Recent innovations in art practice do not fit the profile of art genres erstwhile recognized as “contemporary.” Many contemporary art practices go out of comfortable categories or conventions in art, which are now seen as hackneyed or worn-out. Process art, earth art, installation art, performance art, new media art, etc., are names that have now become conventionally mainstream and academic. The curator and theorist Nicolas Bourriaud notices this in the 1990s and contends that the things which preoccupy contemporary artists no longer comfortably fall into the common genre types that are used to describe late 60s art. Descriptions such as “interactive,” “user-friendly,” “openended,” etc., simply do not work as effectively anymore as with yesterday’s art. In place of the confused categories of art – categories that fall apart whenever they are used to account for the orientation of 90’s art – Bourriaud coins “relational art” and deploys “relational aesthetics” as a critical framework that accounts for avant-garde art practices. In the mind of its progenitor, relational aesthetics is therefore born out of the realization that artworks and art practices produced by contemporary artists possess a nature or orientation that is different from works in the late 60s and 70s (which are mostly dominated by neo-dada, conceptualist, and minimalist tendencies). It is an offshoot of Bourriaud’s observation that contemporary art critics and theorists are unable to account for the complexity of experience that recent contemporary art practices offer. For him, the world of art was on theoretical impasse in that it was unable to explain contemporary art’s constitution in relation to society, history, and culture.
Bourriaud defines relational art as “an art taking its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.” He believes that the emergence of relational art practices is a byproduct of the reorganization of social spaces due to urbanization (which has repercussions in the human being’s aesthetic encounter with the world); that contemporary art is characterized by a movement away from the affective notion of art as something to be experientially acquired. “It is no longer possible to regard the contemporary work as a space to be walked through,” he says. Rather, art now is “presented as a period of time to be lived through,” which means that the reorganization or restructuring of how art is constituted and experienced today is directly manifested by how contemporary artworks are encountered by human beings in collectively temporal sense – albeit as inter-subjectively lived experience. Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics found traction in contemporary art discourse and reception. It provided the fresh ground through which art critics and theorists made new headways in art-historical and art-theoretical discourses. It gave new directions that circumvent the gridlock in the theorizations of contemporary art. However, by contributing to the discussion, a number of commentators on relational art have also pointed out the limitations of Relational Aesthetics and supplied the gaps that Bourriaud missed in the seminal work. Claire Bishop, for one, provides the art-historical precedents that may have preempted relational art practices in the late 20th century, an accounting that is lacking in Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics. Further, she also questions the rather naïve assumption of Bourriaud: the view that the interaction or engagement that relational art instantiates with the public is inherently democratic. In contrast to Bourriaud’s Debordian reading of relational art’s promise, Bishop states that relational art has nothing to do with democratic or egalitarian utopias that art ought to bring about. Instead she argues that relational art merely partakes in the contestations of an ever oscillating dynamics of power relations which, for her, is what democracy is all about.
What is clear here is that relational aesthetics, as originally conceived by Bourriaud, is inextricably bound up with the question of political (and even ethical) commitment. This means that there is an underlying normative valuation in relational art practice that is emancipatory or, at the very least, ameliorative. There is, however, an important caveat in Bishop and Bourriaud’s accounting of relational art’s ameliorative potential: while the two critics disagree on certain points, in that they deploy different artistic valuations depending on types of “democratic” ideals that they find desirable (because their descriptions of what constitutes “democracy” differ), both seem to anchor their valuation of relational art in the emancipatory promise of “avantgarde” or cutting-edge art practices. In fact, Bishop is best known for her declaration that relational or socially engaged art is “the new avant-garde.” Likewise, Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics and his coinage of “relational art” appeal to the same selfcongratulatory image and authority of critic-progenitor, a discoverer of some sort not unlike any bourgeois explorer who takes pride in the novelty of her find (a new race of people, a new frontier of land, etc.). Bourriaud and Bishop assume a historicist, albeit ethnocentric, valuation of art in that they still see art history as a progressive overcoming of that which has already come to pass, a sort of incremental leaps or upheavals of artistic self-knowing through which the nature of art gets revealed. Of course, the self-revealing motivation of art occurs at and proceeds from the metropole, which renders practices at the periphery “derivative” – and that the only redeeming potential of the periphery is its ability to independently chart its own version of “democracy-to-come,” which ought to mimic or approximate the same or similar redemptory manifestations in the future. Bourriaud and Bishop’s ethnocentrism is held in check by Grant Kester’s work, The One and the Many. In contrast, Kester takes a more regionalist perspective. While the former critics champion artists in the metropoles as representatives of artistic vanguardism and place great importance on city biennales as the paradigmatic framework that affirms the worth of artistic practices, the latter celebrates “the process of geo-political decentering” that happens when the accounting of socially engaged art practices is made to cover the fringes of the art world. This gesture avoids the ethnocentric pitfall that Bourriaud and Bishop’s accounting of relational art commits to. In fact, Kester’s rejoinder to relational aesthetics resonates Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s work – a work that departs from the patent Eurocentrism of many modernist scholarships because it questions the narrativized accounts of art history which deploys a progressivist view and privileges particular locations of culture over others. So, instead of focusing on the revelatory value of avant-garde practices of the metropoles, Kester found the erstwhile muted but insightful articulations of rural-based community art or collective art practices (in India, Thailand, and Senegal, for instance). Kester even echoes the sentiment (held by dependency theorists) that the project of globalization merely reinforces inequalities that characterize the relationship between centers and peripheries. This decentering, so it seems, is also a movement away from urban interventionism that dominate recent art practices in new media, time-based art, and urban spaces. Kester states: The significance of this shift of emphasis…should not be underestimated in an art world that continues to privilege the city as the only relevant site of art practice and dissemination (evident in the tendency to identify major biennial exhibitions with particular cities, and in the ongoing relationship between new museum construction and the process of urban redevelopment)….The core/periphery logic of globalization thus reiterates a more general prejudice within the discourse of modernism that contrasts the city, as the site of an advanced, cosmopolitan culture, with the conservatism, stagnation, and “idiocy” …of rural life. The renewed interest in rural cultures and contexts has effectively challenged this simplistic opposition, drawing attention to the complex changes being registered in the countryside through the process of globalization, and exploring the necessary interdependence of the urban and the rural.
The art practice of Malaysian artist, Chuah Shu Ruei (the recent recipient of Regional Art Forum -USC art fellowship program), is urban-based yet the insights that it affords the spectator-participant veer away from Bourriaud’s and Bishop’s accounting of relational (or “participatory” in the latter’s case) art practice – although it remains faithful to the inherent relationality and ameliorative promise of art. For one, Shu Ruei’s work does not echo the Debordian subscription of Bourriaud’s views in Relational Aesthetics, nor does it manifest Bishop’s understanding of the contesting relations that are implicit in participatory art practice. Instead, Shu Ruei’s practice creates a space which enables conversations that could never have happened outside the aesthetic dimension of the project. Art in Shu Ruei’s art practice functions as a mediating principle, a dialogical ploy that instantiates what Bourriaud would have called the “intersubjective” play between the spectator and the art “object.” The “object” here is not the traditional art object, however, in that it approximates a phenomenological understanding of the object-subject relation. In a sense, Shu Ruei does not privilege the media or “object” of art. Instead she sees art as a vehicle for mediations, a virtual space that enables negotiations of meanings and human dispositions. In a participative work called Dunia-Kalibutan (a coupling of Malay and Filipino words that approximate the term “world” in the English language), Shu Ruei serves as a facilitator of encounters rather than an overbearing auteur that plans, dictates, and projects artistic values or outcomes . Here, Shu Ruei asks the spectator-participants to work in pairs. Each participant is then asked to draw the interior of one’s home or room on a piece of paper while describing the domestic space to his or her partner. After which, the drawings are cut and pasted together to form a single sculptural work. The paper sculptures from different pairs are then collected and exhibited by participantspectators as parts of an installation piece. What makes this work interesting is that it is not necessarily “textual” or “object-based.” In Dunia-Kalibutan, the arthood of the project is not reducible to the final installation piece, nor is it necessarily about the drawings which later manifest as unified sculptures or coherent installation piece. As Shu Ruei herself explains, the art here is the encounter between participant-spectators that the art project makes possible. The art here is the intimate conversation between two souls, a conversation that is made possible because of the aesthetic funnelling of the project. Of course, the “aesthetic” in this case does not merely pertain to the affective results of the interactions between human bodies and objects (art). Rather, it pertains to a phenomenological encounter between two bodies sanctioned by specific articulations of time and space. Jacques Ranciere has a term for this kind of “aesthetic.” He calls this “primary aesthetics.” The participative dimension of Shu Ruei’s art practice is of course nothing new. In fact, Bourriaud and Bishop have already discussed such encounter-instantiating dimension, which is one of the things that make relational art “relational.” Unlike Bourriaud, however, Bishop believes that this kind of mediation in art is not unique to 90s art. In fact, she states that socially-oriented practices in 1990s is not only anticipated by avant-garde art in the 1960s, they are offshoots of certain art-historical potentialities which already started way back in early 20th century. According to her, participatory practices can be traced back to two art-historical tendencies: a disruptive or interventionist tendency – an authored tradition that seeks to provoke participants, and an ameliorative tendency – a de-authored tradition that aims to embrace collective creativity. The work of Shu Ruei is consistent with Bishop’s description of the latter’s profile – the profile of relational art practice that led Kester to investigate rural practices and dialogical community works. Kester’s accounting of non-textual, non-object-based, performative works also captures the kind of space that Shu Ruei’s practice represents. In Conversation Pieces, Kester reacts to a dominant view in the art world that renders the “collective” as inherently corrupt. This view echoes a point of view in political discourse that demonizes any kind of collectivist project as undesirable by liking them to “failed” collectivist experiments in the past or by drawing attention to unsavory collectivist expressions of hate that emanate from identities like nationality, race, and ethnicity. Kester even observes that the contemporary world of art champions a kind of artistic agency which is diametrically opposed to the syndicalist thrust of community-based practices. Here, the urban-based manifestation of “autonomous” art practice is pitted against the regional nature of collective art. The very idea and practice of collective art production that rural-based and other collectivist projects represent (like Shu Ruei’s), so Kester surmises, is an anathema to avant-gardism. For him, however, this is not necessarily an undesirable thing. Kester claims that, in socially engaged collectivist art, the very idea of autonomous artistic agency is not at all forsaken for the benefit of collective interest or goals but merely negotiated. In fact, he identifies this feature as an important revelation that characterizes contemporary art. He demonstrates the weight of this revelation by contrasting the ameliorative dimension of recent collectivist or dialogical art practices to the supposed emancipatory promise of relational works that Biennales celebrate. One of the examples of art practice (with promise but fails) that Kester cites is the work of Francis Alys. In When Faith Moves Mountains, Alys asked volunteer students in Lima, Peru, to move a mountain for a few centimeters. The task, of course, is a futile one. The idea being, surmises Kester, is that the project demonstrates the idea of Sisyphean labor which informs many of Alys’ works. The problem with this kind of relational work, however, is the difficulty of locating its ameliorative dimension, which it ought to demonstrate in the first place. In other words, one is compelled to ask this question: if relational art is emancipatory, what then is the emancipatory dimension of When Faith Moves Mountains? If the idea is to demonstrate the futility of labor, or to use such demonstration as metaphor for the failure of modernization in Latin-American countries regardless of Sisyphean efforts to do so, or to deconstruct the role of firstworld-initiated development projects in the persistence of backwardness in Latin America, then, at best, its ameliorative dimension is only analogical, which is destined for gallery and biennale consumption, or, at the very least, only kinesthetic because it afforded the student volunteers of Lima a few hours of exercise. The thing is, the ameliorative value of the work is designed for later consumption, to be relished only after the fact that a certain performance occurred, not in the performance or instantiation of actual encounter itself. The work of Alys excludes the very actors in the performative dimension of the project from the emancipatory or ameliorative effect of the same project. In other words, the challenge now is how to avoid the “instrumentalization” of people in relational art projects. This charge also applies to practices of many contemporary artists who work in the social or relational realm like
Santiago Sierra, Christian Phillip Muller, Pierre Huyghe, the Filipina artist Martha Atienza, and many others. The challenge is how to make the ameliorative dimension of relational art complicit or consistent with its performative instantiations and the other way around. This point brings out questions that ought to bother artists who work in the relational realm: what type of mediation should one employ when engaging the social or relational realm? What traditions in art production should one negotiate with participants when practicing in the social realm Indeed, Shu Ruei surrenders part of her artistic agency for negotiation in her actual practice. This is evident in Dunia-Kalibutan and her previous art projects. Part of what is interesting in her work is what she herself brings to human conversation when she instantiates encounters in the context of real-time and performative dimension of the work. Albeit, by surrendering part of her agency to the structuring creativity of the group or collective, she enables the personal narratives (or agencies) of the participants to intersect with hers and the others. Through the intimate conversations, the spectator-participant in the work gets something in return: one gets to see, hear, and perhaps feel a domestic or personal dimension of the other, which renders the part of the other familiar or non-strange. The encounter that Dunia-Kalibutan instantiates reveals a humanizing insight: the other is more or less like one’s self. This ameliorative insight can be valuable in various degrees when set or deployed in different contexts and can serve as corrective to the xenophobia that may overwhelm visual communication technologies (which mediate human interactions or relationships). In fact, one may surmise that the kind of mediation that Shu Ruei’s practice deploys is badly needed in the world today. Shu Ruei’s motivation in doing the project also shapes the participative or dialogic dimension of her work. She identifies as Peranakan – a Malaysian of Chinese descent who has completely assimilated with Malaysian society and diaspora. The imperative to assimilate, in a way, has partially shaped the worldviews of Peranakans who, by the way, completely identify as Malaysians. Her identity, in other words, is emblematic of the work that she does. One can even surmise that her engagement withrelational art and her willingness to surrender part of her own agency for art and the collective is sourced from her own bias: the bias to dialogue, to communicate, and to immerse with others.
