[-empyre-] -twerkw or placebo

[Judith Rodenbeck]

> without [ not then yet-] the space of the participatory art in the
> classic "Relational Aesthetics" reminded me, sometimes, of walking
> into a nice semi-private, semi-public waiting room where, here and
> there, attractive popular magazines,
> and toys for the kiddies, stack up; maybe,   a doctors office
> reception, freshly redone.  A mistake no doubt, this feeling of
> unease.  

Oh, yeah. This speaks to Marc's example, too. The placebo effect of
RA--comfy furniture and office cubicles in feel-good colors (Gillick), hip
but not overly challenging "exotic" snacks (did Tiravanija ever make the
really spicy stuff?), the soft reassurance bougie hipster insiderness, the
semi-reflective phallocentric patina of the latest philosophical Proper
Name, the frequent flyer miles... Gestation in the Thatcher/Reagan years of
trickle-down and the baby bubbles that would turn into Richard Florida's
"creative economy. The "return to beauty." The desperate yearning for
affect, to the extent that alternative venues become sites for cloying
twenty-somethings' versions of nap-time recast as be-ins of some sort...

Framed in another way, thinking about what it might mean that the generation
of "relational aesthetics" took place at the same moment as and using the
same equipment as Rosalind Krauss's bizarre but not uninteresting critical
project about "inventing a medium" helps elucidate some of the broader
problematics both articulate--and both suppress. Both projects are
intimately engaged with film and its processes, Krauss with avant-garde
projects that draw attention to the properties and procedures of
frame-by-frame projection, Bourriaud with the industrialized organization of
labor. For the latter, we, the "viewers" or "participants," are lucky
"extras"; for the former, we are still the subjects of (modernist) epiphany.
And both projects emerge from reflection upon the way in which international
art discourse has been virtually consumed, since the 1980s, by two
practices: photography and installation, the one proliferative and flat, the
other a peculiar instance of site-specificity that also depends upon the
hypostasizing of the readymade.

Here's what happened in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in New York,
Dusseldorf, Osaka, Paris, London, etc. Artists making flat work and objects
began to explore: making/allowing the viewer a more dynamic engagement with
the work; relinquishing artistic control of the outcome of the work; systems
thinking about work qua labor and work qua work, as well as work qua
situation; acknowledging and exploiting arts fictional autonomy; ditto
commodity status of art AND artist; recognition of spectacular conditions of
art making, fashion status of art viewing, interpellative effect of
mediation (chiefly, then, around 1960, photography but also, in an
increasing sense, audio recording). See, on these topics from various
directions, John Cage, Gutai, Allan Kaprow, George Maciunas, Anna Halprin,
Jack Smith, etc., and, oh yeah, in a very partial way the SI. See also:
bebop. 

Why would Bourriaud disavow these earlier projects which were,
fundamentally, about relations? (And, for Simon: Kaprow, like probably
plenty of others, was directly engaged with anthropological discourse on
play, also thinking about Goffman, of course, and early on, like 1962 or so,
visiting computing hardware and getting it, thinking about systems and C3)
Perhaps because these earlier experiments trouble or even -twerkw a
latter-day model predicated not just on presentism ("you had to be there")
but also upon the placebo feel-good--and highly capitalized--tracery
Christina laid out. Perhaps because the art exchange was being construed
then as a place that might not simply be a commodity exchange.

Robert's original call asked about the possible heteronormativity of
"relational aesthetics." I'm not interested in "torturing" anything, whether
bodies or the proper names of continental theorists, but I am interested in
"the democratic space of the 'violence of participation,'" though I'd add
quite emphatically not as the repetition of violence or even the
metaphorical torturing of anything but as the exploration of, for example,
behaviors, obedience to authority among them. "Queering" relational
aesthetics, then, is productive inasmuch as it forces that metadiscursive
activity. But I am way way over my 300 words, and since I think 300 words is
a great limit I will stop.

Judith