Relational Aesthetics and Other Expanded Fields

Nicholas Bourriaud, "Postproduction," "Altermodernity," "The Radicant," "From Relational Aesthetics"

Let me play a little bit of the devil's advocate here...

To start off I will state the obvious, that this week was all about Relational Aesthetics and the metamorphosis that art has taken over the course of the last century, especially concerning Postmodernism and the "Post" which follows Postmodernism. As defined by Bourriaud Relational Aesthetics encompasses "a set 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." It seems to me that throughout the entirety of the readings this week the idea of "Relational Aesthetics" is talked about in reference to the "new wave" of art or contemporary conceptual art. That the time for originality in art is at an end and now, as artistic, our responsibility lies in appropriation of an archive of already existing imagery and how, by recycling this imagery, we can begin to talk about cultural, ideologies, and political/social change. Only in this way may we, as artists, and our work remain relevant. After letting this idea sink in for a while I became very depressed. The history of art is so vast, its many works so varied, and its meanings go deeper into the human psyche of the past, to me, with more power than any other form of historical evidence. How is it that I have been born into an age when artistic practice has capped its ability to create and now we are demanded merely to respond and reuse?

This "depression" got me thinking...couldn't all art; past, present, and future, be considered part of Relational Aesthetics? Weren't the small statues of ritualistic worship from prehistory and response to the cultural and religious standards of their time? And the elaborate pots of Greece and hieroglyphics in Egypt a recording of the political and social happenings of those particular civilizations? The High Art of the Renaissance seems to me to be a direct response to the religious dominance and the unabashed bourgeois control over the people during that period of time. I cannot be lead to believe that artistic works of the past are any less relevant than the most avant-garde performance piece of the present and not just for reuse by a contemporary artist. All artwork that is created, whether it is original or appropriated, is a direct response to our current condition. We have never lived in a vacuum, even under the heavy oppression of monarchs of the Dark Ages. We are creatures of our own condition so it is our condition that we consistently represent to ourselves through the means of artistic practice. No experience is personal or universal, that is what makes us unique. This idea that we must only create artwork that can responds to the universal condition of humanity is kind of funny to me because it sounds a lot like how a mass productive Capitalistic ideology would want us to think of our individual creativity and how should be used. It sounds more like rules and stipulations and less like a natural evolution of artistic practices.

To end, I would just like to say that I don't think that Modern/Postmodern/Post-Postmodern art is in any way irrelevant or wrong, but that it is informative of the ideologies that surround us just like the artwork of the past informs us of their condition, no matter how beautiful or "aesthetically pleasing" we may think it to be and write it off as such. Just because something is ugly and loaded with philosophies and academic words does not make it more important than the aesthetic object; both are loaded with the human condition and both are a visual peek into the time-line of human history.

The Aftermath of Postmoderism

Raymond Williams, "When was Modernism,"
Toni Ross, Art in the 'Post-Medium' Era: Aesthetics and Conceptualism in the art of Jeff Wall

As the titled suggests in "When was Modernism" Raymond Williams central dialogue is focused on pinpointing the moment, decade, movement, person, etc. that birthed this idea of Modernism in the ideology of society. First, Williams breaks this idea of modernism into the evolution of several key movements within art and literature; the Romanticism, Realism, Impressionism, and Cubism. Finding threads and flaws in each movement respectfully Raymond comes to the conclusion that Modernism is dependent on the revolutionaries involved within their respective movements; "the earlier novelists, it is widely acknowledged, make the latter work possible; without Dickens, no Joyce."
Further on he goes on to attribute an ideological, cultural and social, shift at the time (brought upon by Industrialism) as a key factor for ushering Modernism into the limelight. It wasn't just thoughts of Freud and his defining of Psychoanalysis, but it the key to Modernism lies within shifting attitudes toward aesthetics and an integration of visual advertisement within the Western culture. These attitude shifts and birth of the mass, visual advertisement was a direct result of the technology of this time. Williams cites the invention of photography, cinema, Radio, television, reproduction, and recording as a catalyst for these ideological changes and the importance of the image within the dominating culture of the time and how important a critique of these images were.


Art in the "Post-Medium" Era: Aesthetics and Conceptualism in the Art of Jeff Wall by Toni Ross was a little harder for me to unpack. She is most clearly and obviously concerned with aesthetics. Like Williams, she understood the importance of the attitude-change on aesthetics within this new Industrial/Post-Industrial world and how this change was directly linked with Modernism. Ross digs down deep in an effort that seems to defend aesthetic beauty from its criticizers, to elevate the beautiful into a state of importance and relevance. She does this, very eloquently, through her description of the Sublime and the creation of "The Thing." She uses the work of Jeff Wall to illustrate her idea that while the moment of "beauty for beauties sake" has passed, the beautiful still holds sway over the conceptional and can be just as valid as abstraction. Beauty and aesthetic are still ingrained and very much a part of the present cultural ideology and to ignore its power over everyday life and its role within our history would to be doing ourselves a great discredit. I think she verbalizes this argument most clearly in her ending quote, "...the medium comprises both an aggregation of historical codes and expectations, and the aesthetic, sensory registration of their failure. By sustaining the minimal illusion of an internal excess of symbolization, the work begs a reaction foreshadowed in Kant's account of aesthetic judgement: to speak of the singular within present constructions of social reality."

The Blasé Attitude vs. Get A Studio! The theory of work

The flaneur, the slacker, and the lazy...let's take a walk...OR, Why Virginia Woolf was right about getting a room of your own.

Robert Smithson, "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey,"
Daniel Buren, "What is a studio?,"
Max Weber, "Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism"
Jean Baudrillard, "Ethic Labour, Aesthetic Play,"
Jan Vanwoert, "Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform"



"A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey"
The focus that Robert Smithson hopes to unravel in his photographic and written journey into the heart of his hometown Passaic, New Jersey is one of the effects that time and history play within our perception of aesthetic sensibility.
"Time turns metaphors into things, and stacks them up in cold rooms, or places them in the celestial playgrounds of the suburbs."
Smithson speaks of his present day Passaic as a "ravaged present that almost appears to be part of the past." That the eternal city of Rome lives on in the burnt out shells of suburbia wasteland. Stripped of its grandeur, its aesthetic, its sacred monuments and mirrored back on itself the historical is twisted and demented into the polluted steams, worn parking lots, and unused sandboxes. The quote from the text that baffles and delights me most is where Smithson talks about this idea of the future...
"I am convinced that the future is lost somewhere in the dumps of the non-historical past..."
Does he mean that, in the end, the monuments of our past glorious cities are not what shape our future but in the junk beside the road? "In the false mirror of our rejected dreams." In the past over, the ugly and grotesque that within time is transformed into a metaphor of what lies behind us and what exists before us?

"What is Studio?"
The idea that the Studio and Museum/Gallery are in conflict with one another while also acting as the crutch that either supports itself upon is an interesting one and what I believe to be the core argument for Daniel Buren in "What is Studio." I guess deep down this realization is one that I can relate to and that I understand, but before this reading had never given great thought to. The studio is vital to artistic practice because it is a private place where personal struggle, history, thought, etc can manifest unscathed (or seemingly so) by the outside institution of the Museum, the prejudiced eye of the public. It is not until the artist voluntarily welcomes the public until its sacred space does it become a place of consumption and distribution. This talk of the studio space and its function within the grand sphere of artistic success got me thinking about the photographers studio; what is it? Where is it? Is a photographers studio always a room? The darkroom? The digital lab? Is it where I store my prints? To me a studio is somewhere where creativity is unhinged and where reality blurs into the "mirror of our rejected dreams" that Smithson speaks of. After much thought I decided that my own personal photographic studio exists within a particular person, my niece Juliana, who I have been photographing for 6 years now. It is interesting to consider that when exhibiting my work that I am in fact opening her up into the world public opinion and consumer culture. This is something that I have come to realize that I really need to understand and grapple with in order to be aware of the weight of this realization.

I digress...

"Exhaustion and Exuberance: Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform"
Cutting to Jan Vanwoert's essay on performance and exhaustion, I am struck dumb by the resonance that Jan Vanwoert's words have upon me in my present state. I almost feel that this text was written specifically for me, specifically for now. Within the realm of academia the pressure to perform is unabashed, demanded of you openly between students and teachers alike. The expectations of academia are structured set for a specific amount of production and information to be generated within the course of a week, a class, a year. I feel utterly exhausted and berated with this structure of performance that I have constructed for myself in response to what I feel those who are there to teach me are expectant of me and my work. I know that over the course of three weeks I better have at least 9 rolls of 12 frames exposed and 12+ prints on the wall when my critique week rolls around. I better know right then and there what it is I took away from last critique and how I applied that to the images I'm showing for this critique. What are you interested in? Who inspires you? Why should we care? Make us care. What is in this images? Make a choice. Sometimes I feel as though I perform so much I've lost complete sight of what it is I was trying to say in the first place or even myself. I've gotten so used to and so good at performing I'm not quite sure if I really know myself beyond the performer any longer. I know it is said to "not make photographs for critique," but how else would they have me do it and would that satisfy?

I am finished writing. I am exhausted and too tired to perform. I can't because I can, I can because I care.

Race, Postcolonialism, Globalism, and the idea of the other...

Gayatri Spivak, "Who Claims Alterity,"
Coco Fusco, "Racial Tim, Racial Mark, Racial Metaphors," in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self



Both the readings this week by Spivak and Fusco were concerned with archetypes that have been created by the Cultural Apparatus' we have existed in since the dawn of civilization and how through social injustice, colonialism, political ambition, and a desire to control the masses these methods for controlling have become magnified. For Spivak she is most concerned with the ideology of class while Fusco focused on race. Both these constructed instance of society seem to be made for the purpose of defining the "other." For the class, race, religious affiliation, etc in power this "otherness" could be used to create differences between their own bourgeois culture and those of the lower mass. Although these ideologies of race, class, gender, etc were used as a means for control I believe they now hold their own power within our present day culture; a power that has run rampant and can no longer be wrangled with even those residing in a ruling class position. Presently we have created so many other modes of control for defining the "other" and for lulling the masses that these archaic archetypes have been exposed for what they really are, but because we have begun to identify ourselves within them instead of only relating them to alterity they will not suffer to be broken down and discarded. This is where our problem lies; how do we break free from what is so ingrained within our perceived essence without tearing us apart in the process? These modes of alterity and stereotype have festered like a tumor upon the body of humanity and where once a benign growth hindered now a cancerous mass grows. This is precisely why I believe Spivak speaks about the alteration of history and how we must undo this hallucination.

Subjectivity: Psychoanalysis, Identity Formation, Feminist Critique

Jacques Lacan: "The Mirror-Phase"
Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory"
Jonathan Weinberg, "Things are Queer"
Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
Margaret Olin, "Gaze"

Jacques Lacan: "The Mirror-Phase"
Jacques Lacan's interest lies in the relation of the "realized self" within the reality that contains it. He seeks to explain stages in the development of conscious by dividing them into two, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. "The [Symbolic] concerns the subject's entry into, and formation by the world of language. The [Imaginary] involves a pre-linguistic stage of consciousness focused around the visual recognition of images." It is through the mirror-phase, or the realization of the ego through the reflection of the individual, that signifies an identification and transformation into a recognized I. Before this Mirror-Phase we can only see ourselves as fragmentations of the body and without consciousness, but once we see ourselves as an image a representation of our body, only then can we begin to fully come to consciousness and become an individual. Thus our entire concept of reality, individual, and consciousness is centered around imagery and representation; we only know ourselves through our reflection.

Judith Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory"
"One is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman."- Simone de Beauvoir
I feel that this one statement quoted by Butler into her text clearly symbolizes the main point in dealing with her ideas of Phenomenology and Feminist Theory. Butler explains that gender is not something that is innate with us, but is a construction formed within the cultural apparatus. She explains that there is a vast difference between sex and gender; that sex is specifically the genitalia, while gender is the expected performance of the idea of sex. She speaks in terms of quotations of "the body is an 'historical idea' rather than 'a natural species'" and that "...any gender, is an historical situation rather than a natural fact." So even though sex is something of the body and is physical we conform even our bodies into an historical idea/situation by the fact that we can only define our sex within the terms of the constructed gender.

Is the construction and performance of gender a form of survivalism? Did we develop these specific constructions of what it means to be "man" or "woman" through the means of continuing the lifespan of our species? And if so is this survivalist tactic outdated?

Jonathan Weinberg, "Things are Queer"
In "Things are Queer," the main concern for Jonathan Weinberg is the role that "queerness" manifests within the realm of reality and its historical relevance to the ideas of sexuality and gender. He uses the work of photographer Duane Michals, specifically his series Things Are Queer, to begin to formulate an opinion that "The queer [...] is not a matter of specific sexual identities but of the world itself. The world is queer, because it is known only through representations that are fragmentary and in themselves queer. Their meanings are always relative, a matter of relationships and constructions. [...] things themselves are not queer, but rather what is queer is the certainty by which we label things normal and abnormal, decent and obscene, gay and straight." The idea of homosexuality does not fit within the construct of gender or the cultural definition of sex, therefore it was deemed as something abnormal, amoral, obscene, wrong, queer.

Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
Laura Mulvey utilizes film to begin to dissect the role that men and women play within out society. In its most simplistic terms Mulvey equates the male to the spectator and the female to the spectacle; men are voyeurs who continuously look upon the female for her abnormal and terror-inducing castration and therefore lack of a penis. The phallus has gained its power within society and across culture only in its degradation of the feminine; without the absence of it within one form of humanity its presence cannot hope to hold such importance. "The function of woman in forming the patriarchal unconscious is twofold: she first symbolizes the castration threat by her real absence of a penis and second thereby raises her child into the symbolic." By merely existing within this patriarchal society she a symbol of the power of the penis and the weakness its absence creates; no words have to be spoken to her offspring her mere being is a lesson more powerful than words. She goes on to explain male unconscious as "two avenues of escape from [...] castration anxiety: preoccupation with the reenactment of the original trauma (investigating the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the devaluation, punishment, or saving of the guilty object[...]; or else complete disavowal of castration by the substitution of a fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous..." Mulvey then directly relates this to film, as the film gives the male (the spectator) exactly the power to do this. Because the male is more often than not cast as an active protagonist that the audience, or spectators, can directly relate him to while the female is frozen within her role as mere icon, or something to be viewed (the spectacle). These two avenues of consciousness are then transferred onto her easily through the methods of voyeurism and fetishistic scopophilia.

How are we then to change this? If the phallus holds so much power and that power is based solely on the woman as the manifestation of absence of the penis (or power) then isn't the power really within the woman? For without her the power of the male (or phallus) would cease to exist. But, how do we break this power without destroying ourselves?

Film Still of Mia Sara (as Lily) in the movie Legend where she brings about "darkness" by disobeying Jack's (Tom Cruise) command not to touch the unicorn. Thus her disobedience brings about the apocolypse which is then only righted by Jack as the "knighted savior" who rescues both Lily (who is captured because of her beauty) and the world.

Drawing of the confrontation between Eowyn and the Witch King in Lord of the Rings where before she delivers the final blow the Witch King says, "No man shall kill me" and Eowyn states, "I am no man, I am a woman." Thus the man-made prophecy is fulfilled that only by not being a man may she posses the power to do anything of worth. Her action of striking down the Witch King is only defined by her lack of a penis.

Archives, Research, and Practice

Walker Evans. Photographic archive of the American Dustbowl during the Great Depression, The Farm Security Administration, lower class Americans of the 20th century

August Sander. Made it a goal of his to create an archive of "citizens of the 20th century," archive of the the German population in the 20th century, cultural archive of the German people of the 20th century.

"The camera is integrated into a larger ensemble: a bureaucratic-clerical-statistical system of intelligence. This system can be described as a sophisticated form of the archive. The central artifact of this system is not the camera but the filling cabinet."

Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive"
Allan Sekula, "Reading an Archive"
George Baker, "Photography's Expanded Field"

This quote from Allan Sekula's "The Body and the Archive" lingers with me the most out of the densely packed information contained in the readings this week. To me this quote adequately illustrates photography's relationship to the archive; the necessity that both have for one another. Photography makes the archive possible and, in turn, the archive continues to bring relevance to photography; through the many technological, conceptional, stylistic, social, cultural, etc changes that have caused the importance other forms of representation and expression to dim to a mere flicker. This relationship is, at its best, abusive. On one hand photography and the archive work to heighten each others relevance within reality while continuously threatening to destroy one another (amidst their role in the destruction of the reality they so wish to be relevant within). In the beginning photography rocked the representational art world that existed at its birth, changed the public fascination with resemblance and lessened the importance of the powerhouse that was painting by supplanting it with its superior (and cheaper) means of "truthfully" showing reality to those who existed within it. In doing so photography became a theoretical object, threatened by its own representation to itself and teetered on the verge of losing its own future. That is where I believe the archive came into play and pulled photography from the whirlpool that it had created for itself. The archive gave power back to the photograph, beyond merely representing what was pictured within the image, the photograph then began to represent entire groups of people, overarching ideas, historical periods, cultures, etc (I'll even go so far as to suggest that maybe photography and its role with the archive gave birth to art history as we know it today). The archive is the filing cabinet which takes a group of scattered seemingly unrelated images of people, places, things that float in a vortex of non-importance, beyond their power to show the viewer what is contained within the frame, and organizes these photographs into groups that hint at ideologies, philosophies, histories, etc. within the culture apparatus (or within reality) so that rather than just see one can begin to understand how the world is organized and how, beyond the physical, ideas, histories, philosophies, and other non-physical forms are recognized.

But, like I said before, even though photography is seemingly heightened by the presence of the archive it was photography that created a need for the visual archive. What first comes to mind is the function and response that was created by photography in the 19th century; "The private moment of sentimental individuation, the look at the frozen gaze-of-the-loved-one, was shadowed by two other public looks: a look up, at one's "betters," and a look down at one's "inferiors." Not only was photography showing the viewer something, allowing them to see and reflect on what was in front of them, but the photograph made it possible for judgment to be passed and the physical knowledge of how someone from "high class" society might differ from someone from a "lower class," could be realized and thus fanning the flames of class struggle. At this time the archive was of great importance within the police system of identifying and organizing criminals and it was through Jeremy Bentham's proposal of The Panopticon that the (criminal) archive and (19th century) photography came together to uplift one another into higher realms of significance.

There was one example that Sekula used to illustrated the dialectic relationship between photography and the archive that very coherently explains and embodies what I have been struggling with in the paragraphs above and that was his comparison of Bertillon and Galton. "Bertillon's nominalist system of identification and Galton's essentialist system of typology constitute not only the two poles of positivist attempts to regular social deviance by means of photography, but also the two poles of these attempts to regular the semantic traffic in photographs. Bertillon sought to embed the photograph in the archive. Galton sought to embed the archive in the photograph."

Besides the dialectic relationship which exists both within my idea and in Sekula's example I am particularly interested in the idea of embeding the archive in the photograph and I find myself returning to a previous post where I illustrated Barthes idea of a "Text" with a photograph. Peneolope Umbrico's Suns from Flickr is the archive existing within the photograph, or in this case within the finished piece. Like Galton's work Umbrico composites photographs, but in her work the photographs are found and then stitched together into one large overwhelming piece that archives a cultural and worldly ritualistic obsession with photographing the sun, as well as an archive of visual physical representation of the sun itself.

The Post

Hal Foster, "1984" from Art Since 1900
Frederic Jameson, "Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism"
Jean Francois Lyotard, Into to The Postmodern Condition
Douglas Crimp, "Appropriating Appropriation"

It seems to me that the only intelligent discourse that we are capable of performing as human beings is that of resemblance. Everything else is mimicry, representation, mirror, resemblance. Through our own obsession we have broken everything in this world to representation of representations. As ancient beings we struggled to etch the world around us on the walls of the caves we sought shelter in; our faith in gods who held the stars up in the sky, kept the ground from breaking apart...we were made in their likeness and image. Our need to represent evolved into drawings on the pottery we used for practical means in every day life, to statues which adorned our places of ritual and worship, to the finely crafted paintings of the Renaissance, and many other instances within our timeline. Photography changed everything because of its ability to represent perfectly what was in front of the lens, but even that did not fully satisfy. We sought to represent reality to itself and to appropriate our own existence. Succeeding we destroyed reality only to recreate it as a "hyper-reality" where image became more sacred than touch. What does it even mean anymore to see something; something directly in front of you, something that you could reach out and touch? Is the image of a rainbow or the physical rainbow in the sky more valid; more important? Do questions like these even matter in this hyper-reality...

In Jean-Francois Lyotard's Introduction to The Postmodern Condition he opens with "[s]cience has always been in conflict with narratives." And I wonder what exactly he means by that, is it that science opposes myth and story. What narrative does not eventually turn into fable; what was once thought science begin to morph into a narrative. Can we continue to take the world around us and photograph it, paint it, form it into words and put it into little boxes and claim that we have found the truth, or is it just a couple of hundred of years that separates science from the fable and vise versa? I am not claiming that science is not truth or valid, because to me personally I consider it very truthful. But, if the truths of the ages (from 10,000 B.C. to 1776 A.D.) have succumbed to fable what would kept science of the 20th century from doing so as well? It is in this desire of representation that we begin to deconstruct our reality again and again and in ways never thought imagined. "I will use the term modern to designate any science that legitimates itself with reference to a metadiscourse [...] making an explicit appeal to some grand narrative; such as the dialectics of Spirit, the hermeneutics of meaning, the emancipation of the rational or working subject, or the creation of wealth" and "I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives [...] to the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation corresponds, most notably, the crisis of metaphysical philosophy and of the university institution which in the past relied on it." So it is to my understanding through Lyotard that postmodernism is a representation of modernism to itself; postmodernism holds the mirror up in from of modernism to reveal its faults, flaws, and message.

When we can no longer be contented with representing just objects that we observe in reality but with the invention of photography we have been seduced by the representations of ideas, faith, art, culture, etc to themselves. The reasoning between why we believed that artistic practices and everyday life are separate from one another are beginning to crumble because of this obsessive nature to always need to represent some thing in reality to some thing else (when we could no longer have the physical we turned to the metaphysical, the philosophical, the political, etc). What I first thought to be a simplistic, almost pitiful, reaction to the world around us has evolved over time (and through my understanding in writing this blog) into a highly intelligent approach to figuring this structure, this cage, that we have created for ourselves. Art is the ultimate form of resemblance and it is only through it that we can begin to tell of the texture and color of the bars which surround us. But, in a way we have created our own monster; art is a response to objects in life, then to ritual and religion, then dictated by politics, to a weapon used against the ideological apparatuses that have erected all around us, and finally to reality itself whereas it is true if we merely turned things upon themselves...objects, ritual and religion, politics, the cultural apparatus, and reality are merely responding to art itself.