contemporary monkey

To know thy enemy, is to sleep with it, eat it, gorge on it, before expelling it for waste. I’m sure that was never said, but I’m imagining it being recited by whomever is the Sun Tzu for our day. Just as in war, in order to beat the opponent, we must understand him.

The enemy for we, the proletarians making an effort to understand contemporary art, of course, are those that separate us from the work. These are people In Our Way. They are those that neither create, nor speak a useful 20th century language to decipher meaning for, contemporary art. Therefore to know the enemy, must be an important step into knowing the language and thinking inside the head of the ‘middleman’. In this case, it’s the art philosopher Nicolas Bourriaud.

one of them: The Enemy!

Inevitably when I can’t comprehend something, jumping head-first into the subject usually proves to be the best route. So I’ve set myself up to pore through Nicolas Bourriaud’s book “Relational Aesthetics” to, if possible, make sense of it. Bring meaning back into the English language, as it were. The subject, “Relational Aesthetics”, I’m aware, speaks to interaction between artist and viewer. I think this is a well-suited place to start. If this smart and intelligent person can’t, or isn’t willing to, explain it, who will? And if he’s not any good at it, I’m making it up for him. You’ll have to decide whether you want to come along for the tour.

Let’s get to it. Read onward as I rip into each chapter.

FORWARD

Nicolas Bourriaud (photocopyright: Mikael Olsson)

Rarely do I read the Forward of a book. Or an Introduction, or a preface, or an obscure latin-esque name for the purely avoidable bit that comes before the reason you bought the book in the first place. Except for the writer, a Forward is usually read by nobody.

I never understood the point of The Forward. What other medium takes time away from you like a book does? Quentin Tarantino will never invite Martin Scorsese to go on about the subtlety and  overtones of Mr. Pink in the rainbow world of colourful, criminal nicknames. The Forward is evidence that we shouldn’t be surprised people are abandoning books for film and other digital media.

However, in my circumstances, which is one of re-interpreting an art book, I’m resolved to go the full monty. I’m using the Forward of “Relational Aesthetics” as a jumping-in point for French curator, art critic, and generally confusing communicator, Nicolas Bourriaud. And lucky I did, because M. Bourriaud has a peculiar fear of the future. It’s all there, ironically, in the Forward.

First written in French in the late 1990s, “Relational Aesthetics” is a compilation of essays written by Bourriaud to capture the mood and work of artists of the day who were focused on viewer participation. It might be that he indeed did “write” rather than type because there is an immediate lamentation of the so called super-highway of electronic media. I don’t know about you, but whenever I see or hear the words super-highway, it immediately adds 40 years to the speaker’s real age, and about 100 miles from any sort of cosmopolitan centre.

Bourriaud pretends to speak for all when he says, “We feel meagre and helpless when faced with the electronic media, theme parks, user-friendly places, and the spread of compatible forms of sociability, like the laboratory rat doomed to an inexorable itinerary in its cage, littered with chunks of cheese.” Interestingly, Bourriaud sees the human existence as an Englishman would: doomed to kill itself, and can’t see any good coming from it. Whither note paper?

During the early 1990’s, attempting to “get online” wasn’t simple and didn’t promise anything other than discovery of the new. By way of scrambling over the carpet, ducking beneath desk or chair, seeking out any usable phone jack, one had to be keenly interested just to get the hardware to work. Yes, it was a bit of a yoga maneuver. Yes, you had to be both electrician and HTML reader. But jumping in was seemingly the only way to solve the puzzle, and most civilians like me pretty much did the same thing. To us, feeling “meagre and helpless” as Bourriaud calls it, is someone else. Perhaps an old man, reclining on the sofa under a warm blanket, with a bowl of popcorn and a full bottle of wine, complaining that the batteries are dead in the remote control.

Bourriaud also hints that the social bond between people has turned into a marketing game, able only to exist as a shared logo. As if we can only have conversations if we meet up at the Starbucks. “This is a society where human relations are no longer ‘directly experienced’, but start to become blurred in their ’spectacular’ representation”.  Don’t I look utterly stupid, thinking my friends were real people, instead of the puppets they really are.

Bourriaud wonders whether art, (art in the mid 1990s anyway) can generate relationships with the world. I suppose he means a relationship with nary a McDonald’s, Coca Cola, or Lady Gaga in sight. I’m of the opinion that this works in your favour. Would you bond with someone who listens to Britney Spears or JLS? From the perspective of 2010 at least, the answer to Bourriaud’s question is that art’s faithfulness looks bleak. If anything, art has degenerated from building any sort of relationship with real people into avoiding us like the bubonic plague. In its attempt to burn brightly, art has zapped the locals to a crisp.

But it’s early yet. After all, we’re only in the Forward. And forward we must march. Bourriaud’s Luddite points smack of Victorian England, but I’m hoping by page 104 he’s able to turn the tables on his own kind and convince them to give it a 21st century, cheerleading try. Maybe the final chapter will be a, “Come on People, Snap Out of It!”