Tinkering with language and terminology has raised several other issues, namely about selection criteria. The application guidelines currently state that selection will be based on accordance to the tinygrants mission statement, creativity and ingenuity, and viability/logistics. I think over the coming weeks I will be including other criteria to more specifically address the common threads that run through the kinds of creative interventions I am looking for, such as activating a public, initiating dialogue (implicitly or explicitly), visibility in non-traditional spaces, education components, inventive use of funds, etc.

With these changes, the overarching principles behind tinygrants remain the same. The coming specifications will only be to name what has already been inferred.

From Sasaki’s website:

For I Promise It Will Always Be This Way, twenty-six costumed team mascots took the field at Lamport Stadium, attempting to whip the crowd into a fervent frenzy. Throughout the twelve-hour endurance piece, they pulled out all the stops with their mascot shenanigans, while “Jock Rock” played over the loudspeakers. As the night progressed and physical fatigue began to set in, the mascots required cigarettes, naps, snacks and bathroom breaks. Plush heads were removed and mascot illusions were broken, revealing the performers to be human after all…capable of feeling cold and weary. However, flying in the face of all expectations, the mascots’ morale never dwindled. An unbelievably supportive, ever-cheering, crowd reciprocated the enthusiasm, creating a touchingly symbiotic back-and-forth of support. What was intended to be a much darker comment on futility and pathos ended up being a very moving moment of social generosity.

Here’s a video of the event:

[Image by Sweet One; cropped from this original. Shared under Creative Commons.]

DodoLab is a collaborative, nebulous “organization” that stages interactive seminars that ask its participants, “What are the barriers to adaptation and change?” The question is posed in as many ways as it is answered through a variety of participatory projects. (Full disclosure: I traveled to Montreal with DodoLab as part of their involvement with WEEC5.)

What’s interesting about DodoLab is that it is never one thing, one project, or one idea, which fits well with their interest in adaptation and change. What links all of their projects together is their dependence on participants to supply data or share experiences. There is no “final product” with DodoLab, just new evolutions of ideas, questions and responses.

Read their About page for a list of DodoLab values. You can read what DodoLab is, and what DodoLab isn’t. And on the latter’s list? DodoLab isn’t just an art project.

DodoLab is a great example of how relational art can be collaborative, educational and investigative.

Diane Borsato’s Touching 1000 People is a great example of what Kathleen Ritter calls “furtive practice.” For this piece, Borsato set out to touch 1000 people in Vancouver and Montreal. In the artist’s words:

I read a study that suggested that when people are subtly touched, it can affect their behaviour and well being. For a month I went out of my way to delicately bump, rub past, and tap 1000 strangers in the city. I touched commuters, shoppers, cashiers and taxi cab drivers on the street, on the metro, in shops and in museums. The exercise was like a minimalist performance. I was exploring the smallest possible gesture, and how it could create an effect in public.

The action was performed for one month in various locations in Montreal in 2001, and repeated for ten days across the city of Vancouver in 2003.

I love this piece because, although it is a relational work, its participants aren’t gathered and they aren’t necessarily aware of the fact that they are participants at all. It’s a subtle and lovely intervention.

[Image: Documentation of Diane Borsato's Touching 1000 People from the artist's website.]

There’s drawing, there’s painting, there’s sculpture, installation, illustration, performance, video, netart… and then there’s relational aesthetics. Relational artwork doesn’t exactly have a style, and it isn’t really a medium. What “relational aesthetics” describes is artwork whose completion isn’t realized until the audience steps in. It’s a broad definition, but for a good reason: relational artworks can take many, many shapes, incorporate many other styles and media, and even have different types of audiences (such as audiences who are aware of the piece as artwork, and audiences who aren’t aware an artwork is being presented).

The term “relational aesthetics” was coined by Nicolas Bourriaud in the 1990s to describe artworks like Jens Haaning’s Turkish Jokes (1994), where the artist “uses a loudspeaker to broadcast jokes told in Turkish on a square in Copenhagen… He instantly produces a micro-community of immigrants who have been brought together by the collective laughter that inverts their situation as exiles.” (Bourriaud, Nicolas. “Relational Aesthetics.” Participation (Documents of Contemporary Art). Ed. Claire Bishop. New York: The MIT, 2006. 162. Print.)

So why does tinygrants only want to fund relational work? Primarily, I think it’s an underfunded and undersupported method of art making, possibly because it is so broad, difficult to pin down, and can in fact be disguised within the realm of more “traditional” methods of art making. But also, I think that great, unconventional and unexpected things can happen with relational work, and that’s what I’m inspired to support. You can read more about the logic behind the impetus here.

I’ll be sharing more examples of relational work, in case people need some kickstarting for their applications.

[Image: Jens Haaning, Turkish Jokes, 1994. Image from skor.nl.]

Here are some initial questions that will guide my critical thinking:

1. What does ‘relational aesthetics’ look like (or act like) in 2009? ["How are we to understand the types of artistic behaviour shown in exhibitions held in the 1990s, and the lines of thinking behind them, if we do not start out from the same situation as the artists?" - Nicolas Bourriaud, from Relational Aesthetics, 1998.]

2. Can the question of aesthetic criticism be resolved in relational aesthetics? [The more I read about these arguments from the 1990s, the more I understand 'beauty' to be a privileged position.] Subquestion: Is the question of aesthetic judgment in relational aesthetics relevant anymore?

3. How will processes of subjectivity (application review and selection) be negotiated? What is fair and democratic?

There is so much to read on the subject yet somehow, not enough hindsight!