Nicolas Bourriaud
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nicolas Bourriaud (born 1965) is a French curator and art critic who coined the term Relational Aesthetics, which he outlined in a text for the catalogue of the exhibition "Traffic" that was shown at CAPC contemporary museum[1] in Bordeaux in 1995.
From 2002 to 2006 he was Director of the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (with J. Sans).
Founder & Director of the magazine Documents (1992-2000), correspondent in Paris for Flash Art (1987-95).
Bourriaud is best known among English speakers for his publications Relational Aesthetics (2002) and Postproduction (2000). Relational Aesthetics in particular has come to be seen as a defining text for a wide variety of art produced by a generation who came to prominence in Europe in the early 1990s. The book attempts to identify and characterise what is distinctive in contemporary European art as compared to that of previous decades. It does so by approaching it in a way that ceases ‘to take shelter behind Sixties art history’ (RA, p7), and instead seeks to offer different criteria by which to analyse the often opaque and open-ended works of art of the 1990s. To address this work Bourriaud imports the language of the 1990s internet boom, using terminology such as ‘user-friendliness’, ‘interactivity’ and ‘do-it-yourself’. Indeed, Bourriaud describes Relational Aesthetics as a book addressing works that take as their point of departure the changing mental space opened by the internet (PP, p8).
Bourriaud defines as ‘relational’ art which takes as its theoretical horizon ‘the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space’ (RA, p14). In other words, relational art seeks to establish inter-subjective encounters that literally take place – in the artist’s production of the work, or in the viewer’s reception of it – or which exist hypothetically, as a potential outcome of our encounter with a given piece. In relational art, meaning is said to be elaborated collectively (p18) rather than in the space of individual consumption. Relational art is thus conceived as the inverse of the privatised space of modernism as articulated differently by Clement Greenberg and Rosalind Krauss: rather than a discrete, portable, autonomous work of art that transcends its context, relational art beholden to the contingencies of its environment and audience. In some manifestations of this art, such as the performance-installations of Rirkrit Tiravanija, viewers are addressed as a social entity, and are even given the wherewithal to create a community, however provisional or utopian.
[edit] Deejaying and contemporary art
In Postproduction (2000), Bourriaud lists the operations DJs apply to music and relates them to contemporary art practice:
[edit] Bibliography
- Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 2002, Paris: Presses du réel
- Nicolas Bourriaud, Formes de vie. L’art moderne et l’invention de soi, 1999, Paris: Editions Denoël
- Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, 2000, New York: Lukas & Sternberg
