Some Thoughts on Bourriaud

I've recently read through Bourriaud's "Relational Aesthetics" and thought I'd jot down here some thoughts. I've already put down a few things on his emphasis on the "interstice" and the relation to Marxist terminology. I've had a lot of ideas in the last few years about making art effective, how it operates in the social sphere, and its political and moral responsibility. Many of these ideas I think may have had their basis in reading of the Traditionalists. When studying Coomaraswamy's work on traditional art and aesthetics, I was struck by the idea, perhaps platonic, of art as a "tool for contemplation." Much of the religious work that he focused his commentaries on was quite literally used as a tool by a social institution for dissemination and reinforcement of ideas.

A friend of mine did a lot of work on thangka or Buddhist mandala painting and I've been able to share quite a few of my ideas with her. I'd guess that before there was such an apparatus of mass media allowing us so easily to share text, images and otherwise, the potency of an image had an entirely different import. There was no endless stream of information that each individual could bathe in, the seats of power, whether they were religious, political, whatever, had control of the types of images purveyed and their symbolic content. In my view, a lot of the process and program of modernism has done damage to our understanding of the base symbolism in much traditional art. Art's use in the church, in the temple, in the public forum was always bound with its efficacy. Even scripture, something we tend to not look at aesthetically, is an artistic document. It's literature, poetry which demonstrates a doctrine, a way of being. This is much of Bourriaud's argument.

The "interstice" is an interval, a space between things, a vacuum, a gap. Bourriaud draws attention to the contemporary artistic practice of creating interactive environments or modeling new "life possibilities" as opposed to creating dry, stagnant artifacts. Much of this development can be traced to the early 20th-century avant-garde including the work of Klee, Kandinsky, Picabia and Duchamp. But this frame for art history, while useful, is somewhat of an over-generalization. In reality works of art, as mentioned above, have always been tools for demonstrations of "life possibilities." An idea I've borrowed from Borges is the concept of a philosophical doctrine, that paragon of "nonfiction," as itself a fiction. Spinoza's Ethics is a combination of glyphs, a system of logic that demonstrates a way of being. It is difficult to distinguish it in this way from much art, from a lengthy Dostoevsky novel to a 50-cent song; each demonstrates a mode of being, a set of behaviors and actions in the world. Which some may be rigorously defended as a fool-proof logic, each effects the world in basically the same way.

I had a tremendous revelation in this vein about the work of Yoko Ono and John Lennon in the 60s. I thought quite a bit about the program of the Fluxists and Situationalists, their emphasis on the script and the happening, and the latter's emphasis on political and social import. Taking an idea from Cage that or Duchamp that your hearing or seeing is part of the artistic process, the consequences become apparent. A piece is not just a static artifact hung on a wall, it affects people's thought processes, their future behaviors and their overall outlook. Having an intense awareness of the effects of a work gives an artist tremendous power. This is why I was struck by the supreme beauty and simplicity of Lennon's 70s work. The majesty of it, to me, extends far beyond the popular art sphere and has yet to receive its rightful lauding. To promote a simple message of peace and love that is participatory and inclusive is, in my view, the highest artistic achievement. They together built a tremendous understanding of their effect on the world and applied a strong set of principles toward an admirable political and moral object.

I'll end this here, I presume, as I feel I've run out of things to say for the time being. But expect in the future more ruminations on different things I've read, astrological interpretations, and other creative ideas. I've got a lot to say it seems...