Monday, October 15, 2012

Reading Bourriaud

"This is a society where human relations are no longer 'directly experienced', but start to become blurred in their 'spectacular' representation."

What is the function of a public private representation?
Visualisation? Images that allows us to masturbate to a perfect illusion of ourselves as part of a social reality?
What kind of reality is that?

Are we living in an infrastructure described in Bourriaud's text "Relational Aesthetics", one following a modernist strategy to achieve a rationalistic visions of an idealistic future?
The infrastructure which allows us to "travel faster and more efficiently, yet it has the drawback of turning its users to consumers of miles and their bi-products".

B. explains the difference between art exhibitions and other forms of artistic presentations, such as TV, theater, litterature..



If we mainly communicate within digitally designed forums or meet in pre-defined spaces such as theatres, this would propose a significant threat to our mobility and means to create open dialogue with each other.

My art exhibition should, according to B., instead enable inter-human commerce. You should be able to participate in a social interstice. You are present in the conversation by the fact that you have something to offer. You are not visiting. You are not existing in an art space after having bought or received permission to do so. You are an asset. Maybe the art work will be able to take form first after you have left?

The opposite would perhaps be the visitor that
views the art space not as a platform of discussions about that what we might think we see, but as a stage or construction site for her ideology and identity. Something that is constructed for her subjective project of understanding herself and the context she belongs to.
The conversations in the foyer after a play are happening between such visitors. They are merely exchanging subjective interpretations of what they just witnessed? The art work is old even before it's exhibited.

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