The birth and development of the Internet since the 1980s makes a wealth of information accessible on a global scale. Compared to a large amount of existing materials, Nicolas Bourriaud[1] emphasizes how many artists, rather than creating forms from scratch, reinterpret existing forms, helping to eradicate the concepts of originality and creation, in favor of remixing and manipulating existing forms into new uses.
The relational artist
The figure of the deejay, who uses the vast stock of sounds available to compose new music, is a perfect metaphor to describe the attitude of these relational artists, who draw on the vast world cultural heritage to propose new uses. More than building something new, the relational artist takes possession of the cultural codes he knows, projecting his own vision onto the world through his own associations. The resulting work is no longer intended as a productive output, but rather as a generator of other activities, since its consumption immediately becomes a source of new associations and relationships on the part of the audience.
This is certainly not new, considering for example the studies on reading, which show how literary works are co-created by the imagination of readers … Similarly, a dress is such when it is worn and food is nourishment when it constitutes our body.
When we inhabit the culture, we select, use and modify the content according to our needs.
Art is an encounter, an experience
Bourriaud is the author of the famous relational conception of art of the Nineties, that is to say of an art that was interested in the temporal dimension of artistic experience and human relationships. This art creates social interstices, i.e. spaces of relationship that suggest possibilities of exchange through encounter. It would be precisely in these occasions of encounter and transaction that the forms would develop, in a similar way to how the text is generated in reading (i.e. the transaction between the writer’s imagination and the reconstruction of the reader’s imagination).
Since the 1990s, works of art increasingly seem to be moments of an infinite and complex chain of relationships, pushing users to the generation of often participatory behavior. Installations (of various objects, images, lights, sounds, etc.), workshops and performances are not only becoming more and more frequent, but they are also becoming requested first and foremost by new museums and art institutes, which focus on services to visitors (educational, playful, restful, etc.), but also by the public, who expect entertainment and direct contact with the work and the artist.
The counter-narrative of art to consumerism
The market is the global place of business and exchange of goods and services, which coordinates work activities as well as leisure activities -art included-; the society of the first decade of the 21st century perceives its everyday life as a constant relationship between production and consumption of which the industrial interest is interested, building narratives that project lifestyles and worldviews to adhere to more or less consciously. Faced with this perception, art tends to build counter-narratives, giving us a world with more possibilities than those provided by the market, alternative solutions and greater diversity.
In the 1950s, the International Situationist had promoted the reuse of existing works with the aim of returning to lived experience, against the alienation of everyday life. Likewise, Kaprow’s happenings responded to the alienation of everyday life through the creation of meaningless happenings, in environments crowded with bulk objects and unblinkingly alienated behaviors. Performance art reacts with violence against the conventions of society, rediscovers ancestral rituals, takes to the streets and squares, uses scandal to shock and provoke occasions to rethink the world as we live it.
The artistic experience as a place of production
In the 21st century art exhibition, the curator as well as the viewer propose a personal journey within the vast global art scene, “it is no longer the end result of a process, but a place of production”[2]. The elements selected from the world are related by the artists and placed in reaction with the users of art; in the same way the deejay selects a playlist and coordinates his activity in front of the masses moving in front of him, projecting his own vision of the world with the awareness of “making the forms work”, which will be transformed again already in the act of their consumption.
The consumer of the late twentieth century lives on narratives
Today the consumer buys according to his needs and on the basis of his personality; the act of cosumption coincides with the production of his own universe. Everyone builds his or her own history through his or her own consumption. How personalized it is or, vice versa, how conformed this consumption is is an incessant source of interest also for art. To deal with the narratives of the personalities of each consumer, in fact, the market responds with great narratives, which are built to make consumption flow as predictably as possible.
One example is Hollywood and transmedia storytelling[3]. Against the great narratives that see “in the division of labor the dominant scenario of employment; in the married couple the dominant sexual scenario; in television the privileged scenario of free time”[4], performance in particular has always struggled, becoming the spokesman for counter-narratives, whose scripts attack conventions in favor of diversity.
Our everyday life is not a reality, but one of the possible realities. Performance is the medium through which many artists have decided to articulate the differences of the world.
From open work to Relational Art
Since “nothing is reported from the outside, you must first inhabit the form you want to love or criticize”, the performance has incorporated. If in the 1960s the work of art was open[5], so that the audience responded to the impulse of the artist-transmitter, towards the 21st century interaction and participation dissolved the traditional boundaries between transmission-reception, composition-interpretation. Each one is a semi-onaut, who consumes according to the production of his own story, in response to his own personality, through the personal strategy of consumption that he develops, constantly trying to project his own vision of the world.
The attitude of the performance pushes those who come across it to live the experience in hic et nunc, becoming aware of being an active part in their own consumption. Would you like to read more about this topic? Read my book Dance and Alchemy.
Note:
1] Bourriaud N., Postproduction. Come l’arte riprogramma il mondo, Postmedia Books, 2004.
2] Bourriaud N., ibid.
3] Fina D., Lo Slancio, Lulu, 2015.
4] Bourriaud N., ibid.
5] Eco U., Lector in fabula, Bompiani, 1979.
6] Cfr. Dominique Gonzalez-Foester, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, catalogo Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1998.
