Bourriaud nicolas relational aesthetics update#
Mischaracterizing the SI’s concepts of the situation, détournement, and the dérive, Bourriaud claims to update these concepts with concepts of his own: relational aesthetics, detourage, and radicant aesthetics. Over the last decades, curator Nicolas Bourriaud has drawn significant inspiration for his writings on contemporary art from the theories of the Situationist International (SI), an avant-garde group in existence from 1957 until 1972. From the book’s preface: “So what is New Media Art? What does this term really describe? And what has occasioned the schism between this term and the art scene it is supposed to describe? And lastly, what accounts for the limited presence in critical debate of an artistic practice that appears to have all the credentials for representing an era in which digital media are powerfully reshaping the political, economic, social and cultural organization of the world we live in?” Domenico Quaranta, Beyond New Media Art, Link Editions, Brescia 2013. On the other hand, this book is also an attempt to suggest new critical and curatorial strategies to turn this marginalization into a thing of the past, and to stress the topicality of art addressing the media and the issues of the information age. “Beyond New Media Art” is an attempt to analyze the current positioning of so-called New Media Art in the wider field of contemporary arts, and to explore the historical, sociological and conceptual reasons for its marginal position and under-recognition in recent art history.
Through the circulation of excerpts, reviews and interviews, the book produced some debate outside of Italy, which persuaded the author to release, three years later, this English translation. “Beyond New Media Art” is the revised, updated version of a book first published in Italian with the title “Media, New Media, Postmedia” (Postmedia Books, Milan 2010). It draws links between normally unconnected practices, identifying the often overlooked or underplayed aesthetic experience within socially engaged art and the political resonances of aesthetic experience, attending to gaps in thought and practice around art and social change. Contextualised by poststructuralist, postanarchist and Autonomist Marxist political philosophy and debates in contemporary art criticism and theory, the thesis and dossier of practice contribute to a richer understanding of - and expanded language with which to discuss – the relation between art and politics. The connecting thread between these sites and practices is their potential for effecting change at the level of the individual via a subjectivising aesthetic rupture. The thesis demonstrates how these often distanced and apparently contradictory practices find resonance and whose accumulative effect contributes to the conditions for a paradigmatic shift that would constitute ‘postcapitalism’. This ‘informal’ art practice is referred to as ‘self-organised cultural activity’ and opens up on to discussions of the relative merits of DIY practices including music, self-publishing, political activism and so on. A further distinction is made between those practices that self-identify as art (and the institutional, market-led and capitalist framework this can entail), and those that either actively disavow or go unrecognised as art due to their distance from the signifying apparatuses of the discipline. The varied nature of the work under question leads to the adoption of a structure that distinguishes practices by their operation in different spaces or ecologies: the individual, social and structural.
It explores how art contributes to a better world and the form such practice takes in an increasingly expanded, ‘precarious’ and interdisciplinary sphere. The thesis and accompanying portfolio of practical work presents a parallel inquiry into socially transformative art practice and the evaluative framework proper to it.
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