« Working on and with Eigensinn – A new approach to Media | Art | Education | Main | On Rules and Monsters »
The Open Work: Participatory Art Since Silence
Tuesday, February 07
iDC Lecture by Dr. Judith Rodenbeck
In the introduction to his 2002 book, Relational Aesthetics, the curator Nicolas Bourriaud writes that currently, "the liveliest factor that is played out on the chessboard of art has to do with interactive, user-friendly and relational concepts." Neither revival nor comeback, relational aesthetics, for Bourriaud, is the correct vanguardist response to a world saturated by mass communications. Part of the newness had to do, in Bourriaud's account, with asking what kind of art was possible after the doldrums of the 1980s, when the hegemony of "spectacle" seemed assured (via the alleged failures of May 1968), after institutional critique seemed to have run its course, and after any socially-engaged avant-garde had exhausted itself and the political patience of its adherents-and even, perhaps, the conditions of its possibility. "How are these apparently elusive works to be decoded, be they process-related or behavioral by ceasing to take shelter behind the sixties art history?" (Bourriaud, 7) Yet this unwillingness to examine relational aesthetics with an eye on history is a defensive maneuver. As such it is one that needs to be taken on. This talk is an historical presentation addressed to some of the parameters under which the "interactive, user-friendly and relational" were actively explored-and critiqued--in key works of the 1950s and early 1960s.
About Dr. Judith Rodenbeck:
BA, Yale University. BFA, Massachusetts College of Art. MA, MPhil, PhD, Columbia University. Special interests in art since 1945 and its compositional strategies; intersections between modernist literature, philosophy, and the visual arts. Co-author and co-curator with Benjamin Buchloh of Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts--events, objects, documents; contributor to catalogues for Work Ethic and Inside the Visible; author of articles for Grey Room, The Art Book, Documents, and P-Form. Recipient of fellowships, including Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Fellowship in American Art and Columbia University Mellon Fellowship for Art History.
12:02 PM | Permalink
Comments
Dear Judith,
I'd like to speak with you regarding this lecture on relational aesthetics. I am a BA (Hons) Painting student studying in Camberwell College of the Arts, London. Currently i am in the process of researching and writing my dissertation for my final year at university.
I am writing about Sophie Calle, specifically her exhibition "Prenez Soin de Vous" and i am asking specifically how the artist has developed "The Open Work". I would like to speak to you more specifically about Bourriaud's R.A and Post-Production and Eco.
If you would like to continue this discussion, which would be of a great aid to my research, i would appreciate it if you could e-mail me on the address i have supplied.
Thanks so much,
Kind Regards,
Thomas Burton
Posted by: Thomas Burton | Jan 13, 2010 5:16:44 PM
I also think the same as the genius commenter above.
Posted by: replica rolex | Oct 6, 2010 9:31:20 PM
It was my pleasure finding your site last night. I came up here right now hoping to uncover something new. And I was not frustrated. Your ideas with new solutions on this area were informative and an excellent help to me personally. Thank you for making time to create these things and then for sharing your opinions.
Posted by: Central London escorts | Oct 1, 2011 10:38:05 PM
The comments to this entry are closed.