Diane Borsato

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.]

This entry was written by Marissa Neave, posted on October 24, 2009 at 1:23 PM, filed under Research and tagged diane borsato, furtive practice, kathleen ritter. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Relational Projects: An Overview

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.]

This entry was written by Marissa Neave, posted on October 21, 2009 at 12:58 PM, filed under Research and tagged collaboration, jens haaning, nicolas bourriaud, participation, relational aesthetics. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.

Why Relational Aesthetics?

One of my first tasks for tinygrants is to establish a theoretical framework within which I can position this experiment. Although it’s necessary as a starting point, I also imagine that it will develop amorphously and nebulously, almost in a catch-22 kind of way.

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!

This entry was written by Marissa Neave, posted on October 3, 2009 at 6:55 PM, filed under Research and tagged critical framework, nicholas bourriaud, questions, relational aesthetics. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.