Circa 114: Article
Art of the encounter: antagonism and Relational Aesthetics
In this paper I present a response to Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational aesthetics from an arthistorical and theoretical perspective. By this I don't mean locating it historically in art of the 1960s and '70s - in social sculpture, installation, performance and 'service' art by artists as diverse as the Fluxus Group, Joseph Beuys, Daniel Spoerri, Allen Ruppersberg, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Vito Acconci, Marina Abramovic and others - although this history certainly needs to be written. Nor do I wish to locate Bourriaud's collection of essays in relation to significant theoretical precursors - such as Roland Barthes' 'Death of the author', or Umberto Eco's The Open work. Rather, I wish to discuss relational aesthetics in terms of two connected problems that persistently intrude upon discussions of 'relational' art: firstly, the problematic status that this work holds as an object of critical and historical judgment, and secondly, the assumption underpinning Bourriaud's book (and a great deal of other writing on contemporary art) that art encouraging dialogue between viewers is unequivocally a 'good thing', and moreover democratic.
For the purposes of economy and clarity, I will take one artist as paradigmatic of relational art - Rirkrit Tiravanija - since his art seems to me the clearest expression of Bourriaud's argument that relational art privileges intersubjective relations over detached opticality: Tiravanija insists that the viewer is physically present in a particular situation at a particular time - in this case, eating the food that he cooks, alongside other visitors in a communal situation, usually within the gallery. As some readers will already know, Tiravanija often includes the phrase 'lots of people' in his lists of materials - and it is noticeable that the criticism about his work is extremely subjective, reflecting the importance of the viewer's first-hand experience in the work. Every piece of writing on Tiravanija's work refers back to the author's own experience of the piece - which raises the following critical and historiographical problem: how can we judge Tiravanija's work - or indeed any work that relies for its meaning on the direct participation of the viewer - if we didn't experience it for ourselves?
To be fair, this problem also accompanies the history of installation and performance art, but with relational art this situation is exacerbated, since the artist often has a hands-off approach that delegates the meaning of the work to the viewer-participant. Photographic documentation of relational work reveal little to us of the social dynamic that emerged, and written accounts offer only partial assistance. By way of example, the only substantial account that I can find of Tiravanija's first solo exhibition at 303 Gallery is by Jerry Saltz in Art in America, and it runs as follows:
At 303 Gallery I regularly sat with or was joined by strangers, and it was nice. The gallery became a place for sharing, jocularity and frank talk. I had an amazing run of meals with art dealers. Once I ate with Paula Cooper who recounted a long, complicated bit of professional gossip. Another day, Lisa Spellman related in hilarious detail a story of intrigue about a fellow dealer trying, unsuccessfully, to woo one of her artists. About a week later I ate with David Zwirner. I bumped into him on the street, and he said, "nothing's going right today, let's go to Rirkrit's." We did, and he talked about a lack of excitement in the New York art world. Another time I ate with Gavin Brown, the artist and dealer... who talked about the collapse of SoHo - only he welcomed it, felt it was about time, that the galleries had been showing too much mediocre art. Later in the show's run, I was joined by an unidentified woman and a curious flirtation filled the air. Another time I chatted with a young artist who lived in Brooklyn who had real insights about the shows he'd just seen.
The informal chattiness of this account clearly indicates what kind of problems face those who wish to know more about such work: the review only tells us that Tiravanija's intervention is considered good because it permits networking amongst a group of like-minded art lovers, and because it evokes the atmosphere of a late-night bar. In the glossary at the back of Relational aesthetics, Bourriaud proposes some criteria that we should level at open-ended, participatory artworks in order to overcome such problems. He suggests that the criteria we should engage are not simply aesthetic, but political: we must judge the 'relations' that are produced by relational artworks. When confronted by a relational artwork, Bourriaud suggests that we ask the following questions: "does this work permit me to enter into dialogue? Could I exist, and how, in the space it defines?" (p109). He refers to these questions, which we should ask in front of any aesthetic production, as "crite ria of coexistence" (p.109). Theoretically, in front of any work of art, we can ask what kind of social model the piece produces: could I live in a world structured by the organising principles of a Mondrian painting? What 'social form', for example, is produced by a Surrealist object?
So far so good. But in putting this idea into practice, it is difficult to determine what constitutes the 'relations' we are assessing. For example, what Tiravanija cooks, how and for whom, is less important than the fact that he gives away the results of his cooking for free. In other words, although his works claim to defer meaning to their context, they do not question their imbri cation within it. We need to ask, as Group Material did in the 1980s, "Who is the public? How is a culture made,and who is it for?"
I am not suggesting that relational artworks like Tiravanija's need to develop a greater social conscience - by giving free curries to refugees, or using organicingredients. I am simply wondering what it means to equate aesthetic judgment with an ethico-political judgment on the relationships produced by a work of art. The social sciences have innumerable methodologies for measuring and evaluating such relationships, but contemporary art criticism remains wilfully immune to such complexities. The quality of the relationships in relational art is never examined or put into question by its critics and curators, nor is the issue of how we might arrive at this assessment. When Bourriaud argues that "encounters are more important than the individuals who compose them" (Postproduction, p.43), I sense that this question is (for him) perhaps unnecessary. But Bourriaud is not alone in this: the problem I am outlining readily extends into the bulk of contemporary art criticism about interactive and socially engaged works: all relations that permit 'dialogue' are automatically assumed to be democratic and therefore good. But what does 'democracy' really mean in this context? If relational art produces human relations, then the next logical question to ask is what types of relations are being produced, for whom, and why?
I propose that one way to begin addressing this problem is to examine its terminology more rigorously, and 'democracy' is a good place to start. In their seminal book Hegemony and Social Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (1985) the political philosophers Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe argue that a fully functioning democratic society is not one in which all antagonisms have disappeared, but one in which new political frontiers are constantly being drawn and brought into debate - in other words, a democratic societyis one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not erased. Without antagonism there is only the imposed consensus of authoritarian order - a total suppression of debate and discussion which is inimical to democracy.
Laclau and Mouffe's understanding of antagonism is founded in a Lacanian theory of subjectivity. They argue that subjectivity is not a self-transparent and rational pure presence, but is irremediably decentred and incomplete; we have a failed structural identity, and are therefore dependent on identification in order to proceed. Because subjectivity is this process of identification, we are necessarily incomplete entities. Antagonism, therefore, is the type of relationship that emerges between such incomplete entities. Laclau contrasts this to the types of relationship that emerge between complete entities, such as contradiction (for example, we can be materialists and read horoscopes, or be in analysis and send Christmas cards); antagonism also differs from what mathematicians call 'real difference' (a collision between full identities, such as a car crash, or the war against terrorism). In the case of antagonism, argue Laclau and Mouffe, "we are confronted with a different situation: the presence of the "Other" prevents me from being totally myself."
I dwell on this theory in order to suggest that the relations set up by relational art works such as those of Tiravanija are not intrinsically democratic, since they rest too comfortably within an ideal of subjectivity as whole, and community as immanent togetherness. There is debate and dialogue in one of his cooking pieces, to be sure, but there is no inherent friction since the situation is 'microtopian': it produces a community whose members identify with each other, because they have something in common (the art world).
By contrast, I wish to argue that an understanding of democracy as a relationship of antagonism can be seen in the work of two artists who are not discussed in Relational aesthetics: Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn. These artists set up 'relationships' of quite a different order to that of Tiravanija: while they emphasise the role of dialogue and negotiation in their art, the work is not reducible to these relationships. Rather, the relations produced by their performances and installations are marked by unease and discomfort rather than belonging, because the work sustains a tension between viewers, participants and context.
To give two examples: Sierra's contribution to the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2003, which involved sealing off the pavilion's interior with concrete blocks from floor to ceiling. On entering the building, viewers were confronted by a hastily constructed yet impregnable wall that rendered the galleries inaccessible. Visitors carrying a Spanish passport, however, were invited to enter the space via the back of the building, where two immigration officers inspected passports. All nonSpanish nationals were denied entry to the gallery, whose interior apparently contained nothing but grey paint peeling from the walls, left over from the exhibition two years back. The work was 'relational' in Bourriaud's sense, but problematised any idea of these relations being fluid, harmonious and unconstrained; the work exposed how all our social interactions are, like public space, riven with social and legal exclusions.
A second example: Hirschhorn's Bataille monument at Documenta XI. The Bataille monument is a more complex work, comprising three installations in makeshift shacks outside a housing estate in the suburbs of Kassel; it also featured a sculpture of a tree, and a functioning bar. To reach the Bataille monument, visitors had to participate in a further component of the work: securing a lift from a Turkish cab company who were contracted to ferry Documenta visitors to and from the site. Viewers were then stranded at the Monument until a return cab became available, during which time they would inevitably make use of the bar. The three installations included a library of books and videos on Bataillean themes, a functioning TV studio, and an installation about Bataille's life and work.
In locating the Monument in the middle of a community whose ethnic and economic status implied that it was not a target audience for Documenta, Hirschhorn contrived a curious rapprochement between the influx of art tourists and the area's residents. The result was a reversed 'zoo effect', in which visitors feel like hapless intruders. Even more disruptively, in light of the international art world's intellectual pretentions, Hirschhorn's Monument took the local inhabitants seriously as potential Bataille readers. This gesture induced a range of emotive responses amongst visitors, including accusations that Hirschhorn's gesture was inappropriate and patronising. This unease revealed the fragile conditioning of the art world's self-constructed identity. The complicated play of identificatory and dis-identificatory mechanisms at work in the content, construction and location of the Bataille Monument were radically and disruptively thought-provoking: the 'zoo effect' worked two ways. Rather than offering, as the Documenta handbook claims, a reflection on 'communal commitment', the Bataille Monument served to destabilise (and therefore potentially liberate) any sense of what community identity might be, or what it means to be a 'fan' of art and philosophy. In other words, the relations established by this work were marked by unease and ambivalence, rather than comfortable togetherness and identification. Significantly, in the two works I have discussed, the viewer is no longer required to fulfil a literal participatory role (to eat noodles, or to play the drums), but is asked only to be a thoughtful and reflective visitor. As Hirschhorn says,
I do not want to do an interactive work. I want to do an active work. To me, the most important activity that an artwork can provoke is the activity of thinking. Andy Warhol's Big electric chair, 1967, makes me think, but it is a painting on a museum wall. An active work requires that I first give of myself.1
It is with this appeal to an art of encounter as activated thinking that I wish to end this paper. Rather than being coerced into fulfilling the artist's interactive requirements, perhaps it is more political - and provocative - to presuppose the viewer as a subject of independent thought, which is after all the essential prerequisite for political action. It is no longer enough to say that activating the viewer tout court is democratic, for every artwork - even the most 'open-ended' - always prescribes in advance what participation may and may not take place within it Such pretences to emancipation should no longer be necessary: all art - whether immersive or not - can be a critical force that appropriates and reassigns value, decentralising our thoughts from the predominant and pre-existing consensus. The task facing us today is to analyse how contemporary art addresses the viewer, and to assess the quality of the audience relations it produces. If relational art seeks a unified subject as a prerequisite for community-as-togetherness, then Hirschhorn and Sierra provide a mode of artistic encounter more adequate to the split, divided and incomplete subject of today. This relational antagonism would be predicated not on social harmony, but on exposure of that which is repressed in contriving the semblance of this harmony, and thereby would provide a more concrete and polemical grounds for rethinking our relationship to the world and to each other.
1 Thomas Hirschhorn, in Jessica Morgan (ed.), Common wealth, Tate Modern, p.63
Claire Bishop is currently Leverhulme Research Fellow in the department of Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art, London.
This article was read as a paper for the Art of the Encounter conference, Whittechapel Art Gallery, London, May 2004. A full version can be found in October, no.110, Fall 2004.
