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 Art and Rhinoceroses Jānis Taurens, Philosopher Nikolā Burjo. Attiecību estētika (Rīga: Laikmetīgās mākslas centrs, 2009) | |
| In preparation for a potential interview with Nicolas Bourriaud, I attempted – in one evening – to read, on the computer, the as yet unpublished translation of ‘Relational Aesthetics’, to the point where I started to doubt whether I would be able to be an adequately empathetic interviewer. Bourriaud’s text aroused in me an urge for debate, or even, to make some sort of rhetorical gesture. In the event, the author did not come to Riga, the issue about an interview was no longer relevant and I was eventually able to reread the work, now published, and to write my comments on the margins of the pages in pencil, as I usually do. The book wasn’t very large, and there wasn’t much space for remarks, so without too much thought I accepted the invitation to write a review about it. Similarly to the ‘Undoing Aesthetics’ by Wolfgang Welsch, which was published in Latvian translation by the Laikmetīgās mākslas centrs in 2005, Bourriaud’s text presents an indubitably current discourse on the problems of aesthetics, and it is good to see that the tiny island of art theory in the cartography of the Latvian language is acquiring some new contours. Only in contrast to Welsch, Bourriaud, being a curator and art critic, is more familiar with what has been taking place in art of the 1990s, which also forms that basis for his theory of aesthetics. (I am using the term “theory” here in a somewhat broad and loose meaning of the word, though not quite as free as that which Paul Feyer abend has elected to use, deeming the creation of the world according to the First Book of Moses also a theory.) Herein also lies the “glory and downfall” of Bourriaud’s opinions. On the one hand, the Latvian reader is introduced to a number of new and perhaps in Latvia less well-known artists of the generation who came to prominence in the 90s, a generation that includes also Bourriaud himself. An extensive knowledge of the current processes of art, it seems, prevents “a main cause of philosophical disease – a onesided diet”, because, as Wittgenstein wrote, “one nourishes one’s thinking with only one kind of example” (“Philosophical Investigations”, §593) Yet, on the other hand, repeatedly mentioning the names of certain artists is symptomatic of this very same “one-sided diet”. As the scientific editor of the Latvian version Ieva Astahovska notes in the afterword – in amidst providing a short and concise context for the translated text – Bourriaud has even been accused of “marketing his own set of artists” (p. 127). In any case, the repeated references to concrete expo¬nents of “relational art” provide a unifying motif for the work, which is based on initially disparate essays. Bourriaud sketches in his philosophical theoretical background – a form of Louis Altisere’s western Marxism – thus creating another leitmotif for the work which to our local reader may seem unaccustomed and alien. I myself do not feel comfortable with the language games that operate with “the conditions of social production” (p. 70), “the mode of production” (p. 67) or “exchange value” (p. 42), moreover in the essays these and similar designations appear more as rhetorical vehicles which merely indicate the background to an opinion or assumption, rather than defending or explaining it. Hence this component of Bourriaud’s theory – just like the references to various French structuralism and poststructuralism sources – remain uninvestigated further. The essays examine and underline a concept which, at first glance at least, apparently balances the materialist (with even a reference to Epicurus and Lucretius!) leanings of Bourriaud. That is the concept of form, however the existence of form in art Bourriaud links with the human interaction essential to relational aesthetics, in addition to speaking about the political value of forms. Hence, dissociation from the formalism of “purity” defended by Clement Greenberg seems understandable. In the 1960s the main theoretical and artistic opponents of formalism were the artistic movements of minimalism and conceptualism, and Bourriaud often makes references to these movements and some of the artists as¬sociated with them, as well as to artworks of the 1960s and 70s. However, another “methodological” characteristic of his work is the consistent juxtaposition of 60s conceptual thinking with artistic practices of the 90s. This could possibly be the most interesting and important issue of relational aesthetics, namely, to what extent art of the 90s – which, as Bourriaud writes, is connected with “the acknowledgement of interaction, communality and relationships” – is original and independent of the artistic strategies of conceptualism, therefore, to what extent is the concept of relational aesthetics itself original and interesting? As I have previously mentioned, Bourriaud is consistent in bringing out this contrast – already in the foreword of the work he begins with an invitation “not to hide behind the history of art of the 1960s” (p. 7). Admitting that the generation of the 90s has taken on the problems of conceptualism, he indicates that no longer is “the problem being resolved as to how to extend the boundaries of art, but rather, how to test the ability of art to survive in the arena of global society”, and this Bourriaud considers to be a completely new set of problems, in which, con¬trary to the relationships inherent within art, those “external relationships within eclectic culture, where a work of art resists the steamroller of ‘show society’” (pp. 30–31) are accentuated. Metaphor and vivid descriptions are some of the charac¬teristics of Bourriaud’s style of writing with which the translator Ieva Lapinska has dealt with successfully, however this kind of style demands some explanation of the assumptions lying hidden behind it. For example, what does conceptualism’s “angelic regard for the sense” mean (p. 81)? Within the confines of a short review it is not possible to present arguments about one opinion or another, and to decipher the propositions of Bourriaud’s aesthetics and the consequences deriving from them – this remains to the reader. I will only point out that at the basis of the counterposition highlighted by Bourriaud (similarly as behind the description “angelic regard”) hides a simplistic and narrow understanding of conceptualism as a linguistic strategy only, which is founded on the autonomy of the artwork (“the internal relations of art”). The translation is valuable because it brings into the Latvian language many new artists’ names, although some names and terms which in the small – hence easily grasped – discourse in the Latvian language have already been examined are, in this book, “Latvianised” [i. e., adapted to the Latvian language] without taking heed of the existing tradition of doing so. One can ignore other publications with this kind of “I’m more clever” attitude; this will, however, then allow each translator or editor that follows to state that “I am even more clever”, basing this on the rhetoric of the preceding gesture, rather than on any criteria of “wisdom”, which at least in theory could be open to discussion. Now, one could ask: but what happened to the promised rhinoceroses? Thus I too will end this review with a rhetorical gesture, by saying that to see in current contemporary art only the substrata of relations (the term used by Bourriaud himself) – it all reminds me of the gradual metamorphosis of human beings into rhinoceroses in the famous play by Eugene Ionesco. Of course, one has to agree with Bourriaud’s thesis that “sense is the fruit of the interaction between the artist and the audience, rather than an authoritative fact” (p. 79), however this semantic thesis has already been substantiated by the American philosopher (neither Marxist nor structuralist) Donald Davidson in his witty article ‘A Nice Derange¬ment of Epitaphs’, but the artistic representation of such was most vividly evident even earlier – in ‘Hotel Palenque’, Robert Smithson’s project-lecture of 1969–1972. To be fair, I must mention that at the close of Ionesco’s play, the chief protagonist – who does not want to become a rhinoceros – is abandoned by his girlfriend, saying that she does not wish that anything bad should be said about rhinoceroses... /Translator into English: Terēze Svilane/ | |
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