Some thoughts on Relational Aesthetics: an open letter

Dear Relational Aesthetes,

The following is by no means intended as an assault on the individual practices of artists whose work falls under these themes/methodologies. Rather, it is intended as an opposition to the broad acceptance of the theory surrounding the work--and the reasons given for such work--described initially by Bourriaud and his theory of Relational Aesthetics. It is both a cautionary tale and a call to arms, in a sense; it has a deliberate manifesto-like tone and is intended to provoke strong criticism.

By opposing each other, may we find compromise.

The trouble I have with the term Relational Aesthetics is that the work the theory tries to classify is decidedly anti-aesthetic. Despite the term itself--coined not by the artists involved but rather by theorist Nicolas Bourriaud--it makes no claims to aestheticization or beauty; it is rather, in fact, the ultimate rejection or nullification of beauty. It is obsessed with societal interaction (the most quotidian of all possible concerns) and one-liners masquerading as concepts, building only superficial and stunningly brief "communities."

Relational Aesthetics is therefore image-nullifying (has anyone ever wondered why the photographs which document most of these works are interchangeable? How many photos of a person serving dinner to an audience must we see?). It is not a desire for ugliness fueling this work, because any antithesis secretly justifies its opposite; rather, the work is an assertion and manifestation of the idea that beauty and ugliness are irrelevant, pointless pursuits of a pretentious Bourgeois culture that predates the service-based economy. This is art imitating life, or more specifically art imitating the market and this, of course, is the true bourgeois pretension--that the marketplace is central.

Relational Aesthetics seeks therefore to destroy the line between art and life: a line which, as one might suspect, exists for a reason. In its use of social interaction as material, it becomes a sort of re-Duchamping of the world. “Readymade objects have been done,” says Relational Aesthetics, “and the object is an artifact of the old economy. If Duchamp removed the building of an artwork and left only the declaration of it, we will remove even the attempt to declare art.” But Duchamp’s point was that the viewer is already complicit in the agreement that what they are seeing is indeed art; any further involvement is superfluous and, in the long run, on the part of the viewer-cum-participant it is potentially unwelcome.

If one were paranoid, one might not be blamed for thinking that this self-decentralization is an attempt by the artists to absolve themselves of guilt if the work ends up being as boring as most of this work does. “Well,” one can always say, “I did relinquish sole authorship...” Like a Texan Governor who is able to claim that he neither wrote the law nor flipped the switch, these artists are nevertheless central and primary to the process, for better or for worse; the blood, as it were, is on their hands. If the removal of one’s authorship or primacy is the objective--conscious or otherwise--then these artists are the victims of an irony, or perhaps a paradox.

The proof of this irony is found in Warhol, who was a perfect example of the decentralization or the anonymity--perhaps the pretense of anonymity--claimed to be part of Relational Aesthetics, which is at best a pipe-dream and at worst a poorly thought-out swindle. In those moments where he was willing to say anything at all, Warhol claimed that he wanted to be non-human, anonymous, mechanical (he once said that he would like nothing better than for someone else to begin making work just like his own, such that no one would be able to tell the difference). This rejection of individuality, in turn, made him the center of the art world’s largest cult of personality...ever. Warhol’s rejection of his own worth as an individual personality was, of course, as much of a pretense as his personality itself, leading the astute observer to realize that perhaps today’s Relational Aesthetics artists are not totally oblivious to the lessons of history; the more you deny that you are an authorial personality, the more you are recognized as one.

As Jean Baudrillard has said, "Insignificance--real insignificance, the victorious challenge to meaning, the shedding of sense, the art of disappearance of meaning--is the rare quality of a few exceptional works that never strive for it." It does not take a great logical leap to realize that if this is true, one can also substitute the word "artists" for the word "works" in the passage above.

Is this because of some stubbornness on the part of the public (whomever they are)? Or is it because all secrecy breeds further inquisition, the secrecy itself implying that there is something underneath it? These are possibilities, but I would suggest that it is a logical paradox that foils the supposed assassination of the Author. As Alan Watts has said, “no one believes in God quite like an atheist;” it is not much of a stretch to say also that any denial at authorship is a secret claim to authorship. Put plainly, no one is positioned to deny authorship except the author. Or, to state it poetically, “there is no author, and I know this for I am he.” Even the idea of giving credit to a project’s participants is a claim to authority--otherwise, what right does one have to be "giving away" credit?

The tragedy is that this deceit passes by us, thinly-veiled as benevolence and communism, when in fact it is the ultimate expression of neo-liberal capitalism, for when the traditional contexts, discourses and practices of art have all been discredited or destroyed, there will remain only the Free Market for determining what is art and what is not. Therefore this strata of works which claim to embrace community and "the public," claim to be populist and anti-elitist, and claim that anyone can and everyone should be a part of the artistic process, would have success or failure designated only by those rich enough to pay for it.

So I request that artists, writers, critics and commentators concerning themselves with Relational Aesthetics--especially those applauding it as decentralizing to the artist and inherently communistic or benevolent--take a long, hard look at what it is the work is doing. Because this elusive "community" that is so sought after does not form after five seconds of coerced interaction.

Thank you,
Lee Henderson

Ingrid Bachmann: Symphony for 54 Shoes (Distant Echoes)

Neutral Ground
September 9 - October 6, 2006

Ingrid Bachmann’s Symphony for 54 Shoes attempts to delineate where humanity ends and technology begins. The symphony consists of 27 pairs of shoes which move up and down, accompanied by a clacking sound. The movement, which appears totally random, is controlled by a micro-controller and software. By presenting noise that is almost the opposite of music, and movement that could not be mistaken for dance, Bachmann removes evidence of the human hand--or, more specificallly, the human foot--from her work.

It is not simply that human presence is lacking, it has been eradicated. The artist is working with shoes, which, on an extremely superficial level, recall Marilyn Levine’s clay representations of leather shoes. However, the appeal of Levine’s hyper-realist shoes, and other leather articles, is the way that they imply human absence through the physical traces left by the owner of the shoes. Or, perhaps a more fruitful comparison would be to Dominique Blain’s non-kinetic installation of army boots, where every other boot islifted about a foot off the ground by a white box. The piece is eerily effective in its evocation of movement, and, as a result, the absent soldiers.

So, how does Bachmann take shoes, particularly effective in reminding the viewer of their absent occupants, and remove the human element? First, the shoes are presented to the viewer several feet above the ground, on a shelf that runs along the periphery of the gallery. They are not positioned on or near the floor, as Blain’s army boots are, and therefore do not have a direct relationship to either the viewer’s or imaginary occupant’s body. Furthermore, they have been lifted off the base of the shelf by two metal posts and a small box (which I assume contains the mechanical components which control the movements of the individual shoes).

Second, the movement of the shoes is distinctly robotic and mechanical. It is an intentionally and glaringly inaccurate imitation of the motion of the human foot. Third, although each shoe has taps attached to both the sole and the heel, the tap itself serves no purpose. The tapping sound is created by metal bits at the end of the metal posts. The shoe itself is mute. This is a particularly important element, because it renders the tap, the shoe, even the motion, absolutely pointless. There is really no reason for any of it, as none of it actually contributes to the “symphony.”

Lastly, the symphony is completely a-rythmical. I could not pick out any kind of arrangement, pattern or method to the clacking sounds, and the randomness of it is mildly unpleasant (which is perhaps why the gallery staff turn the installation off when no one is viewing it). Like the non-dance-like motion, the noise is almost exactly the opposite of music. This, the piece seems to say, is technology without humanity. It can imitate but it cannot recreate human expression. The artist--who is interested in technology, but also nostalgic, preferring those technologies that are not cutting-edge, that have been relegated to the realm of the obsolete--may not have intended this reading of the work. In her artist statement, Bachmann explains that she “[tries] to bring the complexity of the real world and experience into the digital experience, to complicate the relations between the virtual and material realms, to create works that situate themselves in the world in rich sensory, tactile and sonic ways.” For me, the work does complicate the relations between the virtual and material realms, but in the way that it fails to bring the complexity of the real world into the digital experience.

Angela Beck

Bart Gazzola and Donna White: Beautiful, as well as Brutal

artistsbyartists series, Mendel Art Gallery
Summer season, 2006

Discomfort, whether social or biological, is only occasionally either the subject or the objective of contemporary art in Saskatchewan. In the case of Beautiful, as well as Brutal, it is all four--social, biological, subject and objective.

This pairing of artists Bart Gazzola and Donna White is part of the Mendel’s artistsbyartists program, in which a senior artist from the community is paired with a junior artist--age not necessarily withstanding--in the hope that each of their practices will inform the other. This particular pairing is a clever choice, because each artist is creating an imagery of discomfort; Gazzola’s emphasis is on a medical or biological anxiety, while White’s is on social tension.

Gazzola’s work in this case is a pair of digital prints. The prints are untitled, although Gazzola refers to them as “kisses” in gallery literature. The prints show fleshy pink shapes on a black background, and are poster-sized in a landscape orientation. Each print seems to have been produced by scanning a piece of meat, an image which is then mirrored horizontally and vertically to produce the final print. The final forms, then, appear bow-shaped--not unlike lips.

Gazzola’s kisses are incredibly suggestive, bearing greater resemblance to vaginal openings than to facial ones, although Desmond Morris might suggest that evolution has ensured that there is little difference. In either event, the lip pairings are grotesque, and viewers may find themselves shocked to imagine themselves kissing them--the detail in the photographs is high enough, and the surface glossy enough, to permit this. The fact that the lips are composed of cow tongues (as the gallery's information indicates) serves to interrogate the reasons for our disgust as viewers; after all, this is the same substance some of us put into our mouths and it is similar to that we already have in our mouths, except that Gazzola’s version is hyperaestheticized compared to what one finds in the butcher’s shop. Gazzola has made it plastic through digitization, and quarantined it under glass in his process.

If biological quarantine raises tension in Gazzola’s photographs, it is social quarantine that is the modus operandi of White’s sculptural works. These sculptures, entitled The Cyborg Collars, are ornate neckpieces crafted of metal and a combination of paper and translucent film. The paper/film is folded and rippled to create undulating patterns reminiscent of those on Elizabethan collars. The metalwork, on the other hand, is industrial and aggressive, coming to sharp points around the periphery of the collar. Whether these devices are worn by an isolationist aggressor or an isolated victim is unclear, and perhaps irrelevant, although I couldn’t help but wonder how the sizing for the neck was determined; do these works fit the artist’s body, built to her proportions? The collars are not placed on models of any kind; because of this, and the historical influences they incorporate, the collars also reference the artifacts of a civilization now obsolete.

If this work has an inconsistency, it is in the discrepancy between the detailed--almost obsessive--patterns on the paper/film and the technical imperfections and irregularities in how these materials are applied. Furthermore, all the works in the exhibition are illuminated by fairly standard gallery lighting. As such, the environment the works find themselves in becomes a compromise between the extremes the two bodies of work might call for independently: dim, focused museum lighting for the collar-artifacts, and cold, sterile surgical light for the flat, plasticized lips.

Neither of these concerns are fatal, however--but, by infection or impalement, the work itself looks as though it could be.

--Lee Henderson

link to the Mendel Gallery's site for Beautiful, as well as Brutal (must scroll down)

Mark Dudiak and Cedric Bomford: My Home Away from Time

Neutral Ground
August 26 - October 6, 2006

The concept behind My Home Away From Time has potential. Two artists in two different locations take photographs of their surroundings and send the undeveloped roll of film to the other. Both artists then develop the film and respond to what the other has photographed by shooting another roll of film, which is subsequently sent off undeveloped so that the process can be repeated. Unfortunately, the end result of this project, the exhibition, falls short of what might have been an interesting statement on the role of the artist.

Before entering the exhibition space, I had the opportunity to read a curatorial statement by Brenda Cleniuk. I found the essay somewhat self-indulgent; it is more concerned with the writer and her task and, as a result, does not respond sufficiently to the actual artwork. Possibly, this is the result of Cleniuk's desire to "keep [her] opinions about the artist and their work objective and not about [her] needs and desires to become credited with something that would in turn make [her] more special than the artist." In order to avoid saying something that might be perceived as biased, Cleniuk opts instead to say quite a lot about her approach to writing about the art. Identifying one's perspective or process is fine, but the emphasis should remain on the art.

The artwork itself consists of digital images of the photographs projected onto two screens, placed on the floor and angled slightly toward one another. Images remain on the screen for a few seconds before switching to the next, each switch being accompanied by a slide-projector-style click. In front of the screens, Dudiak has placed the digital projectors and a tangle of cords. I assume that the tangle of cords was added to give the installation a sculptural feel, an attempt to inject more visual interest into what is otherwise a fairly dull piece. Watching the passage of images is like sitting at dinner with two friends who work together and who are swapping work-related stories. The coworkers might be endlessly interested in their shared experiences, but you end up on the periphery of the conversation, as if listening to an extended inside-joke. Similarly, the conversation set up between Dudiak and Bomford is probably far more interesting to the artists. This alienation of the viewer is made worse by the placement of the screens on the floor, a timid gesture that betrays a lack of faith in the work, and by the tangles of cords that prevent the viewer from approaching the screens, an apt metaphor for the inaccessibility of the piece. If the work is a challenge to relational aesthetics, as the curatorial essay states, the artists have gone too far in the other direction.

However, I do think that there is potential in the project. I am particularly interested in the romantic, nostalgic element; as digital media increasingly replaces film, we lose that delay between desire and fulfillment. With a digital camera we can see what we have done immediately, edit photographs on the spot, reshoot when we need to. Film, however, requires that we wait. Dudiak and Bomford have increased this delay, and have used it to force themselves to relinquish control. However, for these themes to reach the viewer, the artists would have to take creative control back, in the end, to present a resolved and engaging work.

Angela Beck

Mark Dudiak and Cedric Bomford: My Home Away From Time

Neutral Ground
August 26-October 6, 2006


In experimental work the end result can sometimes be oblique or impermeable, but this is not so in the case of My Home Away From Time. The work is familiar, bearing a marked resemblance to a travel slide show.

In the project space at Neutral Ground, there sit two projectors throwing images onto two Da-Lite collapsible screens. The cables feeding these projectors with data from a pair of DVD players are strewn about the floor, as are the DVD players themselves, as well as their accompanying speakers. The images from the projectors are actually paired videos of slideshows, and the switching of one slide for another is accentuated by the mechanical noise generated by the recorded slide carousel.

The images on the virtual slides are almost perfect in their banality. There is little that sticks out in these images, as they fit seamlessly into the artists’ “summer vacation” aesthetic. The only component of this installation which does not fit in with this aesthetic, in fact--apart from the nature of the gallery itself--is the inclusion of digital media, although one may argue that this represents the spectrum of tourists’ records of their destinations. Each image lasts from about five to ten seconds.

This work was produced, we are told by the statement on the door to the space, by Mark Dudiak and Cedric Bomford while one of them was in Europe and the other at home in Canada. They would take photographs and send them to each other to be developed, without having seen their own photos. They would then “respond” to the delivered photos with yet more photos, sending those off again, and repeating the process. The resultant photographic conversation takes the form of the twin slideshows in the installation.


Mark Dudiak and Cedric Bomford My Home Away From Time, 2006 installation view. Image courtesy Mark Dudiak and Cedric Bomford



In the gallery Director’s statement it is said that Mark Dudiak “directly challenges the aspirations of the new relational aesthetics...” But with this work which acts as a record of a visual but nonetheless private conversation, relational aesthetics are perhaps not so much challenged as entirely counteracted. As such, if the work posits anything at all with regard to relational aesthetics, it suggests a longed-for middle-ground between the pretense of a viewer- or service-based world and the world of the travel slide show in which the viewer endures boredom for the sake of the photographer.

If the uncertainty principle of quantum physics can be said to apply to travel photography--and I see no reason why it can’t--then Dudiak and Bomford’s collaboration may raise the question of the degree to which the photographer is influencing or editing the photograph with his simple inclusion in the process, or vice-versa. A genuinely artistic photographic voice may be as impossible to acheive as an authentically documentary one. But this work doesn’t seem to critique, challenge or dispute that as much as it resigns itself to it. With all of the emphasis placed on process, the visual subject matter itself and the privacy of the conversation in the installation, it seems that what is truly being tested on or experimented with here is viewership and the nature of the travel slide show; the work asks, “without the social obligation to please the host, how long will people stay?”

--Lee Henderson


Exhibition page at Neutral Ground

David Hoffos: Scenes From The House Dream

Dunlop Art Gallery
August 12 - September 29, 2006


Passing through a curtain at the exhibition's entrance--and after my eyes adjusted to the low light--the first thing I noticed about David Hoffos' current installation at the Dunlop Art Gallery was a multitude of glowing stations. The stations are, with one exception, recessed into the black walls facing the entrance and take the shape of dioramas, not unlike the shoebox models children make for science fairs. Inhabiting these detailed miniature sets are glowing, flickering figures.

I'll not dwell on the particular characteristics of these figures and their environments, which range from a Lynchian scene of a drifter next to a car, to a scene of a boy with a toy boat. Nor will I focus on the narratives one can assume these scenes posit--as George Carlin has said, "nothing is so boring as listening to someone else describe a dream." After all, Hoffos' work is visual, apart from the low-level ambient soundtrack accompanying the space. Instead, it may be important to examine the aesthetic the artist uses, which may be described as D.I.Y. media. Viewers familiar with Hoffos' work will have seen it before--in, for instance, his installation Another City which was exhibited at Neutral Ground in 2004.

This D.I.Y. aesthetic takes a number of low-fi forms, but typically it involves the bouncing of an image off of a mirror and "into" the surface of his models. The images themselves are often generated by equipment we don't generally think of as projection-based, such as televisions, and may travel through miscellaneous lenses or mattes so that they are to scale when they appear in the models. The mattes and mirrors are all exposed, leaving no mystery as to how Hoffos constructs his illusions, and the mattes are made of electrician's tape or corrugated cardboard, reiterating the connection to childhood.

Because Hoffos has used these techniques--and the resulting style--so frequently, one might not be blamed for thinking it borders on being a habit. I wondered for some time as to whether he had perhaps been rushed into this method during art school--deadlines get the best of all of us eventually--and found that it happened to work. I then realized I was making assumptions and decided that there must be a way to read his aesthetic as intrinsic to this piece... whether the artist thinks of it that way or not.

So with a return to the title of the work, Scenes from the House Dream, and the artist’s statement, the theme of dream is raised. Dreams are individual fantasies composed without conscious thought, but more importantly they are the fun-house mirrors of waking life, supplying a non-physical surrogate world for the human psyche. If dreams are the imagined or metaphysical side of human existence, and waking life the concrete and tangible, then Hoffos’ work plays on this duality. A viewer may get enchanted by the dreams presented here, and by the flickering, interlaced figures that haunt the various landscapes. But if one withdraws slightly or turns away from one of the miniature fantasies, the physical reality of space and material comes flooding back in. Thus lapping ocean waves are changed back into the white noise of video, and the night sky is seen for what it is: black tape stuck nervously onto a television screen.

--Lee Henderson


Scenes From The House Dream at the Dunlop Art Gallery - exhibition site

David Hoffos' Another City at Neutral Ground, 2004