Relational Art
................................................................................................................................................................................
The press release for Playing the City also mentions something called ‘Relational Art’, a catchall term for categorizing forms of art that seek to produce or facilitate human relations. The label is useful to us here inasmuch as it highlights a trend in artworks that seek to diminish the distance between the artist and the audience. Like Dada, Relational Art undermines the traditional post-Renaissance idea of the artist-creator/artist-genius, displacing his position and skewing the conventional relationship between artist and audience, allowing it to become more ambiguous. Here, the artist is able to slide from the role of creator and assume the role of initiator: instead of creating a work which is then consumed by an audience, the initiator of relational art may seek to simply create the conditions for an event – a meeting, a happening, a communing, a conflict – to take place. The opening upstages the artworks 9.In its challenge to the traditional structure of the artist-audience relationship, Relational Art could be seen to inherit the projects of the avant-gardes. Their goals are concordant: the democratisation of the creative act; the release of its energy into the community, in a bid to encourage relatedness and engagement. Indeed, a glance at the Situationist manifesto for the construction of situations seems to provide us with a blueprint for much Relational Art ...
“[…] the most pertinent revolutionary experiments in culture have sought to break the spectators’ psychological identification with the hero so as to draw them into activity. . . . The situation is thus designed to be lived by its constructors. The role played by a passive or merely bit-part playing ‘public’ must constantly diminish, while that played by those who cannot be called actors, but rather, in a new sense of the term, ‘livers,’ must steadily increase.”10
- Contents
< Fluxus
> CAPITALISM AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Related posts:-
Social Practice and Studio Practice
Imminent (Double)-Agents
Dissemination of Information
