[-empyre-] "Relational Aesthetics" and/as "Aesthetics of Existence"

[Judith Rodenbeck]

"Aesthetics" as used in Bourriaud's/other art theorists' "relational
aesthetics" is not the same as "aesthetics" used in Foucault's "aesthetics
of existence." While NB may not "own" the former his text laid out certain
terms and formulations that are useful. I provided a list of other/related
terms--littoral, dialogic, site-specific, new situationist, etc. (I'd add
interventionist)--that have been deployed in analyses of "relational" art
since the 1990s. Each of these makes use of locational metaphors (location
understood as spatial, temporal, social); further, each relies upon a kind
of Venn logic that is, in turn, reliant upon the conditional autonomy of
artistic practice--the conditions of which are tested by each metaphor in
distinct ways. To be really dumb about NB, his term could be rephrased as
"feeling (aesthetic) connected (relational) in an art context (aesthetic)."

Foucault: "And what I mean by this [an aesthetics of existence] is a way of
life whose moral value did not depend either on one's being in conformity
with a code of behavior, or on an effort of purification, but on certain
formal principles in the use of pleasures, in the way one distributed them,
in the limits one observed, in the hierarchy one respected. Through the
/logos/, through reason and the relation to truth that governed it, such a
life was committed to the maintenance and reproduction of an ontological
order; moreover, it took on the brilliance of a beauty that was revealed to
those able to behold it or keep its memory present in mind." [Uses of
Pleasure, 91]

A while back Christina posted a very (to me) funny definition from the
urbandictionary.com of "kairotic" as: "used to express gayness or queerness
or just to make fun of people who you dont like, [e.g.] 'You are very
kairotic'; 'go away you kairotic bastard.'"

One value of going back into the histories of performance and looking at
certain prototypes of "relational aesthetic" projects, at least for me, is
the critique legible there of easy mappings from art to life and back. When
Alison Kowles makes a salad, is she doing her piece, "Make a Salad," or is
she just making a salad? Is the work in the imperative or in the lettuce?
And "certain it is that fine women eat a crazy salad with their meat"
(actually a pretty interesting critique of capital, given a) Fluxus and b)
Yeats's poem). While there may be a "blurring," as Allan Kaprow would put
it, of art and life, there is nevertheless an awareness of two different
orders of experience--and of the importance of maintaining an awareness of
that difference, whether that's achieved by thinking through the parergon or
what Dewey called "experience" (as distinct, unhelpfully, from "experience,"
of course) or through the articulation of the tesseracted space/time.

Can you enfold chronos into kairos, or vice versa? Is this even desirable?
What happens when "abstract violence," for example and to pick up on Davin's
earlier post, becomes chronic? In(de)finite detention?