![]() Although interest in this kind of work partially cooled off in Glasgow in the mid 1990s, it could still be seen in prominent exhibitions such as Transmission’s Never Been in a Riot (1998) – a culture-jamming show put together to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the May 1968 uprisings – and The Modern Institute’s project with Rirkrit Tiravanija, Community Cinema for a Quiet Intersection (Against Oldenburg), as part of Glasgow’s City of Architecture festival in September 1999.ĭespite the fact that it is largely a cultural moment that belongs to the 1990s, in the early years of this century relational aesthetics have caused a belated stir in certain sectors of British art, notably in London. Indeed, 1990s art in Glasgow is characterised by its strong links with ‘Eurocuros’ such as Bourriaud and Hans Ulrich Obrist, made through curators such as Charles Esche while he was curator at Glasgow’s Tramway. Bourriaud, for this reason, cites Douglas Gordon as a key player in the international development of relational aesthetics in the 1990s. Socially engaged practice continued to find a great deal of support in Scotland in the later 1980s and early 1990s, particularly among artist-inititives such as Transmission, which in the later 1980s was dominated by the free-university model, and from the Scotia Nostra graduates of Glasgow School of Art’s Department of Environmental Art. In the United Kingdom this kind of practice was particularly important to critics such as Richard Cork, who curated a number of exhibitions and conferences on the theme of art for society at the end of the 1970s. This call is not new, having numerous precedents in cybernetic and socially engaged practices of the early 1970s. Bourriaud, therefore, stresses the importance of utility, asking artists to put effects to work rather than simply remain with the safe realms of a critique of representation. To intervene in the economy in a practical sense might allow the artist to do something functional, to actually make a difference. The crucial difference is that Bourriaud fixes on the economy as the key system of representation. Of course, as is the case in earlier forms of postmodernism, the means of changing the world lie in systems of representation. The artist, in this sense, gives audiences access to power, the means to change the world. Bourriaud regards art to be a form of information exchanged between audiences. ![]() A customary postmodernist privileging of second order information is central to Bourriaud’s vision of the artist as a facilitator rather than a ‘maker’, a DJ rather than a performer. Bourriaud’s conception of practice is located in postmodernist developments that span back at least to the mid 1950s and which found widespread expression in the conceptual practices of the later 1960s and early 1970s. Since the mid 1990s ‘relational aesthetics’ has become an increasingly popular neologism for a series of practices identified in contemporary art by French curator Nicolas Bourriaud, including the work of artists such as Philippe Parreno, Douglas Gordon and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liam Gillick, Pierre Huyghe, Maurizio Cattelan, and Vanessa Beecroft. ![]() (Film director Ben Lewis on Relational Art, 2004) They’re trying to tell me something that I disagree with and they’re saying ‘Because we’re artists we know better’, and I think that’s one of the Modernist art myths they haven’t managed to get rid of. The weakness of the art to me is that it is quite patronising actually. Whereas the world we live in today is one that actually offers us much more choice to resist, rebel and construct our own community and I don’t think any of the artists in that programme have really taken that on board. ![]() They argued that we are all slaves to something called dominant ideology this bourgeois thing that was constructing our way of thinking for us, our politics and our society. I think the misfortune of that kind of art is that it’s politically imbecilic, and on an intellectual level they’re still living off the arguments of the Frankfurt school – Adorno and Horkheimer – from the Sixties. Yeah, I’d say all their work was informed by a crushingly naïve political viewpoint that could only have been nurtured in the bubble of an art school. ![]()
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