Relational Art, the Individual, the Community and the Space in Between

Bourriaud asserts that contemporary art, moreover relational art, allows for inter-human relations, creating a dialogue between viewers and ideally setting up a sense of community that seems to be lacking in a world that has posited the machine as the new human. Relational art functions as an open work encouraging critical thinking within the individual and an exchange of ideas between viewers as a group. Bourriaud also writes about the interstice which “suggests possibilities for exchanges other than those that prevail within the system.” (161) Interstices are created between the artwork and the viewer, and then again between the viewer and the community. Each of these spaces allows for the possibility of exchange, first individually and then socially. Bourriaud’s ideas about relational art are not that dissimilar to the nineteenth ideas of Kant and Schiller regarding aesthetic experience and the development of taste by a community. Aesthetic experience is something that happens within the individual, but taste is something that is conceived collaboratively by a community through the open exchange of ideas. This space, I would think, is important for any piece of art as it needs a viewer to fulfill its purpose as a visual work.

I understand the criticisms of Hal Foster about the downfalls of relational art, such as the art becoming only about viewer experience, which then runs the risk of it not being understood in which case it would fail as a work, but can’t relational art just be an idea- an idea to structure art, artistic themes, or future genres around? And furthermore, isn’t the idea of creating a visual work based on the notion of it being seen and reflected upon? Otherwise, why create a visual work which is in symbolic on account of it being a visual creation?