need to understand ourselves and the nature of ourselves. Kierkegaard’s ‘either or’ is Kanye’s aesthetic, saying grab a drink, drink a glass after that I grab your ass.
Joking that was definitely Kanye.
Kierkegaard says the aesthetic man lives his life for desire, like you are on a stage > relational art
The typical video of a rapper is through sex and drugs, Kanye takes that and reflects it into a self-aware visual feast like Shakespeare in the flesh.
The transition from aesthetic to ethical for Mr. West is through is children to that he is humanised, and faith is passionate inwardness. Is his persona a conversation with himself? He is much smarter than given credit for, the ability to operate an audience in such conceptual ways and devise our social culture into a perpetual media frenzy through the use of structure and political narratives.
Aesthetics are a component of human development and Kanye undeniably is about fashioning the self. Kierkegaard’s book on aesthetics and selfhood talks beyond and about the religious context of the self and its primary centre of meaning, seeing human information as interrelated with aesthetics making art a vital dimension of human existence.
When Kanye talks about collaboration, it’s like appropriation in art. Its non-arrogant its absorbing information and wanting people to know where it came from, so those can listen and capitalize off the genius of others, it’s complimentary.
There is also self-illusion, visual perception, and the aesthetic of you, of others
This reflected self is what we form in our artwork, as artists we must look at our character and imitate this through the essence of touch and mark making, deliberating ourselves and inner minds towards the narrator in our heads to create art that is like a play. Purposely serving to communicate to a spectator and them able to understand why you are doing it.
There is a beautiful presence that haunts an artist, we are afraid of commitment instead we need to follows the principles of Kierkegaard and desire to achieve an aesthetic, but better yet believe in ever abundant love of Kanye West.
He says, I’m Socrates but way more chocolatey
Kanye has this fixation on death, it’s a live till you die, despair over death fixation on morality. A man may die but his ideas will live forever, he is part of the modern day bible. Kanye looks at aesthetic through the principles of the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard, through the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious.
Kanye is the concept of conceptual art, he is congruent to post modernism: he is outlandishly public yet craves privacy, embracing the notion of death yet living forever. Kierkegaard says we need to understand ourselves and the nature of ourselves. Kierkegaard’s ‘either or’ is Kanye’s aesthetic, saying grab a drink, drink a glass after that I grab your ass.
Joking that was definitely Kanye.
Kierkegaard says the aesthetic man lives his life for desire, like you are on a stage > relational art
The typical video of a rapper is through sex and drugs, Kanye takes that and reflects it into a self-aware visual feast like Shakespeare in the flesh.
The transition from aesthetic to ethical for Mr. West is through is children to that he is humanised, and faith is passionate inwardness. Is his persona a conversation with himself? He is much smarter than given credit for, the ability to operate an audience in such conceptual ways and devise our social culture into a perpetual media frenzy through the use of structure and political narratives.
Aesthetics are a component of human development and Kanye undeniably is about fashioning the self. Kierkegaard’s book on aesthetics and selfhood talks beyond and about the religious context of the self and its primary centre of meaning, seeing human information as interrelated with aesthetics making art a vital dimension of human existence.
When Kanye talks about collaboration, it’s like appropriation in art. Its non-arrogant its absorbing information and wanting people to know where it came from, so those can listen and capitalize off the genius of others, it’s complimentary.
There is also self-illusion, visual perception, and the aesthetic of you, of others
This reflected self is what we form in our artwork, as artists we must look at our character and imitate this through the essence of touch and mark making, deliberating ourselves and inner minds towards the narrator in our heads to create art that is like a play. Purposely serving to communicate to a spectator and them able to understand why you are doing it.
There is a beautiful presence that haunts an artist, we are afraid of commitment instead we need to follows the principles of Kierkegaard and desire to achieve an aesthetic, but better yet believe in ever abundant love of Kanye West.
Søren Kierkegaard
Aesthetics, and Selfhood - The Art of Subjectivity
In the digital world, Kierkegaard's thought is valuable in thinking about aesthetics as a component of human development, both including but moving beyond the religious context as its primary center of meaning. Seeing human formation as interrelated with aesthetics makes art a vital dimension of human existence. Contributing to the debate about Kierkegaard's conception of the aesthetic, Kierkegaard, Aesthetics, and Selfhood argues that Kierkegaard's primary concern is to provocatively explore how a self becomes Christian, with aesthetics being a vital dimension for such self-formation. At a broader level, Peder Jothen also focuses on the role, authority, and meaning of aesthetic expression within religious thought generally and Christianity in particular.
Concepts for dinner
Concepts for studio work linking to dissertation principles of relational aesthetics and relational art.
Tirvanija > relational art. The way that he cooks up an experience is the way that our eyes feast on an artwork.
Everything is an experience in itself, art is an experience that engulfs us as the spectators. It is sound and visuals, metaphorical and physically through the concept of the gaze. A feast for the eyes, an entrée and main course. The way we recognise an image is us understanding and us digesting it.
We as the viewer take the time to soak up the information, the narrative within the artworks are like a play; in my work I am trying to create this through the emphasis on textural and gestural imagery. Abstract artists craft works that are so densely woven with narrative and characters, it is like pulling a thread from a jumper that your grandma knitted, it unravels slowly as you pull at it, that is us as the spectator reading and understanding the meaning and perplexities of an image; it is us digesting a visual dinner for the eyes and mind.
Relational art > the mannerisms of relational art and the concepts of relational aesthetics that Bourriaud writes about follow the principles of audience participation and interaction.
Is viewing an image participation? Visual perception: it’s the onlookers observing a play, reading a book and sipping their wine. You come in contact with hundreds of tasks every day that require the simultaneous movements of looking and understanding what you are doing, this is how we view art, art is postmodern, its dimensional, it’s here and there and it’s a replica of then and now.
We automatically gaze upon such beauty around us without noticing, art is everywhere and always has been; these narratives within the artworks become like TV to us, they are our soap, our EastEnders, the Mona Lisa is Peggy Mitchell. The character is there, the visual perception and feeling you come to experience and identify with.
Art is our continuous play, it is a theatre production, a story that visually encapsulates a mass audience.
To view physically is to touch an image, this is how we find meaning. We picked up toys as infants to learn shape and colour, to develop our senses and discover why and how things and objects have importance. As adults we do this unremittingly without hesitation, in art we make contact with an image to touch the surface and seize our curiosity of what it may feel like, this is how we read visually the pictorial plane, to immerse ourselves.
As humans we want everything, we want to consume information about everything around us, about artwork we want to capsulate everything into a tiny bite of knowledge. Art is our dinner, Peggy Mitchell is edible and the Mona Lisa is a Fullblood Wagyu Tenderloin.
But who is to say they prefer their steak that way? Is the more expensive cut better because it is more acclaimed, or does Lidl’s frying steak still deserve recognition, reproduction is still art, everything is art, art is all around us. Steak for all.
Tirvanija > relational art. The way that he cooks up an experience is the way that our eyes feast on an artwork.
Everything is an experience in itself, art is an experience that engulfs us as the spectators. It is sound and visuals, metaphorical and physically through the concept of the gaze. A feast for the eyes, an entrée and main course. The way we recognise an image is us understanding and us digesting it.
We as the viewer take the time to soak up the information, the narrative within the artworks are like a play; in my work I am trying to create this through the emphasis on textural and gestural imagery. Abstract artists craft works that are so densely woven with narrative and characters, it is like pulling a thread from a jumper that your grandma knitted, it unravels slowly as you pull at it, that is us as the spectator reading and understanding the meaning and perplexities of an image; it is us digesting a visual dinner for the eyes and mind.
Relational art > the mannerisms of relational art and the concepts of relational aesthetics that Bourriaud writes about follow the principles of audience participation and interaction.
Is viewing an image participation? Visual perception: it’s the onlookers observing a play, reading a book and sipping their wine. You come in contact with hundreds of tasks every day that require the simultaneous movements of looking and understanding what you are doing, this is how we view art, art is postmodern, its dimensional, it’s here and there and it’s a replica of then and now.
We automatically gaze upon such beauty around us without noticing, art is everywhere and always has been; these narratives within the artworks become like TV to us, they are our soap, our EastEnders, the Mona Lisa is Peggy Mitchell. The character is there, the visual perception and feeling you come to experience and identify with.
Art is our continuous play, it is a theatre production, a story that visually encapsulates a mass audience.
To view physically is to touch an image, this is how we find meaning. We picked up toys as infants to learn shape and colour, to develop our senses and discover why and how things and objects have importance. As adults we do this unremittingly without hesitation, in art we make contact with an image to touch the surface and seize our curiosity of what it may feel like, this is how we read visually the pictorial plane, to immerse ourselves.
As humans we want everything, we want to consume information about everything around us, about artwork we want to capsulate everything into a tiny bite of knowledge. Art is our dinner, Peggy Mitchell is edible and the Mona Lisa is a Fullblood Wagyu Tenderloin.
But who is to say they prefer their steak that way? Is the more expensive cut better because it is more acclaimed, or does Lidl’s frying steak still deserve recognition, reproduction is still art, everything is art, art is all around us. Steak for all.
Nicolas Bourriaud
Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of ‘relational aesthetics’ may give designers a new set of tools
The comment ‘Anything that cannot be marketed will inevitably vanish’ comes from French art critic and curator, Nicolas Bourriaud. In his 1998 collection of essays, Relational Aesthetics, he captures the mood of much visual communication today, which oscillates between the brand consultant’s wet dream and the critic’s worst nightmare.
For Bourriaud, spontaneous social relations are vanishing in the information age as communication becomes restricted to particular areas of consumption: coffee shops, pubs and bars, art galleries and so on. This is a world littered with the artefacts of graphic design.
The purpose of Relational Aesthetics is to explore art that concerns itself with creating encounters or moments of sociability within these ‘communication zones’ for non-scripted social interaction. Bourriaud’s writing tends to champion the work of a series of key artists with whom he has worked. One of these is Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija who, in the summer of 2005, created two identical versions of his New York apartment in London’s Serpentine gallery. In these, visitors were invited to make themselves at home – put on the kettle, cook a meal, take a shower. It was not the flat itself that was offered up for contemplation but the way people inhabit the space – a process made more noticeable in the move from one apartment to its identical but uncannily mirrored twin. Scribbles and Post-it notes started accumulating spontaneously on the walls to reveal people’s thoughts, developing like graffiti on a toilet wall.
The term ‘relational’ refers to art that not only situates itself within the ‘inter-human sphere’ but it is, in Bourriaud’s terms ‘a formal arrangement that generates relationships between people’ – Tiravanija’s installation, for instance. A unifying principle of relational aesthetics is that they are open-ended – negotiating relationships with their audience in a way that is not prepared beforehand. It is in this way, says Bourriaud, that they ‘resist social formatting’ – unlike the kind of scripted conversation that is designed to end in a sale. This is also in contrast to the more didactic dialogues of, say, a poster where the relationship with the audience communication is not open, but top-down.
The term relational offers a more complex understanding than the simple oppositional binary of much art and design – as either socially active or not. Are the processes at play in relational art practice, as Bourriaud sees them, also active in current communication design?
Over the past couple of years, a talking point of the UK’s Turner Prize has been the exit point – not the usual retail snare of postcards, souvenir espresso cups and umbrellas, but a space for reflection. An installation at Tate Britain, in London, created by graphic designers A2 provides a room for visitors to linger in, debrief, pass comment, swap notes and leave their marks. The room is simply walled by wooden panels with rows of loose-leaf A6 writing paper, hole-punched and hanging from what look like pieces of dowel. These are revealed to be the pencils with which to write your thoughts about the exhibition.
For the Turner Prize, debate is its raison d’etre. Over a decade on, the ‘controversial’ label attached to the prize has become jaded marketing rhetoric. A2’s Henrik Kubel and Scott Williams have discovered a way to re-invigorate a discussion about art at the level of the public but this time more quietly, more intimately, within the gallery rather than the tabloids – red crayon instead of red top. Crucially, discussion is directed by the visitor. Here A2 have combined the structure of ‘art debate’ with ‘the traditional comments box’. But this then becomes something else: it is more than a simple method of feedback; it is about meeting and creating a live community. Thus reconceived, it creates a space of encounter for the formation of micro-communities that are fundamental to Bourriaud’s idea of giving value back to the unmediated ‘consumer’ experience. In a sense it is a different exhibition – uncurated and independent of the show. One note even says, ‘The comments are more interesting to read than half that bombastic [unreadable] that we’ve all paid to marvel at.’
The fruits of interaction and encounter can be used to generate promotional material for more commercial needs. In an initiative by MendeDesign and Volume Design for the Southern Exposure gallery in San Francisco (2004), a project was created to promote ‘The Way We Work’, an art show which featured a series of collectives that facilitated art in the community with their focus on the making, not the finite object. The promotion was in two parts: almost blank posters were pasted up in strategic areas of the city while stencils were sent out to 5000 people on the gallery’s mailing list. Both posters and stencils were printed with the detail of the exhibition; information about where the posters had been put up was included with the stencil mail-out. Each group of posters had one trigger design – but that was it. By night, over a period of four weeks, the posters became stencilled.
The event curates the work
This example sits outside of Bourriaud’s pure definition of a relational experience in art – which not only involves the audience but is made real or materialises in and with the audience and is not to be confused with work that is ‘interactive’. A work such as the Southern Exposure project, participatory but with ‘rules’, is relational in a more generic sense. The public’s interaction at the promotional stage brought in more people to the show than the gallery had attracted before, but didn’t change the outcome of the show.
A more direct example of relational aesthetics could be found in ‘Cracked’ – a 24-hour show at La Vianda gallery by students of the London College of Communication (LCC). People were invited to come and present everyday problems from their work environment to a team of sixteen graphic designers who provided them with solutions to walk away with, free of charge. For instance, Ditched – an events magazine local to Shoreditch, the hub of London’s creative community – dropped in with the problem of how to promote themselves on posters without getting arrested. The solution was to put their logo to a ‘Billposters will be prosecuted’ poster.
The upstairs space provided a constantly updated display of these ‘problems + solutions’, printed out on cards and hung on the walls for perusal – a ‘while-u-wait portfolio and gallery. Downstairs, it was the client-designer relationship and the creative bustle of the working studio – always a process of dialogue both complex and fluid – that was offered for contemplation. What makes this relational is that it is the actual event that curates the work, not the other way around.
These examples provide moments or possibilities for social relationships that Bourriaud calls ‘social interstices’ – a term borrowed from Karl Marx. In contrast to a traditional leftist position Bourriaud insists that these interstices co-exist and live within the branded environment, rather than acting as ‘culture jamming’, which aims to disrupt capitalist activity.
The world of mass communications – which Bourriaud calls ‘looped information’ – is predominantly rhetorical. In many contexts this can be an alienating experience, compounded by a didactic signage system. A relational stance can work in this sphere, too. For his signage system for the Umeda Maternity Clinic in Osaka, Japan, designer Kenya Hara uses the traditional visual language of information design – pictograms, symbols, typography, etc. – but the signs are printed onto white cotton cloth. It is detachable and washable, allowing the signage to become part of the fabric of the day-to-day running of the maternity clinic, washed and recycled along with the general laundry. Here, the conviviality of many of Bourriaud’s examples of relational aesthetics is not literal. It is the cyclical nature of the signage, which inhabits what Bourriaud calls the ‘minute space of daily gestures’, that is of interest. The Umeda Maternity Clinic’s signage makes the impersonal world of a large hospital more human – allowing it to engage with the patients on a more personal level. Moreover, this is an open-ended process, in that the signage isn’t perceived to ‘deteriorate’ when it is used and washed, but to come to life. The signage has not been a target for graffiti. Unlike official ‘Modernist’ street signage, which is prone to the taggers’ aerosol wit, to graffiti Hara’s signage would be like tagging the back of someone’s shirt as he sits in the emergency waiting room.
One of the artists championed by Bourriaud is UK-born Liam Gillick, who, with his large, permanent signage installations for multinational corporations, takes relational aesthetics out of the gallery into real working environments. The shift leaves traces in his work as the size, enigmatic wording and unusual positioning of his work pitches it halfway between sculpture and signage. Specifically, it is the visual language of minimalist art – rendered so often benign in the lobbies of multinational corporations – that is conflated with that of corporate signage. In Interior Location Thing, at the Olnick Corporation building in New York, a ring of words is suspended: ‘. . . literally your place literally this place literally that place literally no place literally your place . . . ’ This reads like an endlessly repeated corporate mantra. The typography is perfectly pitched in the way it picks up on the ‘generic Modernism’ of multinational identity design – a bland sans serif typeface illuminated largely by a colour palette that fades from red through orange through yellow tones and back again as if animated by an over-zealous PowerPoint presentation. Minimalist art aimed to provoke thought, wishing that the viewer ‘inhabit’ the space of the work. Similarly, it seems that the intention of Gillick’s signage is to ask those that use the building to pause for a moment and think about the way that corporate signage, under the guise of neutrality, plays a part in directing the everyday movements and negotiations of people in the office.
Nearby in New Jersey, nArchitects have created Vital Signs – a dramatic interactive installation that spirals down through the atrium at the Liberty Science Center. In a departure from the usual ‘closed’ information disseminated by analogue signage, the strip of LEDs and projections is designed as a conduit for breaking news about science. Visitors can intervene in the information stream by uploading information from interactive points built into the mezzanine handrails. Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang of nArchitects say ‘We re-write each program or project brief to simultaneously stage expected events as well as allow for the unexpected – neither pure choreography nor pure responsive interactivity.’
Humanising the ‘non-places’ of super-modernity
Jason Bruges Studio uses beautifully designed lighting to create moments of contemplation in the rush of everyday life and to personalise otherwise rather empty or alienating environments – from hotel lobbies through suburban flyways to urban back alleys. Elsewhere, these have been called the ‘non-places’ of super-modernity – transitory places – in which we wait or we pass through, and pass others on our way through making little contact. Memory Wall, a recent project for the Puerta America Hotel in Madrid, Spain, is an installation that goes some way to turning this relationship around. According to Bruges, it works like electronic blotting paper and soaks up the colours people are wearing, leaving real-time colour silhouette traces on the wall as they pass. If you sit and read a while, your image burns in and leaves a trace for up to an hour. The wall provides an open-ended series of memories of different people – their actions and, perhaps, their narratives – in relation to a particular space and time. He adds that as you enter the lobby again and again, in contrast to that of the usual bland international hotel, your experience of the space will change.
Digital Turnstile, a project proposed for London’s Camden area puts this to more social effect. An otherwise dark alleyway, a notorious area for drug users, is lit up as a person approaches, setting off an animated wave of light along the pavement to lead them through. Here, Bruges’ interest was in the interaction between ‘people’s physiological and psychological perceptions about a place’ and ‘legislation about how well a space should be lit’. Well placed lighting, it is recognised, can reduce crime – as can a more populated street environment. This positive approach, contrast with the usual paraphernalia – CCTV, anti-climb paint, signs that say ‘No Loitering’ – that the council provides to ‘make the streets safer’, and which instead so often highlight a breakdown in relations and create a stand-off between locals and the street.
Vital Signs, Memory Wall and Digital Turnstile are interactive, and although, for Bourriaud, the interactive is of secondary importance to the creation of convivial social relations, it seems that in communication design it is still a potent force when placed in a more relational context. These installations draw the individual into a relationship with a space, the information it disseminates and the ways in which both are used.
Stripping the street bare
A more faithfully relational interpretation of information design, which creates and relies on human relations, are the experiments in traffic signage devised in Holland and now seen in London, Washington and other communities around the world. In Holland, traffic engineer Hans Monderman has overseen the removal of all traffic lights, signage, speed-limit signs, speed bumps, bicycle lanes and pedestrian crossings. In his view it is when ‘drivers stop looking at signs and start looking at other people, that driving becomes safer’. He goes on to say that ‘all those signs are saying to cars “this is your space, and we have organised your behaviour so that as long as you behave this way, nothing can happen to you” . . . That is the wrong story.’ The primacy of the ‘traffic world’ is interrupted by repositioning the relationship between cars, other motorists and pedestrians and making them aware of operating in a shared space. In the most radical scenarios, this space is literally shared as the kerb traditionally separating them has been removed. Drivers can no longer merely act on signage or a green light automatically, but have to act and react – mingle – as part of a momentary micro-community of pedestrians and other drivers at each road junction.
Dubbed a Dutch ‘naked road’ experiment by the media, the Shared Space initiative is currently being developed by at least five European countries. In Wiltshire, in the west of England, removing the white lines that separate drivers on one side of the road from the other has reduced accidents by 35 per cent. In London’s Kensington High Street, there has been a 69 per cent reduction in accidents in three years through the removal of railings, pedestrian guard-rails and signs. Ben Hamilton-Baillie, a British architect and advisor for Shared Space, suggests this makes the street ‘legible’ – not through signage but as an elegant, live urban environment. ‘Signage is, contrary to popular belief, a very poor way to influence behaviour,’ says Hamilton-Baillie. ‘It may work in a car-only space like a motorway, but it is the least subtle and effective form of communication in the public realm. When we are talking about complex communication between two people – inter-human situations – everyone knows that the more indirect communication is, the more effective the message. Women know that. Musicians, artists and architects know that.’ An image that Hamilton-Baillie uses to illustrate the point is of a road accident where a car is wrapped around the cause: a street sign saying ‘Thank you for driving slowly’.
Scenarios that foster spontaneous human relations, in the way that Bourriaud describes them, are what he would call ‘microtopias’. For him, this is the core political significance of relational aesthetics – and his most contested claim for them. In contrast to a classic, Utopian / Marxist stance that strives to change the world, Bourriaud argues that relational aesthetics create achievable micro-Utopian moments, embedded within the everyday to make the now more pleasurable. Gillick claims that ‘The phrase “literally no place” can be understood as another way of saying Utopia.’ Might pausing at a Gillick signage-sculpture provoke a micro-Utopian moment in the mindless rush of everyday work life?
The examples here go beyond a simple diagnosis of design as good or bad, socially responsible or not. They might not be socially active in the sense of a protest poster, but can still be seen to activate the social. Here, the designer is not the starting or end point of a finished product but, to use Bourriaud’s term, a ‘semionaut’ who connects new spaces, new narratives. For him, ‘The “semionaut” imagines the links, the likely relations between disparate sites.’
In Postproduction, the follow-up book to Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud ‘moves on from the convivial and interactive’ to the matrix of relationships between cultural products in the Internet age. His interest is in ‘how to find one’s bearings in the cultural chaos and how to extract new modes of production from it.’ It is here that the semionaut comes centre stage. Graphic designers Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak of M / M (Paris) have worked in collaboration with many of Bourriaud’s key artists. They are practitioners who re-assess the models that structure graphic design negotiating the matrix of information in art, design, fashion and community. They have tried to create political spaces where, acting as semionauts – ‘inventing trajectories between signs’ – they try to provide a topography of where these communities interlace. In the summer of 2005, the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, invited them to put on a display of major artworks from a prestigious European collection of contemporary art which will be ‘Plunged . . . into an unexpected multiform graphic context, essential works of art will go through multiple translations . . .’
The relational model of enquiry is broadening in its remit as we take this approach away from the sphere of contemporary art. Out in the so-called ‘real world’, it is clear that the relational – as we have come to use the term – is already being used to flesh out current thinking about communication.
For others – visual communicators who have been working in more direct contact with artist-practitioners – relational aesthetics deal with some of their own current concerns. Daniel Eatock, formerly of Foundation33, worked with Rirkrit Tiravanija on the book for the Serpentine gallery show in London. For Eatock the term relational does not intrinsically relate to his oeuvre as a whole, yet what’s interesting to him is the idea of ‘dematerialisation’. In relational aesthetics, this is found in the way it considers ‘interhuman exchange an aesthetic object in and of itself.’ For Eatock, it is important as a new mode of thinking about visual communication. ‘“Graphic Design” is misleading as a term as it is about surface. I’m interested in how graphic design can be dematerialised away from the aesthetic to a process – it seems that now people are interested in re-investigating graphic design that’s more than making surfaces.’
The core concepts, then, behind relational aesthetics can open up a broader way of thinking about communication and the effects of its dissemination in the world. Where visual communication might come into its own is that it can develop these ideas beyond the aesthetics of the relational.
The comment ‘Anything that cannot be marketed will inevitably vanish’ comes from French art critic and curator, Nicolas Bourriaud. In his 1998 collection of essays, Relational Aesthetics, he captures the mood of much visual communication today, which oscillates between the brand consultant’s wet dream and the critic’s worst nightmare.
For Bourriaud, spontaneous social relations are vanishing in the information age as communication becomes restricted to particular areas of consumption: coffee shops, pubs and bars, art galleries and so on. This is a world littered with the artefacts of graphic design.
The purpose of Relational Aesthetics is to explore art that concerns itself with creating encounters or moments of sociability within these ‘communication zones’ for non-scripted social interaction. Bourriaud’s writing tends to champion the work of a series of key artists with whom he has worked. One of these is Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija who, in the summer of 2005, created two identical versions of his New York apartment in London’s Serpentine gallery. In these, visitors were invited to make themselves at home – put on the kettle, cook a meal, take a shower. It was not the flat itself that was offered up for contemplation but the way people inhabit the space – a process made more noticeable in the move from one apartment to its identical but uncannily mirrored twin. Scribbles and Post-it notes started accumulating spontaneously on the walls to reveal people’s thoughts, developing like graffiti on a toilet wall.
The term ‘relational’ refers to art that not only situates itself within the ‘inter-human sphere’ but it is, in Bourriaud’s terms ‘a formal arrangement that generates relationships between people’ – Tiravanija’s installation, for instance. A unifying principle of relational aesthetics is that they are open-ended – negotiating relationships with their audience in a way that is not prepared beforehand. It is in this way, says Bourriaud, that they ‘resist social formatting’ – unlike the kind of scripted conversation that is designed to end in a sale. This is also in contrast to the more didactic dialogues of, say, a poster where the relationship with the audience communication is not open, but top-down.
The term relational offers a more complex understanding than the simple oppositional binary of much art and design – as either socially active or not. Are the processes at play in relational art practice, as Bourriaud sees them, also active in current communication design?
Over the past couple of years, a talking point of the UK’s Turner Prize has been the exit point – not the usual retail snare of postcards, souvenir espresso cups and umbrellas, but a space for reflection. An installation at Tate Britain, in London, created by graphic designers A2 provides a room for visitors to linger in, debrief, pass comment, swap notes and leave their marks. The room is simply walled by wooden panels with rows of loose-leaf A6 writing paper, hole-punched and hanging from what look like pieces of dowel. These are revealed to be the pencils with which to write your thoughts about the exhibition.
For the Turner Prize, debate is its raison d’etre. Over a decade on, the ‘controversial’ label attached to the prize has become jaded marketing rhetoric. A2’s Henrik Kubel and Scott Williams have discovered a way to re-invigorate a discussion about art at the level of the public but this time more quietly, more intimately, within the gallery rather than the tabloids – red crayon instead of red top. Crucially, discussion is directed by the visitor. Here A2 have combined the structure of ‘art debate’ with ‘the traditional comments box’. But this then becomes something else: it is more than a simple method of feedback; it is about meeting and creating a live community. Thus reconceived, it creates a space of encounter for the formation of micro-communities that are fundamental to Bourriaud’s idea of giving value back to the unmediated ‘consumer’ experience. In a sense it is a different exhibition – uncurated and independent of the show. One note even says, ‘The comments are more interesting to read than half that bombastic [unreadable] that we’ve all paid to marvel at.’
The fruits of interaction and encounter can be used to generate promotional material for more commercial needs. In an initiative by MendeDesign and Volume Design for the Southern Exposure gallery in San Francisco (2004), a project was created to promote ‘The Way We Work’, an art show which featured a series of collectives that facilitated art in the community with their focus on the making, not the finite object. The promotion was in two parts: almost blank posters were pasted up in strategic areas of the city while stencils were sent out to 5000 people on the gallery’s mailing list. Both posters and stencils were printed with the detail of the exhibition; information about where the posters had been put up was included with the stencil mail-out. Each group of posters had one trigger design – but that was it. By night, over a period of four weeks, the posters became stencilled.
The event curates the work
This example sits outside of Bourriaud’s pure definition of a relational experience in art – which not only involves the audience but is made real or materialises in and with the audience and is not to be confused with work that is ‘interactive’. A work such as the Southern Exposure project, participatory but with ‘rules’, is relational in a more generic sense. The public’s interaction at the promotional stage brought in more people to the show than the gallery had attracted before, but didn’t change the outcome of the show.
A more direct example of relational aesthetics could be found in ‘Cracked’ – a 24-hour show at La Vianda gallery by students of the London College of Communication (LCC). People were invited to come and present everyday problems from their work environment to a team of sixteen graphic designers who provided them with solutions to walk away with, free of charge. For instance, Ditched – an events magazine local to Shoreditch, the hub of London’s creative community – dropped in with the problem of how to promote themselves on posters without getting arrested. The solution was to put their logo to a ‘Billposters will be prosecuted’ poster.
The upstairs space provided a constantly updated display of these ‘problems + solutions’, printed out on cards and hung on the walls for perusal – a ‘while-u-wait portfolio and gallery. Downstairs, it was the client-designer relationship and the creative bustle of the working studio – always a process of dialogue both complex and fluid – that was offered for contemplation. What makes this relational is that it is the actual event that curates the work, not the other way around.
These examples provide moments or possibilities for social relationships that Bourriaud calls ‘social interstices’ – a term borrowed from Karl Marx. In contrast to a traditional leftist position Bourriaud insists that these interstices co-exist and live within the branded environment, rather than acting as ‘culture jamming’, which aims to disrupt capitalist activity.
The world of mass communications – which Bourriaud calls ‘looped information’ – is predominantly rhetorical. In many contexts this can be an alienating experience, compounded by a didactic signage system. A relational stance can work in this sphere, too. For his signage system for the Umeda Maternity Clinic in Osaka, Japan, designer Kenya Hara uses the traditional visual language of information design – pictograms, symbols, typography, etc. – but the signs are printed onto white cotton cloth. It is detachable and washable, allowing the signage to become part of the fabric of the day-to-day running of the maternity clinic, washed and recycled along with the general laundry. Here, the conviviality of many of Bourriaud’s examples of relational aesthetics is not literal. It is the cyclical nature of the signage, which inhabits what Bourriaud calls the ‘minute space of daily gestures’, that is of interest. The Umeda Maternity Clinic’s signage makes the impersonal world of a large hospital more human – allowing it to engage with the patients on a more personal level. Moreover, this is an open-ended process, in that the signage isn’t perceived to ‘deteriorate’ when it is used and washed, but to come to life. The signage has not been a target for graffiti. Unlike official ‘Modernist’ street signage, which is prone to the taggers’ aerosol wit, to graffiti Hara’s signage would be like tagging the back of someone’s shirt as he sits in the emergency waiting room.
One of the artists championed by Bourriaud is UK-born Liam Gillick, who, with his large, permanent signage installations for multinational corporations, takes relational aesthetics out of the gallery into real working environments. The shift leaves traces in his work as the size, enigmatic wording and unusual positioning of his work pitches it halfway between sculpture and signage. Specifically, it is the visual language of minimalist art – rendered so often benign in the lobbies of multinational corporations – that is conflated with that of corporate signage. In Interior Location Thing, at the Olnick Corporation building in New York, a ring of words is suspended: ‘. . . literally your place literally this place literally that place literally no place literally your place . . . ’ This reads like an endlessly repeated corporate mantra. The typography is perfectly pitched in the way it picks up on the ‘generic Modernism’ of multinational identity design – a bland sans serif typeface illuminated largely by a colour palette that fades from red through orange through yellow tones and back again as if animated by an over-zealous PowerPoint presentation. Minimalist art aimed to provoke thought, wishing that the viewer ‘inhabit’ the space of the work. Similarly, it seems that the intention of Gillick’s signage is to ask those that use the building to pause for a moment and think about the way that corporate signage, under the guise of neutrality, plays a part in directing the everyday movements and negotiations of people in the office.
Nearby in New Jersey, nArchitects have created Vital Signs – a dramatic interactive installation that spirals down through the atrium at the Liberty Science Center. In a departure from the usual ‘closed’ information disseminated by analogue signage, the strip of LEDs and projections is designed as a conduit for breaking news about science. Visitors can intervene in the information stream by uploading information from interactive points built into the mezzanine handrails. Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang of nArchitects say ‘We re-write each program or project brief to simultaneously stage expected events as well as allow for the unexpected – neither pure choreography nor pure responsive interactivity.’
Humanising the ‘non-places’ of super-modernity
Jason Bruges Studio uses beautifully designed lighting to create moments of contemplation in the rush of everyday life and to personalise otherwise rather empty or alienating environments – from hotel lobbies through suburban flyways to urban back alleys. Elsewhere, these have been called the ‘non-places’ of super-modernity – transitory places – in which we wait or we pass through, and pass others on our way through making little contact. Memory Wall, a recent project for the Puerta America Hotel in Madrid, Spain, is an installation that goes some way to turning this relationship around. According to Bruges, it works like electronic blotting paper and soaks up the colours people are wearing, leaving real-time colour silhouette traces on the wall as they pass. If you sit and read a while, your image burns in and leaves a trace for up to an hour. The wall provides an open-ended series of memories of different people – their actions and, perhaps, their narratives – in relation to a particular space and time. He adds that as you enter the lobby again and again, in contrast to that of the usual bland international hotel, your experience of the space will change.
Digital Turnstile, a project proposed for London’s Camden area puts this to more social effect. An otherwise dark alleyway, a notorious area for drug users, is lit up as a person approaches, setting off an animated wave of light along the pavement to lead them through. Here, Bruges’ interest was in the interaction between ‘people’s physiological and psychological perceptions about a place’ and ‘legislation about how well a space should be lit’. Well placed lighting, it is recognised, can reduce crime – as can a more populated street environment. This positive approach, contrast with the usual paraphernalia – CCTV, anti-climb paint, signs that say ‘No Loitering’ – that the council provides to ‘make the streets safer’, and which instead so often highlight a breakdown in relations and create a stand-off between locals and the street.
Vital Signs, Memory Wall and Digital Turnstile are interactive, and although, for Bourriaud, the interactive is of secondary importance to the creation of convivial social relations, it seems that in communication design it is still a potent force when placed in a more relational context. These installations draw the individual into a relationship with a space, the information it disseminates and the ways in which both are used.
Stripping the street bare
A more faithfully relational interpretation of information design, which creates and relies on human relations, are the experiments in traffic signage devised in Holland and now seen in London, Washington and other communities around the world. In Holland, traffic engineer Hans Monderman has overseen the removal of all traffic lights, signage, speed-limit signs, speed bumps, bicycle lanes and pedestrian crossings. In his view it is when ‘drivers stop looking at signs and start looking at other people, that driving becomes safer’. He goes on to say that ‘all those signs are saying to cars “this is your space, and we have organised your behaviour so that as long as you behave this way, nothing can happen to you” . . . That is the wrong story.’ The primacy of the ‘traffic world’ is interrupted by repositioning the relationship between cars, other motorists and pedestrians and making them aware of operating in a shared space. In the most radical scenarios, this space is literally shared as the kerb traditionally separating them has been removed. Drivers can no longer merely act on signage or a green light automatically, but have to act and react – mingle – as part of a momentary micro-community of pedestrians and other drivers at each road junction.
Dubbed a Dutch ‘naked road’ experiment by the media, the Shared Space initiative is currently being developed by at least five European countries. In Wiltshire, in the west of England, removing the white lines that separate drivers on one side of the road from the other has reduced accidents by 35 per cent. In London’s Kensington High Street, there has been a 69 per cent reduction in accidents in three years through the removal of railings, pedestrian guard-rails and signs. Ben Hamilton-Baillie, a British architect and advisor for Shared Space, suggests this makes the street ‘legible’ – not through signage but as an elegant, live urban environment. ‘Signage is, contrary to popular belief, a very poor way to influence behaviour,’ says Hamilton-Baillie. ‘It may work in a car-only space like a motorway, but it is the least subtle and effective form of communication in the public realm. When we are talking about complex communication between two people – inter-human situations – everyone knows that the more indirect communication is, the more effective the message. Women know that. Musicians, artists and architects know that.’ An image that Hamilton-Baillie uses to illustrate the point is of a road accident where a car is wrapped around the cause: a street sign saying ‘Thank you for driving slowly’.
Scenarios that foster spontaneous human relations, in the way that Bourriaud describes them, are what he would call ‘microtopias’. For him, this is the core political significance of relational aesthetics – and his most contested claim for them. In contrast to a classic, Utopian / Marxist stance that strives to change the world, Bourriaud argues that relational aesthetics create achievable micro-Utopian moments, embedded within the everyday to make the now more pleasurable. Gillick claims that ‘The phrase “literally no place” can be understood as another way of saying Utopia.’ Might pausing at a Gillick signage-sculpture provoke a micro-Utopian moment in the mindless rush of everyday work life?
The examples here go beyond a simple diagnosis of design as good or bad, socially responsible or not. They might not be socially active in the sense of a protest poster, but can still be seen to activate the social. Here, the designer is not the starting or end point of a finished product but, to use Bourriaud’s term, a ‘semionaut’ who connects new spaces, new narratives. For him, ‘The “semionaut” imagines the links, the likely relations between disparate sites.’
In Postproduction, the follow-up book to Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud ‘moves on from the convivial and interactive’ to the matrix of relationships between cultural products in the Internet age. His interest is in ‘how to find one’s bearings in the cultural chaos and how to extract new modes of production from it.’ It is here that the semionaut comes centre stage. Graphic designers Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak of M / M (Paris) have worked in collaboration with many of Bourriaud’s key artists. They are practitioners who re-assess the models that structure graphic design negotiating the matrix of information in art, design, fashion and community. They have tried to create political spaces where, acting as semionauts – ‘inventing trajectories between signs’ – they try to provide a topography of where these communities interlace. In the summer of 2005, the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, invited them to put on a display of major artworks from a prestigious European collection of contemporary art which will be ‘Plunged . . . into an unexpected multiform graphic context, essential works of art will go through multiple translations . . .’
The relational model of enquiry is broadening in its remit as we take this approach away from the sphere of contemporary art. Out in the so-called ‘real world’, it is clear that the relational – as we have come to use the term – is already being used to flesh out current thinking about communication.
For others – visual communicators who have been working in more direct contact with artist-practitioners – relational aesthetics deal with some of their own current concerns. Daniel Eatock, formerly of Foundation33, worked with Rirkrit Tiravanija on the book for the Serpentine gallery show in London. For Eatock the term relational does not intrinsically relate to his oeuvre as a whole, yet what’s interesting to him is the idea of ‘dematerialisation’. In relational aesthetics, this is found in the way it considers ‘interhuman exchange an aesthetic object in and of itself.’ For Eatock, it is important as a new mode of thinking about visual communication. ‘“Graphic Design” is misleading as a term as it is about surface. I’m interested in how graphic design can be dematerialised away from the aesthetic to a process – it seems that now people are interested in re-investigating graphic design that’s more than making surfaces.’
The core concepts, then, behind relational aesthetics can open up a broader way of thinking about communication and the effects of its dissemination in the world. Where visual communication might come into its own is that it can develop these ideas beyond the aesthetics of the relational.
Relational Aesthetics Notes
Relational art offers services and experiences rather than objects to be consumed, the object is no longer materially or conceptually defined, but relationally. Bourriaud said “what is produced are connections with the world broadcast by object” in relational art meaning is to be elaborated collectively rather in the space of individual consumption; beholden to the contingences of its environment and audience.
Aesthetics theory consists in judging an artwork on the basis of interhuman relations which they represent or produce. Relational art addresses a new sense of connection between artists and their audience. It refers to an artwork that is open-ended, interactive and resistant to closure. Relational art takes place in time and space and creates interactive communicative experiences and intersubjective encounters, in which meaning is elaborated collectively.
Bourriaud describes the way in which relational aesthetics both rejects and incorporates the important themes modernity exercised upon art: “it is not modernity that is dead, but its idealistic and teleological version”. This means the enthusiastic modern hopes rational certainty or political utopias that fuelled the artistic enterprise during the 20th century have exhausted themselves.
Art was intended to announce a future world, today it is modelling possible microcosmic universes of authentic human sociability. Relational art is much less a consequence of the ideological or philosophical dilemmas of modernity than merely a reaction to the practical concerns of human interaction in our present world.
In the times of the romans, up to the Middle Ages art was used to represent the human relations to a deity; in the renaissance period leading all the length to modern art, art was identified and utilized for human relations to the physical world. Throughout the 1990’s there was an urbanization of contemporary society, art turns to interhuman relations and models of sociability.
It employs a term used by Marx, Bourriaud says relational aesthetics “represents a social interstice”. The work itself becomes space of potentiality, a free realm of possibility for human interaction. Artwork of the 1990’s turns the viewer/spectator into a neighbour, into a direct interlocutor; this is someone who takes part in a dialogue or conversation. The subjectivity of the observer engages the subjectivity of the artist. Meaning and sense are the outcome of an interaction between artist and beholder and not an authoritarian fact, an enforcing strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom. In relational art, form is a property that requires human interaction: connectivity and interactivity this is producing a new relation between the individual and its surroundings.
Participation and dialogue are the key factors and principles of relational art. It combines elements and social relations, it is a performative process-based approach revolving around the publics/audience participation, relying on human relations and social context rather than the autonomous physical art object. The social interactions created between the viewer and a work of art explore and exploit the affiliation amongst viewer, object and space.
Bourriaud saw artists as facilitators rather than makers and regarded art as information exchanged amid artist and the viewers. The artist in this sense gives audiences access to power and the means to change the world. Relational aesthetics is life, our culture is a screenplay, and it brings common points of artists of our generation. We search for the common denominate by looking at the frame work of artists work, providing us the tools that allowed one to analyse the works made by the individuals.
Since the beginning of the nineties, a growing number of artworks have been made on the basis of pre-existing works; more and more artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by others or available cultural products. This art of postproduction seems to reply to the multiplying chaos of global culture in the age of information, which is branded by an increase in the supply of works and the art world's seizure of forms ignored or disdained until now. These artists who insert their own work into that of others contribute to the purge of the traditional division between production and consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original work. The material they employ is no longer primary. It is no longer a matter of elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material but working with objects that are already in motion on the cultural market, which is to say, objects already informed by other objects. Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of the art teacher and the student, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them into new contexts.
Relational aesthetics dealt with the hospitable and interactive aspect of this revolution (why artists are determined to harvest models of sociality, to situate themselves within the interhuman sphere), while Postproduction apprehends the forms of knowledge generated by the appearance of the Net (how to find one's bearings in the cultural chaos and how to extract new modes of production from it). it is remarkable that the tools most often used by artists today in order to produce these relational models are pre-existing works or formal structures, as if the world of cultural products and artworks constituted an autonomous strata that could provide tools of connection between individuals; as if the formation of new forms of sociality and a true critique of contemporary forms of life involved a dissimilar attitude in relation to artistic patrimony, through the production of new relationships to culture in general and to the artwork in particular. Artists are using society as a catalogue of forms.
Artist Rirkrit Tiravanijia is a contemporary artist who cooks up an artistic experience. His installations appear in the form of stages or rooms, sharing meals, cooking, reading or playing music; architecture or structures for living and socialising are a core element in his work. He is about bringing people together, the art of it, rejecting traditional art objects but using the fundamentals that are already there. The practice is interaction based and revolves around the exchange, his artwork is a visual chronology of his life. His work explores the role of the artist, and is directly exemplary of the concept of relational aesthetics.
Aesthetics theory consists in judging an artwork on the basis of interhuman relations which they represent or produce. Relational art addresses a new sense of connection between artists and their audience. It refers to an artwork that is open-ended, interactive and resistant to closure. Relational art takes place in time and space and creates interactive communicative experiences and intersubjective encounters, in which meaning is elaborated collectively.
Bourriaud describes the way in which relational aesthetics both rejects and incorporates the important themes modernity exercised upon art: “it is not modernity that is dead, but its idealistic and teleological version”. This means the enthusiastic modern hopes rational certainty or political utopias that fuelled the artistic enterprise during the 20th century have exhausted themselves.
Art was intended to announce a future world, today it is modelling possible microcosmic universes of authentic human sociability. Relational art is much less a consequence of the ideological or philosophical dilemmas of modernity than merely a reaction to the practical concerns of human interaction in our present world.
In the times of the romans, up to the Middle Ages art was used to represent the human relations to a deity; in the renaissance period leading all the length to modern art, art was identified and utilized for human relations to the physical world. Throughout the 1990’s there was an urbanization of contemporary society, art turns to interhuman relations and models of sociability.
It employs a term used by Marx, Bourriaud says relational aesthetics “represents a social interstice”. The work itself becomes space of potentiality, a free realm of possibility for human interaction. Artwork of the 1990’s turns the viewer/spectator into a neighbour, into a direct interlocutor; this is someone who takes part in a dialogue or conversation. The subjectivity of the observer engages the subjectivity of the artist. Meaning and sense are the outcome of an interaction between artist and beholder and not an authoritarian fact, an enforcing strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom. In relational art, form is a property that requires human interaction: connectivity and interactivity this is producing a new relation between the individual and its surroundings.
Participation and dialogue are the key factors and principles of relational art. It combines elements and social relations, it is a performative process-based approach revolving around the publics/audience participation, relying on human relations and social context rather than the autonomous physical art object. The social interactions created between the viewer and a work of art explore and exploit the affiliation amongst viewer, object and space.
Bourriaud saw artists as facilitators rather than makers and regarded art as information exchanged amid artist and the viewers. The artist in this sense gives audiences access to power and the means to change the world. Relational aesthetics is life, our culture is a screenplay, and it brings common points of artists of our generation. We search for the common denominate by looking at the frame work of artists work, providing us the tools that allowed one to analyse the works made by the individuals.
Since the beginning of the nineties, a growing number of artworks have been made on the basis of pre-existing works; more and more artists interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by others or available cultural products. This art of postproduction seems to reply to the multiplying chaos of global culture in the age of information, which is branded by an increase in the supply of works and the art world's seizure of forms ignored or disdained until now. These artists who insert their own work into that of others contribute to the purge of the traditional division between production and consumption, creation and copy, readymade and original work. The material they employ is no longer primary. It is no longer a matter of elaborating a form on the basis of a raw material but working with objects that are already in motion on the cultural market, which is to say, objects already informed by other objects. Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of the art teacher and the student, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them into new contexts.
Relational aesthetics dealt with the hospitable and interactive aspect of this revolution (why artists are determined to harvest models of sociality, to situate themselves within the interhuman sphere), while Postproduction apprehends the forms of knowledge generated by the appearance of the Net (how to find one's bearings in the cultural chaos and how to extract new modes of production from it). it is remarkable that the tools most often used by artists today in order to produce these relational models are pre-existing works or formal structures, as if the world of cultural products and artworks constituted an autonomous strata that could provide tools of connection between individuals; as if the formation of new forms of sociality and a true critique of contemporary forms of life involved a dissimilar attitude in relation to artistic patrimony, through the production of new relationships to culture in general and to the artwork in particular. Artists are using society as a catalogue of forms.
Artist Rirkrit Tiravanijia is a contemporary artist who cooks up an artistic experience. His installations appear in the form of stages or rooms, sharing meals, cooking, reading or playing music; architecture or structures for living and socialising are a core element in his work. He is about bringing people together, the art of it, rejecting traditional art objects but using the fundamentals that are already there. The practice is interaction based and revolves around the exchange, his artwork is a visual chronology of his life. His work explores the role of the artist, and is directly exemplary of the concept of relational aesthetics.
Mind Map
Duchamp 'the ready made'
The readymades of Marcel Duchamp are ordinary manufactured objects that the artist selected and modified, as an antidote to what he called "retinal art". By simply choosing the object (or objects) and repositioning or joining, titling and signing it, the Found object became art.
Appropriation
Have you ever copied an image from a photograph, advertisement, or other source? When it is OK to do this? When is it not OK?
We live in a culture that overflows with images and objects. From television to the Internet, from the mall to the junkyard, we are surrounded by words, images, and objects that are cheap, or free and throwaway. It is not surprising that artists today incorporate this stuff into their creative expression.
To appropriate is to borrow. Appropriation is the practice of creating new work by taking a preexisting image from another source—art history books, advertisements, the media—and transforming or combining it with new ones. The three-dimensional version of appropriation is the use of found objects in art. A found object is an existing object—often a mundane manufactured product—given a new identity as an artwork or part of an artwork.
In art that uses appropriation, two questions can to be explored:
What is the source of the image or object that has been appropriated? Why has the artist chosen this source for images?
Some common sources of appropriated images are works of art from the distant or recent past, historical documents, media (film and television), or consumer culture (advertisements or products). Sometimes the source is unknown, but it may have personal associations for the artist. The source of an appropriated image or object can be politically charged, symbolic, ambiguous, or can push the limits of imagery deemed acceptable for art.
What does the artist do with the appropriated image?
Appropriated imagery can be photographically or digitally reproduced, copied by mechanical means such as an overhead projector, attached directly onto an artwork, or re-created in a number of ways. The result can be a deadpan representation or a startling transformation. Artists sometimes re-create an object or repaint it, altering its scale or style to create new meaning. Artists can also juxtapose different images or objects, layer them with other images, break them into fragments, or recontextualize (glossary) them, which means to redefine images or objects by a placing them in a new context.
We live in a culture that overflows with images and objects. From television to the Internet, from the mall to the junkyard, we are surrounded by words, images, and objects that are cheap, or free and throwaway. It is not surprising that artists today incorporate this stuff into their creative expression.
To appropriate is to borrow. Appropriation is the practice of creating new work by taking a preexisting image from another source—art history books, advertisements, the media—and transforming or combining it with new ones. The three-dimensional version of appropriation is the use of found objects in art. A found object is an existing object—often a mundane manufactured product—given a new identity as an artwork or part of an artwork.
In art that uses appropriation, two questions can to be explored:
What is the source of the image or object that has been appropriated? Why has the artist chosen this source for images?
Some common sources of appropriated images are works of art from the distant or recent past, historical documents, media (film and television), or consumer culture (advertisements or products). Sometimes the source is unknown, but it may have personal associations for the artist. The source of an appropriated image or object can be politically charged, symbolic, ambiguous, or can push the limits of imagery deemed acceptable for art.
What does the artist do with the appropriated image?
Appropriated imagery can be photographically or digitally reproduced, copied by mechanical means such as an overhead projector, attached directly onto an artwork, or re-created in a number of ways. The result can be a deadpan representation or a startling transformation. Artists sometimes re-create an object or repaint it, altering its scale or style to create new meaning. Artists can also juxtapose different images or objects, layer them with other images, break them into fragments, or recontextualize (glossary) them, which means to redefine images or objects by a placing them in a new context.
Relational Aesthetics - Nicolas Bourriaud
Nicolas Bourriaud - Relational Aesthetics notes
Artist activity is a game, those forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts; it is not an immutable essence. It is a critic’s task to study this activity in the present. The new is no longer a criterion, except among detractors of modern art who cling solely to the things that their traditionalist culture has taught them to loathe in yesterday’s art. In order to invent more effective tools and more valid viewpoints, it behoves us to understand the changes nowadays occurring in the social area, and grasp what has already changed and what is still changing.
The 20th century was the arena for a struggle between two visions of the world: a modest, rationalist conception, hailing from the 18th century and a philosophy of spontaneity and liberation through the irrational (dada, surrealism, the situationists) both of which were opposed to authoritarian and utilitarian forces eager to gauge human relations and subjugates people. The advances in technologies and ‘reason’ made it must easier to blindly replace human labour by machines and set up more sophisticated subjugation techniques all through a general rationalisation of the production process.
What used to be called the avant-garde has developed from the ideological swing of things offered by modern rationalism; but is it now reformed on the basis of quite different philosophical, cultural and social presuppositions. It is evident that today’s art is carrying on this fight by coming up with perceptive experimental critical and participatory models.
The ambition of artists who include their practice within the slipstream of historical modernity is to repeat neither its form nor its claims, and even less assign to art the same functions as it. Their task is parallel to the one that Lyotard allocated to post-modern architecture,
“Is condemned to create a series of minor modifications in a space whose modernity it inherits, and abandon an overall reconstruction of the space inhabited by humankind.”
This chance can be summed up in just a few words: learning to inhabit the world in a better way, instead of trying to construct it based on a preconceived idea of historical evolution. The role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary a utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist. Althusser said that one always catches the worlds train on the move; Deleuze that “grass grows from the middle” and not from the bottom or top. The artists dwells in the circumstances the resent offers him and turn that into the physical and conceptual world. An artist catches the world on the move, he is a tenant of culture.
Nowadays modernity extends into the practices of cultural DIY and recycling into the invention of the everyday and the development of time lived, which are not objects less deserving of attention and examination than utopias and the formal ‘novelties’ that typified modernity yesterday. There is nothing more absurd either than the project or than the claim that its subversive aspects are not based on any theoretical terrain. Its plan, which has just as much to do with working conditions and the conditions in which cultural objects are produced, as with the changing forms of social life may nevertheless seem dull to minds formed in the mould of cultural Darwinism.
Artist activity is a game, those forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts; it is not an immutable essence. It is a critic’s task to study this activity in the present. The new is no longer a criterion, except among detractors of modern art who cling solely to the things that their traditionalist culture has taught them to loathe in yesterday’s art. In order to invent more effective tools and more valid viewpoints, it behoves us to understand the changes nowadays occurring in the social area, and grasp what has already changed and what is still changing.
The 20th century was the arena for a struggle between two visions of the world: a modest, rationalist conception, hailing from the 18th century and a philosophy of spontaneity and liberation through the irrational (dada, surrealism, the situationists) both of which were opposed to authoritarian and utilitarian forces eager to gauge human relations and subjugates people. The advances in technologies and ‘reason’ made it must easier to blindly replace human labour by machines and set up more sophisticated subjugation techniques all through a general rationalisation of the production process.
What used to be called the avant-garde has developed from the ideological swing of things offered by modern rationalism; but is it now reformed on the basis of quite different philosophical, cultural and social presuppositions. It is evident that today’s art is carrying on this fight by coming up with perceptive experimental critical and participatory models.
The ambition of artists who include their practice within the slipstream of historical modernity is to repeat neither its form nor its claims, and even less assign to art the same functions as it. Their task is parallel to the one that Lyotard allocated to post-modern architecture,
“Is condemned to create a series of minor modifications in a space whose modernity it inherits, and abandon an overall reconstruction of the space inhabited by humankind.”
This chance can be summed up in just a few words: learning to inhabit the world in a better way, instead of trying to construct it based on a preconceived idea of historical evolution. The role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary a utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist. Althusser said that one always catches the worlds train on the move; Deleuze that “grass grows from the middle” and not from the bottom or top. The artists dwells in the circumstances the resent offers him and turn that into the physical and conceptual world. An artist catches the world on the move, he is a tenant of culture.
Nowadays modernity extends into the practices of cultural DIY and recycling into the invention of the everyday and the development of time lived, which are not objects less deserving of attention and examination than utopias and the formal ‘novelties’ that typified modernity yesterday. There is nothing more absurd either than the project or than the claim that its subversive aspects are not based on any theoretical terrain. Its plan, which has just as much to do with working conditions and the conditions in which cultural objects are produced, as with the changing forms of social life may nevertheless seem dull to minds formed in the mould of cultural Darwinism.
Mind map
Mr Kant
ART FOR ART’S SAKE
The beautiful, for Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804), is “that which without any concept is cognitized as the object of necessary satisfaction.” The status of aesthetic judgment is not empirical but logical, based upon the powers of human reason and rationality, which excludes internal and external purposiveness. Kant introduces purposiveness without a purpose, allowing the mind of the one who contemplates art free, unrestricted play of the mental faculties. Within the Romantic movement, artists were believed to have the right to exist for the sole purpose of making art and art supposedly existed for the sole purpose of being art. Art for art’s sake is such a powerful (and necessary) concept, so pervasive and entrenched that it is one of the most important motivating forces behind art to this day. With the initiation of “art for art’s sake,” a phrase coined, perhaps by Benjamin Constant, in response to or as a definition of Kant’s ideas, the artist and the work of art now had a purpose again—not a social purpose but a purpose that was strictly an art purpose. Confronting the staid and serious Neoclassic was its rival “ism”, Romanticism, which championed the artist as a genius and art as an expression of that genius—concepts that were pure Kant.
“Art for art’s sake” is a particular concept developed within the branch of philosophy called Aesthetics. These terms: “art for art’s sake,” “aestheticism” and “aesthetics” are not interchangeable. Also not to be confused with Kantian aesthetic theory is Aestheticism, which was an artistic movement in late Nineteenth Century England. English Aestheticism was an attitude on the part of art makers and art appreciators, based upon the desire to make every object “artful” and beautiful, regardless of its utilitarian or use value. Late Nineteenth Century Aestheticism was a desire to combine art and life and life and beauty. “Art for art’s sake” was an aspect of aesthetics, a Kantian derived concept, completely divorced from any specific work of art or from any particular art movement. The independence of aesthetics from art is best illustrated when we picture Kant, an elderly and retiring philosopher professor who denied himself all sensual pleasures in his pursuit of the intellect. Living in a backwater university town, he never went to museums and did not own any art, and yet he was able to reason his way to the solution of grounding the response to art, which is personal and therefore subjective (based in the viewing subject) in an intellectual framework that is impersonal and objective.
The intellectual framework devised by Kant is aesthetics or the grounds for the definition of art. Kant set art free from content, subject matter, the client’s wishes, the community’s desires and the needs of religion. The idea of art being given wholly over to aesthetic pleasure and delight was the ultimate freedom of art to exist on its own merits and to be the center of its own world. Art lived and died by its own art rules and justified its own existence in terms of its separate universe. Art was autonomous and free. Kant’s ahistorical or transcendental ideas did not go unnoticed, and they were conveyed by German expatriates to post-Revolution French intellectuals and artists, who were increasingly alienated from society and adrift without the traditional patrons of Church and State. Suddenly socially “useless” without their historical missions, certain artists found Kant’s concepts very appealing and timely.
The Critique of Judgment (1790) contained the right ideas at the right time: ideas, which were a fortuitous response to an artistic crisis. What does an artist do? How does an artist make art and why? Why is it that certain objects are universally called “art?” What are the common characteristics of these objects? What is their “art-ness?” Kant’s answers came, by the 20th century, to be commonly called formalism. Attention to Form in Kantian philosophy, or art for art’s sake, separates art from its traditional role as purveyor of subject matter on the command of a patron. But there is a difference between what Kant wrote and what his followers made of his ideas. For Kant, formalism is a mode of apprehending and emphasizes direct experience or intuitional awareness, without consideration of practical implications, of a work of art. The cultivation of aesthetic experience as a deliberate value was the work of Kant, who developed critical criterion for the aptness of a work of art for appreciation, based upon its formal properties, rather than upon practical significance or importance of subject matter.
The beautiful, for Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804), is “that which without any concept is cognitized as the object of necessary satisfaction.” The status of aesthetic judgment is not empirical but logical, based upon the powers of human reason and rationality, which excludes internal and external purposiveness. Kant introduces purposiveness without a purpose, allowing the mind of the one who contemplates art free, unrestricted play of the mental faculties. Within the Romantic movement, artists were believed to have the right to exist for the sole purpose of making art and art supposedly existed for the sole purpose of being art. Art for art’s sake is such a powerful (and necessary) concept, so pervasive and entrenched that it is one of the most important motivating forces behind art to this day. With the initiation of “art for art’s sake,” a phrase coined, perhaps by Benjamin Constant, in response to or as a definition of Kant’s ideas, the artist and the work of art now had a purpose again—not a social purpose but a purpose that was strictly an art purpose. Confronting the staid and serious Neoclassic was its rival “ism”, Romanticism, which championed the artist as a genius and art as an expression of that genius—concepts that were pure Kant.
“Art for art’s sake” is a particular concept developed within the branch of philosophy called Aesthetics. These terms: “art for art’s sake,” “aestheticism” and “aesthetics” are not interchangeable. Also not to be confused with Kantian aesthetic theory is Aestheticism, which was an artistic movement in late Nineteenth Century England. English Aestheticism was an attitude on the part of art makers and art appreciators, based upon the desire to make every object “artful” and beautiful, regardless of its utilitarian or use value. Late Nineteenth Century Aestheticism was a desire to combine art and life and life and beauty. “Art for art’s sake” was an aspect of aesthetics, a Kantian derived concept, completely divorced from any specific work of art or from any particular art movement. The independence of aesthetics from art is best illustrated when we picture Kant, an elderly and retiring philosopher professor who denied himself all sensual pleasures in his pursuit of the intellect. Living in a backwater university town, he never went to museums and did not own any art, and yet he was able to reason his way to the solution of grounding the response to art, which is personal and therefore subjective (based in the viewing subject) in an intellectual framework that is impersonal and objective.
The intellectual framework devised by Kant is aesthetics or the grounds for the definition of art. Kant set art free from content, subject matter, the client’s wishes, the community’s desires and the needs of religion. The idea of art being given wholly over to aesthetic pleasure and delight was the ultimate freedom of art to exist on its own merits and to be the center of its own world. Art lived and died by its own art rules and justified its own existence in terms of its separate universe. Art was autonomous and free. Kant’s ahistorical or transcendental ideas did not go unnoticed, and they were conveyed by German expatriates to post-Revolution French intellectuals and artists, who were increasingly alienated from society and adrift without the traditional patrons of Church and State. Suddenly socially “useless” without their historical missions, certain artists found Kant’s concepts very appealing and timely.
The Critique of Judgment (1790) contained the right ideas at the right time: ideas, which were a fortuitous response to an artistic crisis. What does an artist do? How does an artist make art and why? Why is it that certain objects are universally called “art?” What are the common characteristics of these objects? What is their “art-ness?” Kant’s answers came, by the 20th century, to be commonly called formalism. Attention to Form in Kantian philosophy, or art for art’s sake, separates art from its traditional role as purveyor of subject matter on the command of a patron. But there is a difference between what Kant wrote and what his followers made of his ideas. For Kant, formalism is a mode of apprehending and emphasizes direct experience or intuitional awareness, without consideration of practical implications, of a work of art. The cultivation of aesthetic experience as a deliberate value was the work of Kant, who developed critical criterion for the aptness of a work of art for appreciation, based upon its formal properties, rather than upon practical significance or importance of subject matter.
Semiocapitalism
The research experiment is based on a thesis of a privileged relation between economy, aesthetics and sensibility. The cognitive, semiotic and affective mode of accumulation transforms economy from the production of objects to subjects into the production of subjectivity itself. The mechanisms of semiocapitalist value production are directly acting on the sensitivity (nervous system) of the human society, affecting particularly its sensibility (ethico-aesthetic perception). The experiment tries to understand the inclusion of sensibility in the mechanisms of semiocapitalist value production both historically and logically by studying the aesthetic dispositive of semiocapitalism especially in relation to the history of how economy has modeled sensitivity.
We are tracing the history of the relationship between economy and aesthetics, tracing the history of aesthetic dispositives in the functioning of capitalism: from Renaissance perspectivization to its baroque form of proliferation of perspectives in the 16th century Spain to its gothic form in protestant ethics to its return again to its neo-baroque form in the semiocapitalism in the form of deregulation, arbitrariness, simulation, cynicism and deceit.
The experiment is building this genealogy especially on studying the historical relationship between image and word in the history of sensibility, ranging from the iconophobic regimes of monotheism to the iconocratic regime present in semiocapitalism.
We are trying to outline the iconocratic aesthetic dispositive in the functioning of semiocapitalism to better understand the controlling nature and logic of a-siginifying semiotic machines, which operate on the level where or in the way that they can avoid the circle of meaning or signification – and they need to, this is fundamental for them, because of the arbitrariness of all “over” has penetrated our immediate experience (it is this loss of faith, the erosion of values, that distinguishes arbitrary power from despotic power and the overcoding charasteristic to it). Perhaps this would help us understand how is it possible for power to function in the condition of arbitrariness and erosion of all values, after the collapse of the law of value (when it can no longer rely on “overcoding”)? What is “pure power”, a power that is not just means to this or that end, but which is in no relation to ends at all, that operates in “some other way” (as Benjamin says)?
How is it possible for something to function without foundation?
How to understand this form of functioning?
How do mechanisms of semiocapitalist valorization model sensibility?
What is the aesthetic dispositive of semiocapitalism?
And its relationship to the mutation of sensibility?
We are tracing the history of the relationship between economy and aesthetics, tracing the history of aesthetic dispositives in the functioning of capitalism: from Renaissance perspectivization to its baroque form of proliferation of perspectives in the 16th century Spain to its gothic form in protestant ethics to its return again to its neo-baroque form in the semiocapitalism in the form of deregulation, arbitrariness, simulation, cynicism and deceit.
The experiment is building this genealogy especially on studying the historical relationship between image and word in the history of sensibility, ranging from the iconophobic regimes of monotheism to the iconocratic regime present in semiocapitalism.
We are trying to outline the iconocratic aesthetic dispositive in the functioning of semiocapitalism to better understand the controlling nature and logic of a-siginifying semiotic machines, which operate on the level where or in the way that they can avoid the circle of meaning or signification – and they need to, this is fundamental for them, because of the arbitrariness of all “over” has penetrated our immediate experience (it is this loss of faith, the erosion of values, that distinguishes arbitrary power from despotic power and the overcoding charasteristic to it). Perhaps this would help us understand how is it possible for power to function in the condition of arbitrariness and erosion of all values, after the collapse of the law of value (when it can no longer rely on “overcoding”)? What is “pure power”, a power that is not just means to this or that end, but which is in no relation to ends at all, that operates in “some other way” (as Benjamin says)?
How is it possible for something to function without foundation?
How to understand this form of functioning?
How do mechanisms of semiocapitalist valorization model sensibility?
What is the aesthetic dispositive of semiocapitalism?
And its relationship to the mutation of sensibility?
The Uprising
On Theory and Finance: Review of Berardi’s "The Uprising"
Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s newly translated book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance is light on two things: poetry and finance. What Berardi gives the reader instead is a poetics loaded with quasi-literary keywords and bits of post-Marxist critique, a poetics that is semiotized and Search Engine Optimized for the reader of contemporary theory. If we were to give this poetics a name, we might call it reverse symbolism, for Berardi means quite literally to reverse the project of symbolist poetry, or what he calls “the main thread of twentieth century poetic research.” The symbolist culprit, the moving target of Berardi’s reversionism, is what he calls the “dereferentialization” of language, the tearing apart of the signifier and the referent. To put this in another way,The Uprising argues that symbolist experiments with language in the early twentieth century have found their deepest expression in our current predicament. We now find ourselves in the throes of a symbolist “semio-capitalism” where the word and the world are no longer linked together in meaning.
Semio-capitalism is a portable concept; it is easy to pack and travels light. In parable form, it goes something like this:
Financialization and the virtualization of human communication
are obviously intertwined: thanks to the digitization of exchanges,
finance has turned into a social virus that is spreading everywhere,
transforming things into symbols. The symbolic spiral of financialization
is sucking down and swallowing up the world of physical things, of
concrete skills and knowledge. The concrete wealth of Europeans is
vanishing into a black hole of pure financial destruction.
Now, I’ve never seen a symbol “suck down” or “swallow up” anything—including matter, skills, and knowledge—but Berardi does tie another knot between symbolist poetry and finance: deregulation. Citing Rimbaud’s phrase “dérèglement des sens et des mot,” Berardi, through sleight of hand, hitches the symbolist (or proto-symbolist) “deregulation (or derangement) of the senses and the word” to the economic project of financial deregulation that took place throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s in Europe and America. The idea is that symbolism “deregulated” language by divorcing it from the world in much the same way that financial deregulation led to a disconnect between financial instruments and the value of labor.
This is a tidy metaphor, but more on that later. The first problem with Berardi’s analogy between poetry and finance is that it bears no relation to the reality of either.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi’s newly translated book The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance is light on two things: poetry and finance. What Berardi gives the reader instead is a poetics loaded with quasi-literary keywords and bits of post-Marxist critique, a poetics that is semiotized and Search Engine Optimized for the reader of contemporary theory. If we were to give this poetics a name, we might call it reverse symbolism, for Berardi means quite literally to reverse the project of symbolist poetry, or what he calls “the main thread of twentieth century poetic research.” The symbolist culprit, the moving target of Berardi’s reversionism, is what he calls the “dereferentialization” of language, the tearing apart of the signifier and the referent. To put this in another way,The Uprising argues that symbolist experiments with language in the early twentieth century have found their deepest expression in our current predicament. We now find ourselves in the throes of a symbolist “semio-capitalism” where the word and the world are no longer linked together in meaning.
Semio-capitalism is a portable concept; it is easy to pack and travels light. In parable form, it goes something like this:
Financialization and the virtualization of human communication
are obviously intertwined: thanks to the digitization of exchanges,
finance has turned into a social virus that is spreading everywhere,
transforming things into symbols. The symbolic spiral of financialization
is sucking down and swallowing up the world of physical things, of
concrete skills and knowledge. The concrete wealth of Europeans is
vanishing into a black hole of pure financial destruction.
Now, I’ve never seen a symbol “suck down” or “swallow up” anything—including matter, skills, and knowledge—but Berardi does tie another knot between symbolist poetry and finance: deregulation. Citing Rimbaud’s phrase “dérèglement des sens et des mot,” Berardi, through sleight of hand, hitches the symbolist (or proto-symbolist) “deregulation (or derangement) of the senses and the word” to the economic project of financial deregulation that took place throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s in Europe and America. The idea is that symbolism “deregulated” language by divorcing it from the world in much the same way that financial deregulation led to a disconnect between financial instruments and the value of labor.
This is a tidy metaphor, but more on that later. The first problem with Berardi’s analogy between poetry and finance is that it bears no relation to the reality of either.
Conceptual Art Notes
Martin Creed > Work 88 > Crumpled paper in a ball > conceptual art, what is it? Duchamp > Urinal > what is conceptual art? How should we approach it? Why should we care?
Leading figures > Marcel Duchamp, Martin Creed
Before the 20th century, there were objects and there were artworks. Natural, functional not beautiful objects. Artworks were made by artists, they were beautiful and expensive. People were happy with the distinction, but 100 years ago, objects became more and more like artworks and they began to swap places until we cannot tell which is which anymore. This was the first innovation of conceptual art.
Duchamp > a chain smoking sphinx of art, he began as a painter, then around 1913 became attracted to the unassuming everyday objects to which he began presenting as ready-made artworks. Most famously, the urinal. “Taste is the taste enemy of art… it’s hard to find an object that has no attraction from the aesthetic angel. Of course humour was introduced”. Duchamp was making a point that not everything was art but anything COULD be art, why? Because the object didn’t matter anymore, it was the concept, the idea, and that was the beginning to what we called conceptual art. Hid audacious acts opened the floodgates to the conceptual art world.
Piero Manzoni > who rose to prominence from his series of ‘achromes’ made from increasingly unusual materials, he then began to experiment with concepts, he wrote his signature on people and drew never ending lines; blew up balloons and called the piece ‘artists breath,’ put his thumb prints on boiled eggs for the public to consume and most famously his creation pushed both and propriety to the limit. In May 1961 Manzoni produced 90 unique sculptures, he then tinned, signed and number them. It was his own shit. The label comes in four different languages stating 30g net, if you thought conceptual art was crap, there was the proof. Manzoni declared that each tin was worth its weight in gold. You may ask who would buy this, but last year, Christie’s sold ‘number 54’ for £182,500 making it gram for gram almost 200 x more expensive than gold!
What does it all mean, who is it meant to provoke and what was Manzoni’s end game? It seems like Manzoni is mocking us, critics, museums and those who have more money than sense, making fun of the whole madness of the art world. This clever conceit will never truly be exposed as once the artwork is open the value is lost. This piece is a shit filled hand grenade that Manzoni has flung 55 years into the future that we still, don’t know how to defuse it. He died at 29 but proved that conceptual art with a good idea could convert practically anything into a masterpiece. A pioneering provocateur whose influence lives on.
Martin Creed > turner prize winner > he has converted a whole range of things into things, blue tack, empty galleries, singing and even more shit. The scrunched up piece of paper that costs £180, to which he says, he thought was funny, but tried to make it as beautiful as it could be. A perfect sphere that has no limit. His paper ball reflect a broader interest in things, from chairs, cactus and balloons. He thought it was worth doing, he liked it not necessarily calling it art, who says what is good or bad, if it feels good than that’s the test of things.Maybe we shouldn’t worry about if its classed as art or not, we just need to ask, is it funny, original but most importantly, does it make us think.
Alphonse Allais > in 1897 introduced the world to a series of pictures, each was a plain piece of paper. Until you read the titles which were nothing more but a joke. These jokes were as important in the world of perpetual art as it showed that words can be more meaningful than images. When conceptual art really kicked off in the 1960s the pioneers were so keen to shake of its decorative frilliness they turned more and more to words. In a revolutionary atmosphere words were used to explain, subvert and replace the art they described.
Michael Craig-Martin > in 1973 put a glass of water on a shelf in a gallery and titled it an ‘oak tree’ presented with a dialogue to the confused viewer. By titling it ‘oak tree’ you are changing it from a glass of water to an oak tree; it was meant to confuse it audience, when it comes to conceptual art it is 100% the thought that counts.
Sol LeWitt > declared the “idea becomes a machine that makes the art, it is the objective of the artist who is concerned with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and therefore usually want it to become emotionally dry”. Some artists use words to combine intellectual curiosity with real emotional power, one of the most talented was artist Mary Kelly > her documentation of childbirth came to inspire, she recorded the changing relationship with her son. Blending unusual materials with words, using dirty nappies as a canvas, her work consists of small murky images that don’t often leap out at the viewer. These diary like images contain intimate words of mother and son, separated into columns you understand their relationship and it comes to life. Her art is about self-understanding. You have to read, analyse and obtain it, you are drawn towards the emotional presence in her work.
Robert Montgomery > he takes text out of the gallery and into the world. His work has no pictures but is full of imagery. He calls himself a true romantic painter like Turner, he engages with the culture and politics of our time. The conversation of the city, the billboards that treat us as consumers, the infrastructure of capitalism. But to show the antidote. Is it poetry, is it art? It is to be accessible with people.
Martin Creed > Work 88 > Crumpled paper in a ball > conceptual art, what is it? Duchamp > Urinal > what is conceptual art? How should we approach it? Why should we care?
Leading figures > Marcel Duchamp, Martin Creed
Before the 20th century, there were objects and there were artworks. Natural, functional not beautiful objects. Artworks were made by artists, they were beautiful and expensive. People were happy with the distinction, but 100 years ago, objects became more and more like artworks and they began to swap places until we cannot tell which is which anymore. This was the first innovation of conceptual art.
Duchamp > a chain smoking sphinx of art, he began as a painter, then around 1913 became attracted to the unassuming everyday objects to which he began presenting as ready-made artworks. Most famously, the urinal. “Taste is the taste enemy of art… it’s hard to find an object that has no attraction from the aesthetic angel. Of course humour was introduced”. Duchamp was making a point that not everything was art but anything COULD be art, why? Because the object didn’t matter anymore, it was the concept, the idea, and that was the beginning to what we called conceptual art. Hid audacious acts opened the floodgates to the conceptual art world.
Piero Manzoni > who rose to prominence from his series of ‘achromes’ made from increasingly unusual materials, he then began to experiment with concepts, he wrote his signature on people and drew never ending lines; blew up balloons and called the piece ‘artists breath,’ put his thumb prints on boiled eggs for the public to consume and most famously his creation pushed both and propriety to the limit. In May 1961 Manzoni produced 90 unique sculptures, he then tinned, signed and number them. It was his own shit. The label comes in four different languages stating 30g net, if you thought conceptual art was crap, there was the proof. Manzoni declared that each tin was worth its weight in gold. You may ask who would buy this, but last year, Christie’s sold ‘number 54’ for £182,500 making it gram for gram almost 200 x more expensive than gold!
What does it all mean, who is it meant to provoke and what was Manzoni’s end game? It seems like Manzoni is mocking us, critics, museums and those who have more money than sense, making fun of the whole madness of the art world. This clever conceit will never truly be exposed as once the artwork is open the value is lost. This piece is a shit filled hand grenade that Manzoni has flung 55 years into the future that we still, don’t know how to defuse it. He died at 29 but proved that conceptual art with a good idea could convert practically anything into a masterpiece. A pioneering provocateur whose influence lives on.
Martin Creed > turner prize winner > he has converted a whole range of things into things, blue tack, empty galleries, singing and even more shit. The scrunched up piece of paper that costs £180, to which he says, he thought was funny, but tried to make it as beautiful as it could be. A perfect sphere that has no limit. His paper ball reflect a broader interest in things, from chairs, cactus and balloons. He thought it was worth doing, he liked it not necessarily calling it art, who says what is good or bad, if it feels good than that’s the test of things.Maybe we shouldn’t worry about if its classed as art or not, we just need to ask, is it funny, original but most importantly, does it make us think.
Alphonse Allais > in 1897 introduced the world to a series of pictures, each was a plain piece of paper. Until you read the titles which were nothing more but a joke. These jokes were as important in the world of perpetual art as it showed that words can be more meaningful than images. When conceptual art really kicked off in the 1960s the pioneers were so keen to shake of its decorative frilliness they turned more and more to words. In a revolutionary atmosphere words were used to explain, subvert and replace the art they described.
Michael Craig-Martin > in 1973 put a glass of water on a shelf in a gallery and titled it an ‘oak tree’ presented with a dialogue to the confused viewer. By titling it ‘oak tree’ you are changing it from a glass of water to an oak tree; it was meant to confuse it audience, when it comes to conceptual art it is 100% the thought that counts.
Sol LeWitt > declared the “idea becomes a machine that makes the art, it is the objective of the artist who is concerned with conceptual art to make his work mentally interesting to the spectator, and therefore usually want it to become emotionally dry”. Some artists use words to combine intellectual curiosity with real emotional power, one of the most talented was artist Mary Kelly > her documentation of childbirth came to inspire, she recorded the changing relationship with her son. Blending unusual materials with words, using dirty nappies as a canvas, her work consists of small murky images that don’t often leap out at the viewer. These diary like images contain intimate words of mother and son, separated into columns you understand their relationship and it comes to life. Her art is about self-understanding. You have to read, analyse and obtain it, you are drawn towards the emotional presence in her work.
Robert Montgomery > he takes text out of the gallery and into the world. His work has no pictures but is full of imagery. He calls himself a true romantic painter like Turner, he engages with the culture and politics of our time. The conversation of the city, the billboards that treat us as consumers, the infrastructure of capitalism. But to show the antidote. Is it poetry, is it art? It is to be accessible with people.
A manifesto
'How to be a good artist.'
This is a set of rules, an invert guide or brief manifesto to follow that I have made for becoming the contemporary artist.
The problem and the solution - this is my idea for the modern day artist, with the effects of capitalism in full swing the idea of being an artist is one that holds no security or definite profitable gain, set wage, or comfort to rely on. Of course, you have those artists who want to create art, be free and swing from trees at night time but then there those who read newspapers and have a slightly better grasp on reality and the essential needs we take to survive e.g. iPhone 6 with a marble case and matching iPad.
The problem is that we only strive to earn money, we are set to believe that eventually that is all we abundantly amount to, our worth, stature and secret bank accounts in the canary islands. With a world that builds us up only to stand if we wear the highest shoes it does come with many anomalies along the way.
With the lack of money put into emerging artists it is hard to make a name for yourself in the art world, this elitist group does open its doors at private views by giving out prosecco but ends it when you take your third glass. Another issue we face is the fact the space in London is growing ever smaller with the property market only ever rising. The studio spaces and venue hires will be made into flats or developed into something else, it’s like a subtle middle finger to those trying to be creative in an ever emergent city.
To produce work you’d be proud to show an auntie or uncle at Christmas is where we all go wrong, it’s time to now sell out, realize that capitalism has won and the only option is to feed the art market and its contemporary collectors. Money will always be the catalyst that turns the world.
In the words of Ayn Rand, ’It is commonly believed that morality demands we choose between sacrificing other people to ourselves (which is deemed “selfish” and therefore immoral) and sacrificing our own values to satisfy others’ needs (which is deemed unselfish and therefore moral). Rand rejects both options as forms of selflessness, and offers a new concept of egoism — an ethics of rational selfishness that rejects sacrifice in all its forms.’
The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness which means: the values required for man’s survival qua man which means: the values required for human survival not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the “aspirations,” the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered an industrial society and can conceive of no self-interest but that of grabbing the loot of the moment.
Survival is definitely for the fittest, and as much as it turns us into terrible human beings we still need to creep our way into the world and find a chair that is sturdy enough to hold our paranoid schizophrenic selves as we enter into adulthood and prepare for the dreaded ‘freelance artist’ stage but then finally find ourselves on new bond street trying to break into a gallery and steal a Jeff Koon’s sculpture for millions, then of course end up in jail.. Well at least you are guaranteed three set meals and possible use of an Xbox 360.
We do all face dilemmas in life, but as an artist I can only imagine it never truly ends.
So, the choice is clear, sell your integrity, veracity, honor and pride and get into a commercial gallery that prices your work at £12,000 minimum or of course, marry a rich old man and persuade him to add you to his will.
This is a set of rules, an invert guide or brief manifesto to follow that I have made for becoming the contemporary artist.
The problem and the solution - this is my idea for the modern day artist, with the effects of capitalism in full swing the idea of being an artist is one that holds no security or definite profitable gain, set wage, or comfort to rely on. Of course, you have those artists who want to create art, be free and swing from trees at night time but then there those who read newspapers and have a slightly better grasp on reality and the essential needs we take to survive e.g. iPhone 6 with a marble case and matching iPad.
The problem is that we only strive to earn money, we are set to believe that eventually that is all we abundantly amount to, our worth, stature and secret bank accounts in the canary islands. With a world that builds us up only to stand if we wear the highest shoes it does come with many anomalies along the way.
- We all want to live in London as artist
- Promoting ourselves as unique artists following our hearts to produce work we are proud of
- Selling your artistic integrity to buy a new ford focus
With the lack of money put into emerging artists it is hard to make a name for yourself in the art world, this elitist group does open its doors at private views by giving out prosecco but ends it when you take your third glass. Another issue we face is the fact the space in London is growing ever smaller with the property market only ever rising. The studio spaces and venue hires will be made into flats or developed into something else, it’s like a subtle middle finger to those trying to be creative in an ever emergent city.
To produce work you’d be proud to show an auntie or uncle at Christmas is where we all go wrong, it’s time to now sell out, realize that capitalism has won and the only option is to feed the art market and its contemporary collectors. Money will always be the catalyst that turns the world.
In the words of Ayn Rand, ’It is commonly believed that morality demands we choose between sacrificing other people to ourselves (which is deemed “selfish” and therefore immoral) and sacrificing our own values to satisfy others’ needs (which is deemed unselfish and therefore moral). Rand rejects both options as forms of selflessness, and offers a new concept of egoism — an ethics of rational selfishness that rejects sacrifice in all its forms.’
The Objectivist ethics proudly advocates and upholds rational selfishness which means: the values required for man’s survival qua man which means: the values required for human survival not the values produced by the desires, the emotions, the “aspirations,” the feelings, the whims or the needs of irrational brutes, who have never outgrown the primordial practice of human sacrifices, have never discovered an industrial society and can conceive of no self-interest but that of grabbing the loot of the moment.
Survival is definitely for the fittest, and as much as it turns us into terrible human beings we still need to creep our way into the world and find a chair that is sturdy enough to hold our paranoid schizophrenic selves as we enter into adulthood and prepare for the dreaded ‘freelance artist’ stage but then finally find ourselves on new bond street trying to break into a gallery and steal a Jeff Koon’s sculpture for millions, then of course end up in jail.. Well at least you are guaranteed three set meals and possible use of an Xbox 360.
We do all face dilemmas in life, but as an artist I can only imagine it never truly ends.
So, the choice is clear, sell your integrity, veracity, honor and pride and get into a commercial gallery that prices your work at £12,000 minimum or of course, marry a rich old man and persuade him to add you to his will.
How to be a good artist today, the ideas of Ayn Rand and effects of capitalism
I. Expansion on the relationship of politics and abstraction
A. Abstraction against society, the norms, the art markets driven by capitalism. What does money mean for art? Do sales relate to freedom?
B. Main Point
Ayn Rand and the virtue of selfishness
1. Ethical egoism in relation to success in the art world
The virtue of selfishness
Selfishness — a virtue? Ayn Rand chose this book’s provocative title because she was on a mission to overcome centuries of demonization. Rand writes, “the word ‘selfishness’ is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.
“Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word ‘selfishness’ is: concern with one’s own interests. “This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.” |
The idea of selfishness is for the best interest of that person, an artist trying to promote them self is for their beneficial gain and uplift. She, I think has an attitude which I admire, heartless but laced with power.
|
It is commonly believed that morality demands we choose between sacrificing other people to ourselves (which is deemed “selfish” and therefore immoral) and sacrificing our own values to satisfy others’ needs (which is deemed unselfish and therefore moral). In this book, Rand rejects both options as forms of selflessness, and offers a new concept of egoism — an ethics of rational selfishness that rejects sacrifice in all its forms.
Selfishness, however, does not mean “doing whatever you please.” Moral principles are not a matter of personal opinion — they are based in the facts of reality, in man’s nature as a rational being, who must think and act successfully in order to live and be happy. Morality’s task is to identify the kinds of action that in fact benefit oneself. These virtues (productivity, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, pride) are all applications of the basic virtue, rationality. Rand’s moral ideal is a life of reason, purpose and self-esteem.
Selfishness, however, does not mean “doing whatever you please.” Moral principles are not a matter of personal opinion — they are based in the facts of reality, in man’s nature as a rational being, who must think and act successfully in order to live and be happy. Morality’s task is to identify the kinds of action that in fact benefit oneself. These virtues (productivity, independence, integrity, honesty, justice, pride) are all applications of the basic virtue, rationality. Rand’s moral ideal is a life of reason, purpose and self-esteem.
The value of art, research into the art market and art as a commodity
Art and the commodity:
Commoditization comes hand in hand living in a capitalist society, art as a commodity has always been attractive for those who can afford it. However the importance of art can be lost when consumed by the art market. If art becomes one with the market it loses its ability to be that substance of representation of economic, political and mainstream culture. The rich set the point to where they want art to go, if money guides us, where is the artist freedom in that?
Commoditization has a knock on effect on artists themselves, with the difficulty of dealing with the art market most are trying to perform an increasingly strenuous balancing act between their personal integrity and economic needs.
Kant dreamed ‘art should be free’
Moulin ‘There is no such thing as a pure artist because purity of artistic practise in the modern art market would most likely incur the wrath of that great capitalist tradition, ‘market freedom’ the freedom that equates to artists as ‘freedom to starve’.
The idea that some artists use the tactics of money to pry and succeed to their advantage, while other artists take that idea very seriously and only create for the significance of art and the empowerment it brings. To feed the market or to stave. How the market can be played and the integrity of artists. The Duchaphian idea of conceptual art being hijacked to sell work in which critical engagement amounts to commodity worship.
In capitalist society the exchange-value dominates and money acts as a ‘universal equivalent’. Multiple commodities can be exchanged on the free market with money acting as the measure of value. Given that modern ‘fine arts’ value is not often measured on the material use value but mainly on a subjective judgment of the arts philosophical, aesthetic or cultural worth, this term might be used as ‘intellectual use value’ or ‘aesthetical use value ‘. This can be both a personal use value and a social use value as a cultural object however this can be subverted to a market driven social use value, Zizek says a commodity has a ‘theological even metaphysical niceness’. This is a commodity’s extra selling point, an imagined positive reason for the individual to actively desire it. When an image is publicised it is advertised to the public as the real thing and has an invisible transcendence around it, an artwork may be lacking in actual technical greatness but the social/desirability surrounding it creates such a presence that the need for that is so high. The invisible transcendence an artwork can offer is all wrapped up in the perceived cultural worth it can convey to the buyer, such things could be status, intellect or in the past piety. No one can argue that art has always been a commodity; artists have always been hired by rich patrons to make works. Therefore art has always been connected to wealth and power.
The Di Vinci’s and the Michelangelo’s of the past were not brands, work was bought and sold but it was based on what was considered the artists merit. What the modern art market has done is build brands like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. These artistic brands are commodities in themselves based on perceived cultural worth and have become self-perpetuating. The quality of work does not always need to be good because the name itself gives it worth. This is very damaging to arts great tradition of cultural critique and the problem is perpetuated within the marketplace by major galleries. Artists when have become famous that they can literally churn out their signature on anything and it will have value. This is not a cultural value but a commodity value that the market offers the artist-business person to churn out work on an assembly line.
Commoditization comes hand in hand living in a capitalist society, art as a commodity has always been attractive for those who can afford it. However the importance of art can be lost when consumed by the art market. If art becomes one with the market it loses its ability to be that substance of representation of economic, political and mainstream culture. The rich set the point to where they want art to go, if money guides us, where is the artist freedom in that?
Commoditization has a knock on effect on artists themselves, with the difficulty of dealing with the art market most are trying to perform an increasingly strenuous balancing act between their personal integrity and economic needs.
Kant dreamed ‘art should be free’
Moulin ‘There is no such thing as a pure artist because purity of artistic practise in the modern art market would most likely incur the wrath of that great capitalist tradition, ‘market freedom’ the freedom that equates to artists as ‘freedom to starve’.
The idea that some artists use the tactics of money to pry and succeed to their advantage, while other artists take that idea very seriously and only create for the significance of art and the empowerment it brings. To feed the market or to stave. How the market can be played and the integrity of artists. The Duchaphian idea of conceptual art being hijacked to sell work in which critical engagement amounts to commodity worship.
In capitalist society the exchange-value dominates and money acts as a ‘universal equivalent’. Multiple commodities can be exchanged on the free market with money acting as the measure of value. Given that modern ‘fine arts’ value is not often measured on the material use value but mainly on a subjective judgment of the arts philosophical, aesthetic or cultural worth, this term might be used as ‘intellectual use value’ or ‘aesthetical use value ‘. This can be both a personal use value and a social use value as a cultural object however this can be subverted to a market driven social use value, Zizek says a commodity has a ‘theological even metaphysical niceness’. This is a commodity’s extra selling point, an imagined positive reason for the individual to actively desire it. When an image is publicised it is advertised to the public as the real thing and has an invisible transcendence around it, an artwork may be lacking in actual technical greatness but the social/desirability surrounding it creates such a presence that the need for that is so high. The invisible transcendence an artwork can offer is all wrapped up in the perceived cultural worth it can convey to the buyer, such things could be status, intellect or in the past piety. No one can argue that art has always been a commodity; artists have always been hired by rich patrons to make works. Therefore art has always been connected to wealth and power.
The Di Vinci’s and the Michelangelo’s of the past were not brands, work was bought and sold but it was based on what was considered the artists merit. What the modern art market has done is build brands like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. These artistic brands are commodities in themselves based on perceived cultural worth and have become self-perpetuating. The quality of work does not always need to be good because the name itself gives it worth. This is very damaging to arts great tradition of cultural critique and the problem is perpetuated within the marketplace by major galleries. Artists when have become famous that they can literally churn out their signature on anything and it will have value. This is not a cultural value but a commodity value that the market offers the artist-business person to churn out work on an assembly line.
The commercial value of art
A collector has three motifs when buying art: a genuine love, the investment possibilities, or its social promise.
Like currency the commercial value of art is based on collective intentionality, there is no intrinsic value. Human declaration and stipulation create and sustain the commercial value, the popularity and yearn for it. People are often surprised by the insane amounts that certain pieces attract, as they believe art serves no real purpose than that of a decorative one. Even Plato considered the value of art to be dubious because it was an imitation of reality. We pay for things that we can live in, eat, drink or worn. Art predates money, from the first images on caves, the idea of art has always been primitive more so than the aesthetic goods we seek.
The value of an image could be determined by size, quality of materials or social relevance and how well they sustain and durability. Of course the idea of statue comes in to play, the height of the artist and the social value of their name, and if they are being resold or the number of times it has been sold.
There is usually a point in every artist’s working life that is considered to be better than the rest. The peak, the point where their art has hit their highest value and prestige amongst the public eye, the audience they perform for has applauded and saluted their highest point of their artistic career. This is the moment where their stature is worth a commercial value of art, or defined as one of the classics; you could become a Picasso or become a Jeffery Koon.
Individual works of art, particular styles and historical style and art movements can go up in price as a result of increasingly skilful marketing. A century ago most art dealers were glorified shop keepers, now they are celebrities amongst themselves. Auction houses make and break the market of the reputation of artists who work they promote. Christie’s and Sotheby’s sell everything from real estate to collectables; a customer is ‘targeted’, sought upon, researched to find the product or piece of art most susceptible to them, like a heist they stake out those who would supposedly appreciate a million-pound piece of artwork for their 4 bed family house in northwest London. Amongst most commercial art galleries particularly in London is the idea of a ‘customer friendly’ etiquette they most definitely preside by.
A collector has three motifs when buying art: a genuine love, the investment possibilities, or its social promise.
Like currency the commercial value of art is based on collective intentionality, there is no intrinsic value. Human declaration and stipulation create and sustain the commercial value, the popularity and yearn for it. People are often surprised by the insane amounts that certain pieces attract, as they believe art serves no real purpose than that of a decorative one. Even Plato considered the value of art to be dubious because it was an imitation of reality. We pay for things that we can live in, eat, drink or worn. Art predates money, from the first images on caves, the idea of art has always been primitive more so than the aesthetic goods we seek.
The value of an image could be determined by size, quality of materials or social relevance and how well they sustain and durability. Of course the idea of statue comes in to play, the height of the artist and the social value of their name, and if they are being resold or the number of times it has been sold.
There is usually a point in every artist’s working life that is considered to be better than the rest. The peak, the point where their art has hit their highest value and prestige amongst the public eye, the audience they perform for has applauded and saluted their highest point of their artistic career. This is the moment where their stature is worth a commercial value of art, or defined as one of the classics; you could become a Picasso or become a Jeffery Koon.
Individual works of art, particular styles and historical style and art movements can go up in price as a result of increasingly skilful marketing. A century ago most art dealers were glorified shop keepers, now they are celebrities amongst themselves. Auction houses make and break the market of the reputation of artists who work they promote. Christie’s and Sotheby’s sell everything from real estate to collectables; a customer is ‘targeted’, sought upon, researched to find the product or piece of art most susceptible to them, like a heist they stake out those who would supposedly appreciate a million-pound piece of artwork for their 4 bed family house in northwest London. Amongst most commercial art galleries particularly in London is the idea of a ‘customer friendly’ etiquette they most definitely preside by.
Ayan Farah at the Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
The Opera Gallery Review - Marcello Lo Giudice
Pedro Paricio at the Halcyon Gallery
The Serpentine Gallery
Pure Evil on the King's Road Review
Pentimento
PentimentoThe word pentimento is derived from the Italian 'pentirsi', which means to repent or change your mind. Pentimento is a change made by the artist during the process of painting.
These changes are usually hidden beneath a subsequent paint layer. In some instances they become visible because the paint layer above has become transparent with time. Pentimenti (the plural) can also be detected using infra-red reflectograms and X-rays. They are interesting because they show the development of the artist's design, and sometimes are helpful in attributing paintings to particular artists.
What does this do to the artwork? It adds to the narrative of the image, adding physical and metaphorical layers that emphasis the understanding of the artwork.
These changes are usually hidden beneath a subsequent paint layer. In some instances they become visible because the paint layer above has become transparent with time. Pentimenti (the plural) can also be detected using infra-red reflectograms and X-rays. They are interesting because they show the development of the artist's design, and sometimes are helpful in attributing paintings to particular artists.
What does this do to the artwork? It adds to the narrative of the image, adding physical and metaphorical layers that emphasis the understanding of the artwork.
Presentations on current studio practice
Slide 1
‘’Redefine your perspectives. Think in terms of the whole, not simply its parts. “ Josh Goldberg Slide 2 developing my studio practice from the figurative forms of art to the literal forms of art. Studying new artists who use systems, pattern and structures and architecture to produce geometric abstraction. Shape in its simplest formation, together creating complex patterns and optical illusions. It's about the visual perception in response and in relation to patterns. The way colour and shape affect our understanding of an image, our sight of visual plane and our responsive mind. Slide 3 I was reading Turps banana magazine and came across an article about abstract painting, it talks about the idea of critical theory in art, and how calling art theory critical theory means you only think about how it embodies ideology, which limits it. Through the years critical theory has become like a universal knowledge or language for those who study it. When you say critical it adds an air of authority to it, as I’m talking to you now, you probably think I’m sound and knowledgeable, however… definitely not. Art to me relies heavily on the unwritten knowledge, where the physical act is what teaches you, where you teach yourself. Especially in abstract art, it is about the emotion behind it building up quality and identification of the piece. Slide 4 Abstract art is defined as, ‘’Expressing a quality or characteristic apart from any specific object or instance, as justice and speed… relating to the formal aspect of art, emphasizing lines, colours, generalized or geometric forms especially with reference to their relationship to on another.” For example An object, building or person is an collection of individual properties that you can list; a building becomes a window, bricks, and tall blocks, shapes that separate like list of ingredients, those separated forms can be substituted with another making it into an abstract formation. Like a person, their eyes, ears, or nose categorizes them, or fruit, a cherry is defined for its redness, sweetness and shine. They are generalized into geometric forms. Singly they may seem useless but together they create something. Slide 5 Of course, going back to Roland Barthes – an image has a meaning we’re allowed and we expect to notice but it also has a sort of subliminal message designed to reinforce the values of whoever is in charge. Semiology is that task of revealing these hidden meanings, and in my work, these deconstructed images then reformed as a whole created that sign. That thing you recognize, a building or form of architecture, the images create a language that the audience is being encouraged to understand, so that sense of critical theory is what supports geometric art. But Roland Barthes is boring so let’s talk about reality. Slide 6 There is also the idea of deconstruction and reconstructing reality, the present subjects and objects we focus when painting, breaking them apart and reforming them in their simplest forms, this is a minimalist view and in turn a modern view. Modern philosophy and science are based on the idea that the world of appearances is an illusion that both reveals and conceals an underlying reality. Another expression of these ideas can be seen in the poststructuralist view that texts are a mere play of appearances that only create the illusion that they refer to some underlying meaning or objective reality. For Roland Barthes, the text that claims to open a window onto the world is false. In reality, the text is merely a play of signs, a surface without depth, which is there to be explored, toyed with, and expanded on, in the act of reading, it’s a form of semiotic analysis. In art, it is characterized by fragmentation, an interest in manipulating a structure's surface, skin, shapes which appear to distort and dislocate elements of architecture, such as structure. The finished visual appearance has a deconstructivist style and is characterized by unpredictability and controlled chaos. = geometric abstraction. Slide 7 on Deconstruction as an Aesthetic Theory Language as a series of physical marks that operate in the absence of the speaker. These claims can be interpreted so that ‘text’ becomes ‘art work’ and ‘physical mark’ the brush stroke on a canvas. The speaker is now the artist and the futility of writing is translated into the very real work of art; the artist’s intent; symbolism (which makes up the language of art). Slide 8+9 Looking at architecture from around the world, the interiors and exteriors that stand out. Architectural geometry is an area of research which combines applied geometry and architecture, which looks at the design, analysis and manufacture processes. It lies at the core of architectural design and strongly challenges contemporary practice. Slide 10 but it’s not just buildings, the way that Francis bacon deconstructed faces, distorting them into their forms, it works the same way. Slide 11 Bacon frequently employed circles and rectangles as abstract substitutes for the architecture and furniture, and also as a ground for his figures. This can be seen in Study of George Dyer from 1969. George Dyer’s twisted figure is echoed in the crumpled newspaper at his feet and the splayed legs of his chair while the rest of the space is a set of semi-rational geometric forms. It becomes very personal with the way you pull apart a face or figure, the emotion behind is forced to the canvas through the way the image is created. Slide 12 Previously I focused on that figurative side of distortion but have progressed into this side of painting, and in the crit shows I changed my style completely but I can still relate them through the use of shape using visual perception to see the images as a whole rather than in pieces. With the audience is all subjective, the conceptual art you create will be understood differently from one person to another. Slide 13 I was reading sol lewitts sentences on conceptual art, he says ‘’A work of art may be understood as a conductor from the artist's mind to the viewer's. But it may never reach the viewer, or it may never leave the artist's mind.’’ So Perception is subjective and Successful art changes our understanding of the conventions by altering our perceptions. Slide 14 at some point I would like to do some sculpture work but would to also go back to slightly more figurative work as well and just experiment with this idea of deconstruction. |
Developing studio practice
Developing my studio practice from the figurative forms of art to the literal forms of art. Studying new artists who use systems and algorithms, pattern and structure I have found a new muse. Shape in its simplest formation, plaited together creating complex patterns and optical illusions. It's all about the visual perception in response and relation to patterns. The way colour and shape affect our understanding of an image, our sight of visual plane and our responsive mind. Relating to this, are the works of op art.
Geometric abstraction is a form of abstract art based on the use of geometric forms sometimes, though not always, placed in non-illusionistic space and combined into non-objective (non-representational) compositions. Throughout 20th-century art historical discourse, critics and artists working within the reductive or pure strains of abstraction have often suggested that geometric abstraction represents the height of a non-objective art practice, which necessarily stresses or calls attention to the root plasticity and two-dimensionality of painting as an artistic medium. Thus, it has been suggested that geometric abstraction might function as a solution to problems concerning the need for modernist painting to reject the illusionistic practices of the past while addressing the inherently two dimensional nature of the picture plane as well as the canvas functioning as its support.
Research
Patterns—designs composed of repeated motifs—shape the world around us; their arrangements are integral to art as much as nature. Patterns have played a key role in art throughout history, from Greek temple ornamentation, to the geometric and floral decoration of Islamic art and architecture, to textiles from around the world. Since the 19th century, patterns—characteristically avoided by modern artists due to their connection to craft and functional objects—have been taken up by various movements to provide alternatives to the general thrust of modernism. For example, the Pattern and Decoration movement of the 1970s rejected the austere aesthetics of Minimalism and Conceptual Art through the use of extensive, allover ornamentation. In contemporary art, vibrant patterns appear in the works of Damien Hirst, Phillip Taaffe, Fred Tomaselli, and Sarah Morris, among countless others.
Op art is a form of abstract art (specifically non-objective art) which relies on optical illusions in order to fool the eye of the viewer. It is also called optical art or retinal art. A form of kinetic art, it relates to geometric designs that create feelings of movement or vibration. Op art works were first produced in black-and-white, later in vibrant colour. Op art exploits the functional relationship between the eye's retina (the organ that "sees" patterns) and the brain (the organ that interprets patterns). Certain patterns cause confusion between these two organs, resulting in the perception of irrational optical effects.
Despite its strange, often nausea-inducing effects, Op-Art is perfectly in line with traditional canons of fine art. All traditional painting is based upon the "illusion" of depth and perspective: Op-Art merely broadens its inherently illusionary nature by interfering with the rules governing optical perception.
Colour theory - Colour theory encompasses a multitude of definitions, concepts and design applications - enough to fill several encyclopaedias. However, there are three basic categories of colour theory that are logical and useful: The colour wheel, colour harmony, and the context of how colours are used.
In visual experiences, harmony is something that is pleasing to the eye. It engages the viewer and it creates an inner sense of order, a balance in the visual experience. When something is not harmonious, it's either boring or chaotic. At one extreme is a visual experience that is so bland that the viewer is not engaged. The human brain will reject under-stimulating information. At the other extreme is a visual experience that is so overdone, so chaotic that the viewer can't stand to look at it. The human brain rejects what it cannot organize, what it cannot understand. The visual task requires that we present a logical structure. Colour harmony delivers visual interest and a sense of order.
In summary, extreme unity leads to under-stimulation, extreme complexity leads to over-stimulation. Harmony is a dynamic equilibrium. = the use of colour in their artworks, reacts to the viewer.
Systems theory
The transdisciplinary study of the abstract organization of phenomena, independent of their substance, type, or spatial or temporal scale of existence. It investigates both the principles common to all complex entities, and the (usually mathematical) models which can be used to describe them.
Visual perception, challenged by the use of this approach, algorithms and algorithmic art plays on the audiences understand of the work. By using this technique in artwork you are altering and challenging the audience, their view and how they perceive it. Links back to both artist and history of visual perception in art theories.
Visual perception Visual perception is a function of our eyes and brain. We see images as a whole rather than in parts. However, images can be broken down into their visual elements: line, shape, texture, and colour. These elements are to images as grammar is to language. Together they allow our eyes to see images and our brain to recognize them.
Visual rhetoric is the fairly recent development of a theoretical framework describing how visual images communicate, as opposed to aural, verbal, or other messages. Visual rhetoric generally falls under a group of terms, which all encompass visual literacy. Purdue OWL defines visual literacy as one's ability to "read" an image. In other words, it is one's ability to understand what an image is attempting to communicate.This includes understanding creative choices made with the image such as colouring, shading, and object placement.This type of awareness comes from an understanding how images communicate meaning, also known as visual rhetoric. The study of visual rhetoric is different from that of visual or graphic design, in that it emphasizes images as sensory expressions of cultural meaning, as opposed to purely aesthetic consideration. Visual rhetoric has been approached from a variety of academic fields of study such as art history, linguistics, semiotics, cultural studies, business and technical communication, speech communication, and classical rhetoric. As a result, it can be difficult to discern the exact relationship between different parts of the field of visual rhetoric. Some examples of artifacts analysed by visual rhetoricians are charts, paintings, sculpture, videogames, diagrams, web pages, advertisements, movies, architecture, newspapers, or photographs. Visual rhetoric seeks to develop rhetorical theory in a way that is more comprehensive and inclusive with regard to images and their interpretations. Visual images and material objects have become more relevant in light of recent technological developments for understanding general communicative means. Visual rhetoric is a conscious, communicative decision; the colours, form, medium, and size is chosen on purpose. However, a person may come in contact with a sign, but if they have no relation to the sign, its message is arbitrary. Therefore, in order for artifacts or products to be conceptualized as visual rhetoric, they must have three characteristics: they must be symbolic, involve human intervention, and be presented to an audience for the purpose of communicating Visual rhetoric is closely related to the study of semiotics. Roland Barthes, in his essay "The Rhetoric of the Image" also examines the semiotic nature of images, and the ways that images function to communicate specific messages.
Semiotic theory seeks to describe the rhetorical significance of sign-making. Visual rhetoric is a broader study, covering all the visual ways humans try to communicate, outside academic policing.
Semiotics (also called semiotic studies; not to be confused with the Saussurean tradition called semiology which is a part of semiotics) is the study of meaning-making, the study of sign processes and meaningful communication.
Semiotics – text- theorist
We can define semiology or semiotics as the study of signs. We may not realize it, but in fact semiology can be applied to all sorts of human endeavours, including cinema, theatre, dance, architecture, painting, politics, medicine, history, and religion. That is, we use a variety of gestures (signs) in everyday life to convey messages to people around us, e.g., rubbing our thumb and forefinger together to signify money.
In Saussurean analysis, which Barthes largely uses, the distinction between signifier and signified is crucial. The signifier is the image used to stand for something else, while the signified is what it stands for (a real thing or, in a stricter reading, a sense-impression).
The signified sometimes has an existence outside language and social construction, but the signifier does not. Further, the relationship between the two is ultimately arbitrary. There are many different ways a particular signified could be expressed in language, or different objects divided-up. None of these ways is ultimately superior to the others.
The relationship between a signifier and a signified is arbitrary only from the point of view of language. From a social point of view, it channels particular interests or desires. It can be explained by reference to the society in which signs operate, and the place of the signs within them. Nothing is really meaningless. Signs are neither irrational nor natural.
Signs are taken to operate on a continuum, from ‘iconic’ with one strong meaning to users, through ‘motivated’, to the truly ‘arbitrary’. They vary along this continuum as to how tightly defined they are. Most signs have strong enough connotations and associations to be at least partly ‘motivated’. When they are used, they refer back to previous conventional uses.
LINKS BETWEEN ALGORITHMS AND SEMIOTICS = process – pattern- sign –signifier – expressed through form. VISUAL SEMIOTICS
Visual semiotics is a sub-domain of semiotics that analyses the way visual images communicate a message. Studies of meaning evolve from semiotics, a philosophical approach that seeks to interpret messages in terms of signs and patterns of symbolism.
Value of the portrait in the 21st century
With the progression of technology, the portrait has become second nature, we constantly surround ourselves with media and with such an ease of use, does the painted quality lack lustre?
Paintings are surfaces marked so that as to present visible objects; that was the most widely accepted idea about them until the emergence of modern art, and for some people it remained the most appealing. Since the birth of photography in 1839 we may find a photograph is more functional than a painting. We tend to think that the mechanically transmitted image will correspond to the fact more reliably than the handmade. What is photography’s effect on painting? More than any other sort of information, our eyes seek out signs of subjects- that is, things that look at us, even as we look at them. Faces are literally the first things we see as a new born baby. The earliest objet taken for likeness was a pebble, carried to a cave by hominids 3 million years ago, resembling a head with 2 eyes. In this sense, subjects of which faces are the chief sign and indication, are the primal, biological crucial business of visual representation. In pictures, even if we do not actually assume that a face will appear we are always on alert for one. It is an inbuilt expectation in viewing. We bring subjects to mind, to identify the individuals, with the features that we remember. A portrait becomes a tool in the practical psychology of a society. Representation surpassing itself, turning into visual presence.
Paintings are surfaces marked so that as to present visible objects; that was the most widely accepted idea about them until the emergence of modern art, and for some people it remained the most appealing. Since the birth of photography in 1839 we may find a photograph is more functional than a painting. We tend to think that the mechanically transmitted image will correspond to the fact more reliably than the handmade. What is photography’s effect on painting? More than any other sort of information, our eyes seek out signs of subjects- that is, things that look at us, even as we look at them. Faces are literally the first things we see as a new born baby. The earliest objet taken for likeness was a pebble, carried to a cave by hominids 3 million years ago, resembling a head with 2 eyes. In this sense, subjects of which faces are the chief sign and indication, are the primal, biological crucial business of visual representation. In pictures, even if we do not actually assume that a face will appear we are always on alert for one. It is an inbuilt expectation in viewing. We bring subjects to mind, to identify the individuals, with the features that we remember. A portrait becomes a tool in the practical psychology of a society. Representation surpassing itself, turning into visual presence.
'Abstract artists tell their stories with shapes, color, edges, movement, and value - just like when one is painting a beautiful scene. The difference is, of course, there is no scene. The scene is within the artist. I often get asked, 'How do you know when you are done?' I am done when the story is told.'
-Gwen Fox
Self portraits - Future work
I want to create a series of self portrait, the way I look at myself changes everyday, so it would be interesting even to myself, to reflect on it the day after. Evaluating how each style and brush mark represents what mood and emotion I would feel, it will be like a very cheap therapy session.
Artists will quickly find that the model who is most reliable, committed, willing to push themselves to great lengths, anxious to experiment, and to most easily grasp the concept of the artist’s direction and express their personal aesthetic, is themselves. After all, no one can articulate your thoughts better than you can. There is an essential element of “control” in the art of self-portraiture. We control what details are included in the final works and what details are excluded. For a moment, we seize control of time and space. We control the decisive moment that is captured and the setting in which we are contained. The artist becomes director in the clip in which they are the lead actor. The self-portrait can become a major exercise in independent production. The resulting work is a pure, independent expression of the artist’s vision. The concept of self-portraiture is inherently linked to the concept of self-consciousness. And, the concept of portraiture, if not even art itself, is linked to consciousness. Art making can never truly be an “automatic” process. There is always a conscious element of involvement. Even the use of randomness in the creative process reflects a conscious decision to use randomness as criteria for the work. Every stroke of a paintbrush, or click of the shutter at any particular time and place reflects a conscious decision. Art is the reflective result of consciousness. If art making always involves conscious decision-making and self-portraiture reflects self-consciousness, then what is the message or meaning of self-portraiture? Why do certain artists decide to create self-interpretations or visual archives of their presence and decidedly so in a particular time and space? The question answers itself. The self-portrait declares “I exist”.
Whether abstract, subtle, or intimately detailed, the self-portrait is inherently autobiographical. Many artists experiment with negating the self through hiding or masquerading within their works. For example, reading about Francis Bacon I learnt that he notoriously hated his face, so when painting his image in self portrait they would be morphed. There is a unique psychological thing that takes place when you look into your own eyes and face and paint your own portrait. Your own face suddenly becomes a mirror to your soul, the real you, and strange things happen as you paint.
Artists will quickly find that the model who is most reliable, committed, willing to push themselves to great lengths, anxious to experiment, and to most easily grasp the concept of the artist’s direction and express their personal aesthetic, is themselves. After all, no one can articulate your thoughts better than you can. There is an essential element of “control” in the art of self-portraiture. We control what details are included in the final works and what details are excluded. For a moment, we seize control of time and space. We control the decisive moment that is captured and the setting in which we are contained. The artist becomes director in the clip in which they are the lead actor. The self-portrait can become a major exercise in independent production. The resulting work is a pure, independent expression of the artist’s vision. The concept of self-portraiture is inherently linked to the concept of self-consciousness. And, the concept of portraiture, if not even art itself, is linked to consciousness. Art making can never truly be an “automatic” process. There is always a conscious element of involvement. Even the use of randomness in the creative process reflects a conscious decision to use randomness as criteria for the work. Every stroke of a paintbrush, or click of the shutter at any particular time and place reflects a conscious decision. Art is the reflective result of consciousness. If art making always involves conscious decision-making and self-portraiture reflects self-consciousness, then what is the message or meaning of self-portraiture? Why do certain artists decide to create self-interpretations or visual archives of their presence and decidedly so in a particular time and space? The question answers itself. The self-portrait declares “I exist”.
Whether abstract, subtle, or intimately detailed, the self-portrait is inherently autobiographical. Many artists experiment with negating the self through hiding or masquerading within their works. For example, reading about Francis Bacon I learnt that he notoriously hated his face, so when painting his image in self portrait they would be morphed. There is a unique psychological thing that takes place when you look into your own eyes and face and paint your own portrait. Your own face suddenly becomes a mirror to your soul, the real you, and strange things happen as you paint.
Gesture and brushstrokes
'The power of the brushstroke'
Article from the smart set
In 1949 Life magazine published a short feature on the artist Jackson Pollock where the editors famously asked: “Is this the greatest living American painter?” The headline was both genuine and rhetorical. The article was sparked by one of Pollock’s consummate supporters, the art critic Clement Greenberg, who, by the late 1940s was the vocal arbiter of modernism and, more acutely, the promoter of Abstract Expressionism. In the profile photograph, the 37-year-old Pollock stands in front of one is his long horizontal paintings, the chaos of colors and splatters stretching the length of the article. He is dressed in his distinctive overalls, his face expressionless as he crossing his arms and leans slightly back, his posture holding a mixture of private emotions and manly reserve. While the article never prescribes an answer to the question (the editors did received over five hundred letters from readers with their own answers, mostly affirming their alarm and distain for his canvases), it does declare that Pollock “has burst forth as the shinning new phenomenon of American art.”
15 years later, the magazine would ask that question again about Roy Lichtenstein, only in a slightly different way. In its profile of the artist it asked: “Is this the worst artist in America?” This playful echo of the Pollock profile set the contrast between the two artists, but also christened the increasing interest in Lichtenstein’s work. The profile described Lichtenstein’s painting process, showing readers how he transformed cartoon images into paintings. It demonstrated his particular methods in achieving his distinctive benday dots, that repetitive surface that gives his canvases a mechanical sense of texture and depth. Contrasting to Pollock’s full body portrait in front of his canvas, Lichtenstein presents a more reserved image. He sits in a high-back wicker chair, one of his romance paintings propped in front of him, shielding his body from us. His head, slightly tilted back, rests above the canvas, a shy smile on his face as he gazes down at the camera looking almost regal.
This difference in the artist’s image reflected a deeper difference in the styles of art as well. Lichtenstein’s Pop Art was, in many respects, a much more controlled and quiet form compared to the loud canvases of the Abstract Expressionists, their works filled with emotional forces, undefined and unlimited. Pop Art offered the hum of the machine. Think of Andy Warhol’s famous mantra, “I want to be a machine.” Abstract Expressionism rested on the power of the brush stroke, the texture of paint, and the serendipitous surface of the canvas. Pop artists instead turned the brushstroke into line and dots, creating a constant repetition of surfaces, questioning the authentic power of any one imagine. If Abstract Expressionism was about the artist’s emotions, Pop Art was about the cool distance of the artist. In defining this contrast, French theorist Roland Barthes wrote in the late 1970s that the Pop artist “has no depth: he is merely the surface of his pictures, no signified, no intention, anywhere.”
Featuring over 120 works from three decades of the Lichtenstein’s career, this retrospective of his work, which has travelled from Chicago, to Washington, DC, and is set to end in Paris this summer, presents a vision of Pop Art that is more depth than surface, more craft than machine-like repetition. Everywhere you turn, the show presents quotes from Lichtenstein to illuminate core idea of his aesthetic vision. A short documentary on the Tate website entitled “Diagram of an Artist” offers archival clips of the artist working in his studio. He loved spending every day working there, we are told. His art is less machine than handcrafted, meticulous and carefully created. He devised a unique easel stand that allowed him to turn the canvas on its side or upside down, working on small details, paint brush in hand. Such an image of the artist transforms the machine-like qualities of Pop Art’s surfaces and lines into the more personal vision of it brushstrokes. We tend to think of Pop Art as a rejection of Abstract Expressionism’s emotional expressions of paint on a canvas. But this show is intriguingly obsessed with brushstrokes, prompting me to wonder what can we learn about Pop Art in such gestures of paint?
The show begins with a series of paintings Lichtenstein created in the 1960s that present magnified and stylized brushstrokes as the sole subjects of the canvas. “Little Big Painting” (1965) gives us a swirl of a white stroke cascading down the canvas, and “Brushstroke with Spatter” (1966) presents a midnight blue blob of paint in the center stretching itself upward, leaving a trail of blue spots that look random and unplanned. But these brushstrokes are highly controlled efforts that lack any of the abundance or spontaneity we might encounter with such gestures. They are flat, a look more like a framed poster of a painting you could buy in the gift shop in the way out. And that’s the point. They appear as illustrated images, outlined in black against a background of Lichtenstein’s iconic benday dots, creating the illusion of shading and surface. As the wall text tells us, these works were a direct reference to Abstract Expressionism’s intent. “Brushstrokes in painting convey a sense of grand gesture,” Lichtenstein said of these works, “but in my hands, the brushstroke becomes the depiction of a grand gesture.” The image and the art merge into one.
This depiction of the gesture becomes an echoing visual theme as you move through the show. Consider the iconic war and romance works, presented here with dramatic effect as they are grouped together in one, high-ceilinged gallery. After those brushstrokes, I could only see the fiery flames of the exploding jet in “Whaam!” (1963) as its own kind of paint spatter. Or the swirling water of “Drowning Girl” (1963) as a flowing form of emotion and painterly expression, all controlled and stylized under Lichtenstein’s careful hand. We know that Lichtenstein took these images from popular comic strips, that he often used an opaque projector to outline the comic image onto his canvas, and that he transformed the comic strip, which rests on the sequence of images to achieve its narrative force, towards the power of a singular frame to contain a whole story. But what their appearance in the context of this show reveals is that these iconic images, like the brushstrokes series, offer their own doubt about the power of a brushstroke’s emotional appeal. We encounter in these works, in these explosions of war and the distress of heterosexual love, a playful conflation of comics and canvas, of paint turned into pure image, where emotion itself is held at bay.
One of the more interesting moments in this show comes in the gallery entitled “Art about Art,” which displays a series of paintings that reproduce (copy? parody?) works by Monet, Picasso, Matisse and Mondrian. Here you confront three canvases that use the benday dots as a play on Monet’s studies of the façade of the Rouen cathedral that transform the Impressionist’s original studies in light and color into a meditation on repetition. These works look so mechanical, like photographic negatives, dissolving not only the content of the paintings, but the painterly qualities as well. Lichtenstein turns Monet’s use of paint, his delicate concern for how paint can capture light on the cathedral’s surface, into a collection of dots that he carefully applied to create the tonal shades and architectural details of the cathedral’s façade.
But if he turned Monet’s brushstrokes into dots, he transformed Picasso’s and Matisse into lines. Lichtenstein was a child of modernism, studying art at the Ohio State University in the 1940s. He spent nearly two decades practicing a style that reflected his fascination with Picasso in both composition and form. But it would be in the 1960s and 1970s that he explored a different way of copying those early Modernists whom he admired so much. It is hard to tell what to call his paintings about painting. Take his reproduction of Matisse’s “Still Life With Goldfish” (1972), which presents the original composition with a precise familiarity but a distinctive flatness of form. While Matisse was exploring the play of perspective complications in his own canvas, Lichtenstein’s version turns that still life into a set of shapes and lines, repeating the subject and presenting it as a kind of advertisement image. In “Femme d’Alger” (1963) Lichtenstein copies a painting by Picasso of the same name, turning the composition into a much more flat and stylized image, the paint and shading reflecting how Lichtenstein’s canvas is precisely a reproduction. As the wall text informs us, Picasso’s original painting was a copy of a 19th century work by Delacroix, turning Lichtenstein’s work into a copy of a copy. Lichtenstein’s approach to so many of these copies of modernist work “eliminates any sign of organic life from the painting” writes Tate modern curator Iria Candela in her catalog essay. And while some considered such parodies or copies an insult to the originals, or a kind of effort to kill the masters of modernism, Lichtenstein thought of these works as admirations for the artists themselves. These works make explicit not only the use of copy and remixing in the history of art, but also the more vital reproductions of paintings in mass form, transforming the original, unique qualities of the singular painting into ubiquitous copies. In turning those works into their own flat, illustrative forms, Lichtenstein, who worked from printed reproductions of the paintings themselves, doesn’t so much reproduce the originals but rather raises a point about all reproductions. In essence, his paintings are copies of reproductions. The brushstrokes lose all power in the reproductions, a reality that Lichtenstein continually explored as he transformed painting into mechanical images of dots and lines.
And it is those lines that become so crucial in his paintings. It is the outlines of objects that make you so aware of the work’s surface realities. Like characters in a children’s coloring books, Lichtenstein’s lines transforms shapes and colors into solid objects. “It is not the line itself,” he once said, “but rather the placement of the line that matters.” If the modernist were in love with the effect of a brushstroke, Lichtenstein was in love with the effect of a line, and it is the line more than those dots that give is work the intriguing qualities. The lines hold their own power, blurring the boundaries between illustration and painting, between gesture and design. And perhaps this is Pop Art’s significance, this meta-confusion of encounters, this transformation of brushstrokes into mechanical patterns of lines and dots. From the earliest days of Pop Art’s exposure, critics wonder if it was in fact art, if these canvases were paintings or rather mere illustrations. Absent the acute sense of brushstrokes, that detail so crucial to modernism, and looking more like illustrations than paintings, what can we call these works?
Consider the gallery of mirror paintings, these oddly compelling canvases where Lichtenstein explored the idea of art’s ability to reflect. In the 1970s, Lichtenstein created a number of such paintings in all different shapes and sizes, flat white surfaces that used benday dots to indicate the mirror’s reflective potential. Though of course these are not mirrors but canvases, they reflect nothing except the ideas of a mirror. As the wall text reminds us, “Ever since Leonardo da Vinci called the true artist a ‘mirror of nature,’ mirrors have symbolized painting itself.” But, as we are also informed, for Lichtenstein his mirrors “produce no real reflections except depicted ones that lie on the surface as paint.” More acutely, his mirror paintings with their utter inability to reflect anything but canvas surface, remind us, like his copies of modernist art works, that art is itself a play of copies upon copies, dubious of the divide between canvas and nature.
In the 1990s, Lichtenstein experimented in a little-known series of paintings that juxtaposed heavy brushstrokes of paint with flat geometrical forms. He called this series “obliterating brushstrokes.” The wall text in one of the last galleries in this show, calls these works meditations on the “very essence of painting,” but I was struck by the word “obliterating” and violent imagery it connoted. It is as if Lichtenstein’s brushstrokes are a constant meditation on what a brushstroke can reveal, obliterating the meaning but not the gesture. In emphasizes this quality of Lichtenstein’s work, the show offers an odd and intriguing links between the artist and the Abstract Expressionist, hinting that his work is as much a comment upon that earlier genre as it is a part of it essential concerns.
And so we are left with the brushstrokes. In the late 1990s, Lichtenstein created a series of paintings that copy the stylized landscapes of Chinese artists of the Song dynasty (why these works are not included in the “Art about Art” section is unclear to me). Lichtenstein turned those earlier landscapes into near abstractions of dots, the atmospheric qualities of mist and light rendered with a very mute palette of blues and grays. The delicacy of these works is a striking contrast to his earlier use of bold colors and shapes. Here the hills and coastline, cliffs and valleys, take shape through the use of benday dots. No longer simply an accent of shading or texture, the dots now define the essence of the painting. There is one painting here that struck me the most: “Landscape in Fog” (1996), completed just a year before his death. The painting of blue and white hues all composed of benday dots that darken as they move out from the painting’s nearly flat white center. The mountains in the distance are formed through the subtle gradations of dots, and the foreground darkens with them. A small tree branch to the left helps situate you in the painting’s vista. The lines that were so important in Lichtenstein’s earlier images have here evaporated in this rendering of fog. Instead, right in the middle of the canvas, stretching across this abstracted landscape is a thick swirl of light blue and white paint, its heavy layers reflecting the quick gestures of the artist’s brush and hand. Unlike those stylized brushstrokes that began this show, this one, meant to capture the ephemeral nature of fog, holds an emotional presence that contrasts sharply to the mechanical rhythm of the dots. But then I feared over determining this swath of paint. That’s the problem with brushstrokes. They can confound us with their significance. Throughout this show we are reminded how much Lichtenstein depended on such brushstrokes throughout his career. And how difficult it was for him to escape their meaning.
15 years later, the magazine would ask that question again about Roy Lichtenstein, only in a slightly different way. In its profile of the artist it asked: “Is this the worst artist in America?” This playful echo of the Pollock profile set the contrast between the two artists, but also christened the increasing interest in Lichtenstein’s work. The profile described Lichtenstein’s painting process, showing readers how he transformed cartoon images into paintings. It demonstrated his particular methods in achieving his distinctive benday dots, that repetitive surface that gives his canvases a mechanical sense of texture and depth. Contrasting to Pollock’s full body portrait in front of his canvas, Lichtenstein presents a more reserved image. He sits in a high-back wicker chair, one of his romance paintings propped in front of him, shielding his body from us. His head, slightly tilted back, rests above the canvas, a shy smile on his face as he gazes down at the camera looking almost regal.
This difference in the artist’s image reflected a deeper difference in the styles of art as well. Lichtenstein’s Pop Art was, in many respects, a much more controlled and quiet form compared to the loud canvases of the Abstract Expressionists, their works filled with emotional forces, undefined and unlimited. Pop Art offered the hum of the machine. Think of Andy Warhol’s famous mantra, “I want to be a machine.” Abstract Expressionism rested on the power of the brush stroke, the texture of paint, and the serendipitous surface of the canvas. Pop artists instead turned the brushstroke into line and dots, creating a constant repetition of surfaces, questioning the authentic power of any one imagine. If Abstract Expressionism was about the artist’s emotions, Pop Art was about the cool distance of the artist. In defining this contrast, French theorist Roland Barthes wrote in the late 1970s that the Pop artist “has no depth: he is merely the surface of his pictures, no signified, no intention, anywhere.”
Featuring over 120 works from three decades of the Lichtenstein’s career, this retrospective of his work, which has travelled from Chicago, to Washington, DC, and is set to end in Paris this summer, presents a vision of Pop Art that is more depth than surface, more craft than machine-like repetition. Everywhere you turn, the show presents quotes from Lichtenstein to illuminate core idea of his aesthetic vision. A short documentary on the Tate website entitled “Diagram of an Artist” offers archival clips of the artist working in his studio. He loved spending every day working there, we are told. His art is less machine than handcrafted, meticulous and carefully created. He devised a unique easel stand that allowed him to turn the canvas on its side or upside down, working on small details, paint brush in hand. Such an image of the artist transforms the machine-like qualities of Pop Art’s surfaces and lines into the more personal vision of it brushstrokes. We tend to think of Pop Art as a rejection of Abstract Expressionism’s emotional expressions of paint on a canvas. But this show is intriguingly obsessed with brushstrokes, prompting me to wonder what can we learn about Pop Art in such gestures of paint?
The show begins with a series of paintings Lichtenstein created in the 1960s that present magnified and stylized brushstrokes as the sole subjects of the canvas. “Little Big Painting” (1965) gives us a swirl of a white stroke cascading down the canvas, and “Brushstroke with Spatter” (1966) presents a midnight blue blob of paint in the center stretching itself upward, leaving a trail of blue spots that look random and unplanned. But these brushstrokes are highly controlled efforts that lack any of the abundance or spontaneity we might encounter with such gestures. They are flat, a look more like a framed poster of a painting you could buy in the gift shop in the way out. And that’s the point. They appear as illustrated images, outlined in black against a background of Lichtenstein’s iconic benday dots, creating the illusion of shading and surface. As the wall text tells us, these works were a direct reference to Abstract Expressionism’s intent. “Brushstrokes in painting convey a sense of grand gesture,” Lichtenstein said of these works, “but in my hands, the brushstroke becomes the depiction of a grand gesture.” The image and the art merge into one.
This depiction of the gesture becomes an echoing visual theme as you move through the show. Consider the iconic war and romance works, presented here with dramatic effect as they are grouped together in one, high-ceilinged gallery. After those brushstrokes, I could only see the fiery flames of the exploding jet in “Whaam!” (1963) as its own kind of paint spatter. Or the swirling water of “Drowning Girl” (1963) as a flowing form of emotion and painterly expression, all controlled and stylized under Lichtenstein’s careful hand. We know that Lichtenstein took these images from popular comic strips, that he often used an opaque projector to outline the comic image onto his canvas, and that he transformed the comic strip, which rests on the sequence of images to achieve its narrative force, towards the power of a singular frame to contain a whole story. But what their appearance in the context of this show reveals is that these iconic images, like the brushstrokes series, offer their own doubt about the power of a brushstroke’s emotional appeal. We encounter in these works, in these explosions of war and the distress of heterosexual love, a playful conflation of comics and canvas, of paint turned into pure image, where emotion itself is held at bay.
One of the more interesting moments in this show comes in the gallery entitled “Art about Art,” which displays a series of paintings that reproduce (copy? parody?) works by Monet, Picasso, Matisse and Mondrian. Here you confront three canvases that use the benday dots as a play on Monet’s studies of the façade of the Rouen cathedral that transform the Impressionist’s original studies in light and color into a meditation on repetition. These works look so mechanical, like photographic negatives, dissolving not only the content of the paintings, but the painterly qualities as well. Lichtenstein turns Monet’s use of paint, his delicate concern for how paint can capture light on the cathedral’s surface, into a collection of dots that he carefully applied to create the tonal shades and architectural details of the cathedral’s façade.
But if he turned Monet’s brushstrokes into dots, he transformed Picasso’s and Matisse into lines. Lichtenstein was a child of modernism, studying art at the Ohio State University in the 1940s. He spent nearly two decades practicing a style that reflected his fascination with Picasso in both composition and form. But it would be in the 1960s and 1970s that he explored a different way of copying those early Modernists whom he admired so much. It is hard to tell what to call his paintings about painting. Take his reproduction of Matisse’s “Still Life With Goldfish” (1972), which presents the original composition with a precise familiarity but a distinctive flatness of form. While Matisse was exploring the play of perspective complications in his own canvas, Lichtenstein’s version turns that still life into a set of shapes and lines, repeating the subject and presenting it as a kind of advertisement image. In “Femme d’Alger” (1963) Lichtenstein copies a painting by Picasso of the same name, turning the composition into a much more flat and stylized image, the paint and shading reflecting how Lichtenstein’s canvas is precisely a reproduction. As the wall text informs us, Picasso’s original painting was a copy of a 19th century work by Delacroix, turning Lichtenstein’s work into a copy of a copy. Lichtenstein’s approach to so many of these copies of modernist work “eliminates any sign of organic life from the painting” writes Tate modern curator Iria Candela in her catalog essay. And while some considered such parodies or copies an insult to the originals, or a kind of effort to kill the masters of modernism, Lichtenstein thought of these works as admirations for the artists themselves. These works make explicit not only the use of copy and remixing in the history of art, but also the more vital reproductions of paintings in mass form, transforming the original, unique qualities of the singular painting into ubiquitous copies. In turning those works into their own flat, illustrative forms, Lichtenstein, who worked from printed reproductions of the paintings themselves, doesn’t so much reproduce the originals but rather raises a point about all reproductions. In essence, his paintings are copies of reproductions. The brushstrokes lose all power in the reproductions, a reality that Lichtenstein continually explored as he transformed painting into mechanical images of dots and lines.
And it is those lines that become so crucial in his paintings. It is the outlines of objects that make you so aware of the work’s surface realities. Like characters in a children’s coloring books, Lichtenstein’s lines transforms shapes and colors into solid objects. “It is not the line itself,” he once said, “but rather the placement of the line that matters.” If the modernist were in love with the effect of a brushstroke, Lichtenstein was in love with the effect of a line, and it is the line more than those dots that give is work the intriguing qualities. The lines hold their own power, blurring the boundaries between illustration and painting, between gesture and design. And perhaps this is Pop Art’s significance, this meta-confusion of encounters, this transformation of brushstrokes into mechanical patterns of lines and dots. From the earliest days of Pop Art’s exposure, critics wonder if it was in fact art, if these canvases were paintings or rather mere illustrations. Absent the acute sense of brushstrokes, that detail so crucial to modernism, and looking more like illustrations than paintings, what can we call these works?
Consider the gallery of mirror paintings, these oddly compelling canvases where Lichtenstein explored the idea of art’s ability to reflect. In the 1970s, Lichtenstein created a number of such paintings in all different shapes and sizes, flat white surfaces that used benday dots to indicate the mirror’s reflective potential. Though of course these are not mirrors but canvases, they reflect nothing except the ideas of a mirror. As the wall text reminds us, “Ever since Leonardo da Vinci called the true artist a ‘mirror of nature,’ mirrors have symbolized painting itself.” But, as we are also informed, for Lichtenstein his mirrors “produce no real reflections except depicted ones that lie on the surface as paint.” More acutely, his mirror paintings with their utter inability to reflect anything but canvas surface, remind us, like his copies of modernist art works, that art is itself a play of copies upon copies, dubious of the divide between canvas and nature.
In the 1990s, Lichtenstein experimented in a little-known series of paintings that juxtaposed heavy brushstrokes of paint with flat geometrical forms. He called this series “obliterating brushstrokes.” The wall text in one of the last galleries in this show, calls these works meditations on the “very essence of painting,” but I was struck by the word “obliterating” and violent imagery it connoted. It is as if Lichtenstein’s brushstrokes are a constant meditation on what a brushstroke can reveal, obliterating the meaning but not the gesture. In emphasizes this quality of Lichtenstein’s work, the show offers an odd and intriguing links between the artist and the Abstract Expressionist, hinting that his work is as much a comment upon that earlier genre as it is a part of it essential concerns.
And so we are left with the brushstrokes. In the late 1990s, Lichtenstein created a series of paintings that copy the stylized landscapes of Chinese artists of the Song dynasty (why these works are not included in the “Art about Art” section is unclear to me). Lichtenstein turned those earlier landscapes into near abstractions of dots, the atmospheric qualities of mist and light rendered with a very mute palette of blues and grays. The delicacy of these works is a striking contrast to his earlier use of bold colors and shapes. Here the hills and coastline, cliffs and valleys, take shape through the use of benday dots. No longer simply an accent of shading or texture, the dots now define the essence of the painting. There is one painting here that struck me the most: “Landscape in Fog” (1996), completed just a year before his death. The painting of blue and white hues all composed of benday dots that darken as they move out from the painting’s nearly flat white center. The mountains in the distance are formed through the subtle gradations of dots, and the foreground darkens with them. A small tree branch to the left helps situate you in the painting’s vista. The lines that were so important in Lichtenstein’s earlier images have here evaporated in this rendering of fog. Instead, right in the middle of the canvas, stretching across this abstracted landscape is a thick swirl of light blue and white paint, its heavy layers reflecting the quick gestures of the artist’s brush and hand. Unlike those stylized brushstrokes that began this show, this one, meant to capture the ephemeral nature of fog, holds an emotional presence that contrasts sharply to the mechanical rhythm of the dots. But then I feared over determining this swath of paint. That’s the problem with brushstrokes. They can confound us with their significance. Throughout this show we are reminded how much Lichtenstein depended on such brushstrokes throughout his career. And how difficult it was for him to escape their meaning.
Portraiture
What is the connection between subject & artist, how do we perceive this?
Why do we use it? How do we perceive and see.
Portraiture
Portraits are effective and compelling when they tell us something about the person. A good portrait is not just a visual representation of a person; it will also reveal something about the essence of the person. What the portrait reveals may not be completely obvious - sometimes it can be cleverly implied through a certain expression or pose, an included object, or the artist's use of colour. A strong portrait captivates viewers, draws them into the painting, and engages their attention. Such a portrait painting causes the viewer to wonder about the person depicted. In this way a portrait painting or drawing can function as a biography - telling the story of that person's life. John BergerJohn Peter Berger - 1926 is an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. The life and work of John Berger represents a challenge.
The way we see things is affected by our knowledge and beliefs. An image is a sight that has been recreated or reproduced. It is a set of appearances. According to Berger, conventions have established the social presence of a woman as different from that of a man. A man’s presence is dependent on the power that he embodies, while a woman’s presence expresses her own attitude to herself and defines what can and cannot be done to her. A woman’s presence is a manifestation of her gestures, voice, opinions, expressions, clothes, chosen surroundings, and taste. A woman is forced to be self-conscious, eventually resulting in conceitedness and vanity. The way I paint often reflects gender I believe, the strong bold colours represent power, man, typical sense of manhood. I often use softer pastel blues for women that cling to Berger's thesis. The artist begins a journey, which he feels essential in the process of art. Berger explains that the process of drawing ensures that the artist dissects the properties of the object he wishes to capture. This could be the physical attribute of the subject, the redness of an apple, or something deeper. So drawing is therefore like a doctor examining a patient, running several diagnostic checks before bringing judgement. If we suppose that the subject the artist is examining is the human form, then the artist, through the act of drawing, is forced to dissect the properties of ‘being human’. Berger explains this position when he is describing the process of shaping the first outlines of a sketch. He believes that:
‘You find confirmation or denial in the object itself or in your memory of it. Each confirmation or denial brings you closer to the object, until finally you are, as it were, inside it’. The drawing is the private discovery of the subject, and the act of painting the communication, or externalising of the discovery, which produces the presented work. This journey is essential to the artist as the process of discovery builds the frame of a finished piece, like the scaffolding prepares the building site for the construction of a house. Berger explains that a ‘spectator… in front of painting or statue tends to identify himself with the subject… in front of a drawing he identifies himself with the artist’ He is arguing that the process of drawing is important as it ensures the spectator can relate to the artist directly, the drawing and its autobiographical element ensures the spectator can look beyond the subject to see the motivations and emotions that the artist has felt along their journey. What is painting? Representation & modern art. Julian BellMarks are made not only by brushes, pencils and similar tools but also by tires skidding, shoe prints and so on. A mark is whatever we see that we recognise as having a cause, whether intentional or not. We see it and we pass it, or into it. As such, a mark is a sign you can see. A sign, in logic, is something which points beyond itself; something which means. The prime example of a sign you cannot see is a spoken word. Semiotics, the study of signs, which has greatly influenced recent artists theories compares and sorts words, marks, and whatever else has significance. From its point of view, the relationship between the things itself- the sound, the brush stroke, or the scruff on the pebble- and the thing it points the mind towards is one of denotation, or quite simply ‘representation’. This is to say that ‘representation’ as we know from our common use of the word, has a more general meaning than the relationship of ‘pictorial representation’- that is, between picture and seen thing. It is equally the relationship between seen thing and meaning. It depends on the painter’s ability to communicate things, if paintings are a type of mark, representing in either of these senses, then as part of the whole category of signs they are comparable to words. Eg the word stone does not have anything particularly stoney about it. The poet or writer paints pictures in the minds of his audience. With our eyes we envision what poetry is like, painting is our image for representation and hence for all types of signs.
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What is the relationship between subject and content?
Studying form and content in any art piece can usually enhance one’s experience of the piece. There are things going on in a painting or image that one may not recognize but, once it is pointed out to them, the appreciation of the piece may grow from an emotional standpoint as well as the visual. Form and content have many influences. Content can be influenced by religion, politics, society and the philosophy of the artist and sometimes drugs have been and can be an influence. Form can be influenced by the sway of the brush. The decisions the artist wants to emphasis all come in the decisions of form. It represents something deeper - something that strikes us dear. It makes art art. J.T MitchellWilliam John Thomas Mitchell -1942 His works focus on media theory and visual culture. He draws on ideas from Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx to demonstrate that, essentially, we must consider pictures to be living things.
Why do images have such a powerful response, the power to influence? We need to see pictures not as inert objects that convey meaning but as animated beings with desires, needs, and appetites. We want to know what pictures mean, what do they do, how they communicate as signs and symbols, what power they have to effect human emotions. We may know that the pictures we study are only material objects that have been marked with colours and shapes, but frequently talk and act as if pictures had feeling, will, consciousness. Everyone knows a photo of their mum isn't alive, but will be reluctant to destroy it; we know that pictures are not treated as people, however we are willing to make exceptions, not just to valuable artworks that have personal significance. The idea that images have some sort of social or psychological power of their own is a bit of a clique but it is true. If pictures were a person, they would be coloured and marked, if they were a gender its clear that the default position of images is feminine, "constructing spectatorship", art historian Norman Bryson's words, "around an opposition between woman as images and man the bearer of the look"- not images of women but images as women; what is the moral of images, if you were to interview them as a person, surely to be worth a lot of money and to be admired and praised. To have a mastery of the beholder. Michael Fried said, "a painting had to first attract the beholder, then to arrest and finally enthral the beholder".The medusa effect.
The deficient of the image is not a description but a sign of devotion, a recirculation of the painted body of the beholder. Subject MatterA portrait involves a subject, an artist, and an audience. What is the relationship among these three? How does the artist's role change depending on his or her relationship to the subject and the audience?
Portraying an individual is a balance of the tensions among the subject, the artist and the audience, because all of them would like the portrait to look or feel like the one whom they have in mind. The artist takes the active role in depicting his own likeness perception of the one to be portrayed while the subject tends to hope for a true reflection of him/herself. The audience perceives the portrait either in the way it is proposed by the artist or in other ways that are prejudiced by his/her knowledge about the subject, he/she not privy to the intimate psychological exchange between the artist and the subject but whose view often determines the significance of the work, or of the subject. The artist who has strong tie with the subject leans to project his/her preconception about the sitter in the portrait, his/her role might change to making a portrait of someone in his/her mind unconsciously, instead of making a portrait for the audience to have a better understanding of the subject. As our social personality is a creation of other people's thought, the audience also takes an important role in examining the likeness of a portrait. If they are the immediate family of the subject, they are eligible for the most faithful judge. The relationship between the audience and the artist also has a significant effect on the role of the artists and how they depict the subject. It is more about the intention of the portraiture, whether the artists aim at presenting a real individual for their own sake, where they employ more of their artistic expertise to convey their interpretations of the looks and character to viewers; or the artists aim at presenting a person to the viewer, where they have to keep someone other than the subject in mind. |
The philosophy behind abstract expressionism, figurative art
surrealism and psychoanalysis of distortion in art.
Reasons behind the distortion
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Abstract expressionism
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