Eliasson / Heliotrope by: Daniel Birnhaum

RELATIONAL AESTHETICS

"All work of art produce a model of sociability...So there is a question we are entitled to ask in front of any aesthetic production: 'Does this work permit me to enter into dialogue? Could I exist, and how, in the space it defines?" Nicolas Bourriaud (Birnbaum, 133)

*The Distribution of the Sensible by: Jacques Ranciere

""...French philosopher Jacques Ranciere outlines an approach to politics and aesthetics that focus on "the manner in which the arts can be perceived and thought of as forms of art and as forms that inscribes a sense of community." Every artistic articulation involves a distribution of shared experience and is thus a figure of sociability or community. ... The arts, says Ranciere, can "only ever lend to projects of domination or emancipation what they are able to lend to them, that is to say, quite simply, what they have in common with them: bodily positions and movements, functions of speech, the parcelling out of the visible and the invisible." (Birnbaum, 134)

"... aesthetics here should be understood in Kantian terms, as the priori forms determining what presents itself to the sensory experience." -in other words, as the system of delimitations of time and space articulating that which members of a community share. On the basis of this primary aesthetics," Ranciere explores the question of artistic practice- "ways of doing and making" -in order to discover exactly "what they 'do' or 'make' from teh standpoint of what is common to the community." If each work of art produces a form of sociability, it also suggests a model of political life that starts from such immediate and tangible tings as physical location, the position from which one speaks, and teh concrete"parcelling out of the visible and the invisible." (Birnbaum, 134)


Heliotrope by: Daniel Birnhaum

RELATIONAL AESTHETICS cont:

Relational Aesthetics- "an aesthetic theory consissting in judging artworks on the basis of the inter-human relations which they represent, produce or prompt." (Birnbaum, 134)

"...social exchange is not just a side effect or a backdrop, it is the very center of their work. What they produce, says Bourriaud, are "inter-human experiences" and "relational time-space elements."

In referring to the experiences within Tiravanija's work-

"Things are out there, between the visitors of the exhibition. Collective activities thus precede the introspection of the single subject. A first-person stance emerges only belatedly, when the action is over and one is left to one's own devices." (Birnbaum, 136)

In referring to the experiences within Eliasson's work-

"In Eliasson's case it is usually the other way around. His works inspire a reflective stance, reminding the viewer of his or her own position as an experiencing, bodily being and of the subjective condition of all interactions with the world (and with other embodied subjects)." (Birnbaum, 136)

"All possible experience of the world depends on an experiencing subject, even when the thing being experienced is understood to be independent of the perceiving mind." (Birnbaum, 136)

"To a certain extent you produce the work. But in turn you are produced as a subject by the environments that artists constructs. "It could perhaps be called a relationship of co-production," says Eliasson. "As an example I might say: when someone walks down a street she produces the street and is, simultaneously, produced by the street." Is it the intentionality of the active viewer who enters the work of art and fully explores its most extreme possibilities that determines the limits of what it means to be a subject? Or is it the work itself that defines the parameters of new forms of subjectivity, perhaps involving modes of awareness that dodge the framework of phenomenology? (Birnbaum, 138)

COLLECTIVE PERCEPTION

"Of the "necessary and ultimately liberating" integration of the human subject and the technology of cinema, Rosalind Krauss writes, "Not only was film to release men and women from the confines of their private spaces and into a collective realm... but it was to infiltrate and reconstruct subjectivity itself, changing damaged individual experience into energized collective perception." She cites Benjamin, who obviously saw this reconstruction of subjectivity as a moment of emancipation and compared it the act of breaking out of jail: "Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go traveling."" (Birnbaum, 139)

"What interests me here is not so much the disappearance as a manner of being, but rather the "systems if discontinuities" that represents so many different modes of appearance or emergence. ...he is interested in an empowered self: an active subject capable of forming him- or herself through engagement with the environment." (Birnbaum, 139)

"Time becomes a subject because it is folding of the outside and, as such, forces every present into forgetting, but preserves the whole of the past within memory: forgetting is the impossibility of return, and memory is the necessity of renewal." The ultimate exteriority, the absolute outside cannot be understood in spatial terms, but rather as a temporal dimension. Time affects itself, and through this auto affection it folds, producing interiority: an inner realm of reflexivity. Thus the Outside is twisted, folded, or doubled to create an Inside." (Birnbaum, 140)