Relational art, also known as relational aesthetics, represents a distinct artistic tendency that emerged in the 1990s under various designations. In 1998, the French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud defined *esthétique relationnelle* (relational aesthetics) as "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space." Within relational art, the artist functions more accurately as a "catalyst" rather than a central author. While effectively expanding aesthetic considerations beyond individual concerns into a broader social domain, Bourriaud's conception of relational art remains confined to the human sphere, reflecting a humanist value system rooted in modernism. This perspective contrasts relational art and aesthetics with its immediate precursor, Brooklyn Immersionism, a posthumanist art movement originating in the late 1980s that involved numerous creative groups in a sustained, transformative engagement with a living urban ecosystem. Both systems aesthetics shared characteristics with social practice art, and all three movements drew inspiration from the process art of the 1970s and indigenous "web of life" philosophies.
Etymology
Nicolas Bourriaud introduced the term "relational art" in 1998 within his book Esthétique relationnelle (Relational Aesthetics), marking one of the initial efforts to analyze and categorize 1990s art. The term's first appearance was in 1996, in the exhibition catalogue for Traffic, curated by Bourriaud at the CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux. Traffic featured artists frequently referenced by Bourriaud throughout the 1990s, including Henry Bond, Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Liam Gillick, Christine Hill, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Miltos Manetas, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, Gabriel Orozco, Jason Rhoades, Douglas Gordon, and Rirkrit Tiravanija. The exhibition's title and conceptual framework were inspired by Jacques Tati's 1971 film Trafic, which depicts a Parisian automobile designer preparing a new model for an international auto show. A pivotal dénouement in the film, which became a foundational strategy for relational aesthetics—particularly for Tiravanija—reveals that the entire narrative focuses on the designer's journey to the auto show, where he arrives precisely as it concludes.
Relational aesthetics
Bourriaud endeavors to approach art by moving beyond "taking shelter behind Sixties art history," instead proposing alternative criteria for analyzing the often ambiguous and open-ended artworks prevalent in the 1990s. To achieve this, Bourriaud incorporates terminology from the 1990s internet boom, such as user-friendliness, interactivity, and DIY (do-it-yourself). In his 2002 publication, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Bourriaud characterizes "relational aesthetics" as artistic endeavors that originate from the evolving mental landscape fostered by the internet. The interactive, communal expression facilitated by the advent of the World Wide Web can be interpreted as echoing ancient, indigenous concepts of interconnectedness and environmental engagement. Relational art, Social Practices, Process Art, and Immersionism all draw upon Native American insights into the broader web of nature, as articulated by Chief Seattle (Si'ahl) in an 1854 speech:
- "All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Humanity did not weave the web of life, we are merely a strand in it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves."
Relational art
Bourriaud elucidates the concept of relational aesthetics through examples he designates as relational art. According to Bourriaud, relational art encompasses "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space." This artistic approach fosters a social environment where individuals convene to engage in a shared activity. Bourriaud asserts that "the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist."
Robert Stam, who leads new media and film studies at New York University, introduced the concept of "witnessing publics" to describe groups engaged in shared activities. He defined witnessing publics as "that loose collection of individuals, constituted by and through the media, acting as observers of injustices that might otherwise go unreported or unanswered." In the context of relational art, meaning emerges when the perception of art is modified, even as the original artwork remains unaltered.
Relational art conceptualizes its audience as a collective entity. Instead of an artwork facilitating an interaction solely between an observer and an object, relational art fosters interactions among individuals. Consequently, meaning is constructed collectively through these interactions, rather than being derived from solitary engagement.
Critical Reception
Ben Lewis, a writer and director, has proposed that relational art constitutes a novel "ism," comparable to historical art movements like Impressionism, Expressionism, and Cubism. This systems aesthetic, which materialized at the dawn of the 21st century, exhibits parallels with Brooklyn Immersionism, an earlier movement described by art historian Cisco Bradley in 2023 as "the next stage of evolution of the New York art scene." Given the profound interconnectedness of immersion and relationships, both movements collectively signify the emergence of an eco-social zeitgeist within the arts.
In her 2004 essay "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics," published in October, Claire Bishop characterized the aesthetic of Palais de Tokyo as a "laboratory," representing the "curatorial modus operandi" prevalent in 1990s art. Bishop observed that "An effect of this insistent promotion of these ideas as artists-as-designer, function over contemplation, and open-endedness over aesthetic resolution is often ultimately to enhance the status of the curator, who gains credit for stage-managing the overall laboratory experience." She echoed Hal Foster's mid-1990s caution that "the institution may overshadow the work that it otherwise highlights: it becomes the spectacle, it collects the cultural capital, and the director-curator becomes the star." While acknowledging Bourriaud's book as a crucial initial effort to delineate 1990s art trends, Bishop also contended in the same essay that such artistic practices “seems to derive from a creative misreading of poststructuralist theory: rather than the interpretations of a work of art being open to continual reassessment, the work of art itself is argued to be in perpetual flux.” Furthermore, Bishop posed a critical inquiry: "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?" She concluded that "the relations set up by relational aesthetics are not intrinsically democratic, as Bourriaud suggests, since they rest too comfortably within an ideal of subjectivity as whole and of community as immanent togetherness."
A year later, in his Artforum article "Traffic Control," artist and critic Joe Scanlan advanced the critique by attributing a distinct element of peer pressure to relational aesthetics. Scanlan asserted, "Firsthand experience has convinced me that relational aesthetics has more to do with peer pressure than collective action or egalitarianism, which would suggest that one of the best ways to control human behavior is to practice relational aesthetics."
Exhibitions
In 2002, Bourriaud organized an exhibition titled Touch: Relational Art from the 1990s to Now at the San Francisco Art Institute, which was described as "an exploration of the interactive works of a new generation of artists." The exhibition featured artists such as Angela Bulloch, Liam Gillick, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jens Haaning, Philippe Parreno, Gillian Wearing, and Andrea Zittel. Critic Chris Cobb proposed that Bourriaud's "snapshot" of 1990s art both validated the concept of relational art and demonstrated "different forms of social interaction as art that deal fundamentally with issues regarding public and private space."
In 2008, Nancy Spector, a curator at the Guggenheim Museum, assembled an exhibition featuring many artists linked to Relational Aesthetics. However, the specific term "Relational Aesthetics" was omitted in favor of titling the show Theanyspacewhatever. This exhibition showcased prominent figures like Bulloch, Gillick, Gonzalez-Foerster, Höller, Huyghe, and Tiravanija, alongside other artists such as Maurizio Cattelan, Douglas Gordon, Jorge Pardo, and Andrea Zittel, who were more loosely associated with the movement.
The LUMA Foundation has showcased numerous artists whose work aligns with the principles of Relational Aesthetics.
References
Bishop, Claire (Fall 2004). "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics". October. 110 (110): 51–79. doi:10.1162/0162287042379810. ISSN 0162-2870. JSTOR 3397557. S2CID 9591417.
- Bishop, Claire (Fall 2004). "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics". October. 110 (110): 51–79. doi:10.1162/0162287042379810. ISSN 0162-2870. JSTOR 3397557. S2CID 9591417.Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002). Relational Aesthetics. Translated by Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland. Dijon: Les presses du réel. p. 113. ISBN 978-2-84066-060-6. OCLC 1045824516.Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002). Schneider, Caroline (ed.). Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. Translated by Jeanine Herman. New York: Lukas & Sternberg. ISBN 9780971119307. OCLC 224720888.Dezeuze, Anna (November 2006). "Everyday Life, 'Relational Aesthetics' and the 'Transfiguration of the Commonplace'". Journal of Visual Art Practice. 5 (3): 143–152. doi:10.1386/jvap.5.3.143_1. S2CID 191465284.Downey, Anthony (May 2007). "Towards a Politics of (Relational) Aesthetics". Third Text. 21 (3): 267–275. doi:10.1080/09528820701360534. S2CID 144661814.Hemment, Drew (August 2006). "Locative Arts" (PDF). Leonardo. 39 (4: Pacific Rim New Media Summit Companion): 348–355, 331. doi:10.1162/leon.2006.39.4.348. JSTOR 20206267. S2CID 57562967.Johansson, Troels Degn (23–25 October 2001). Marie le Sourd; et al. (eds.). Visualizing Relations: Superflex's Relational Art in the Cyberspace Geography. Culture in the Cyber-Age: report from the Asia-Europe Forum, Kyongju, South Korea, October 23–25. Singapore: Asia-Europe Foundation.Jones, Kip (April 2006). "A Biographic Researcher in Pursuit of an Aesthetic: The use of arts-based (re)presentations in 'performative' dissemination of life stories". Qualitative Sociology Review. II (1: "Biographical Sociology"). ISSN 1733-8077. Retrieved 8 December 2019.Levinson, Jerrold (Winter 1989). "Refining Art Historically". The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. 47 (1): 21–33. doi:10.2307/431990. JSTOR 431990.Nakajima, Seio (April 2012). "Prosumption in Art". American Behavioral Scientist. 56 (4): 550–569. doi:10.1177/0002764211429358. S2CID 146148268.Scanlan, Joe (Summer 2005). "Traffic Control: Joe Scanlan on Social Space and Relational Aesthetics". Artforum. Vol. 43, no. 10. p. 123. Retrieved 8 December 2019.Simpson, Bennett (April 2001). "Public Relations: Nicolas Bourriaud Interview". Artforum. Vol. 39, no. 8. Retrieved 8 December 2019.Stahl, Antje (9 May 2011). "France's Art Dispute: Artists as Cooks Spoil the Broth". Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (in German). Frankfurt, Germany. Retrieved 8 December 2019.Svetlichnaja, Julia (December 19–21, 2005). Relational Paradise as a Delusional Democracy—a Critical Response to a Temporary Contemporary Relational Aesthetics. BISA 31st Annual Conference, "Art and Politics" panel. University of St. Andrews, St. Andrews, Scotland. Archived from the original (Microsoft Word document) on 12 December 2006. Retrieved 8 December 2019.
- Extracts from Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Esthetics (Dijon: les Presses du réel, 2002) as pdf
- Interview with Claire Bishop, July 2009
- Open Engagement 2007 conference
- "What is a Participatory Practice?" in Fillip