The Shifting Aura of Contemporary Art

As a research artist and digital media Ph.D student, I am constantly challenged to reflect critically upon the nature of the various forms which are emerging in contemporary artistic practices.  Is there a thread that connects the work of William Kentridge and Mel Chin or Tim Hawkinson and Ann Hamilton, for example? We were given two final texts to read and discuss in my seminar class this week: curator Nicholas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics and art critic Claire Bishop’s Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics (pdf).  It was also announced that electronics artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, who was scheduled to lecture at the High Museum of Art, and his gallerist would be visiting our class prior to his museum lecture.  Excited by this prospect, I delved into the assigned texts hoping to find an idea that resonated with my own interests.  I think I might have found a connection but not in the way I had initially hoped for in the readings.

Claire Bishop names several curators who are promoting a model which, to a large extent, is a direct reaction to art produced in the 1990s, work she describes as “open-ended, interactive, and resistant to closure” that is often displayed as a “work-in-progress” rather than a complete work.  She critiques Nicholas Bourriaud and other curators who are reconceptualizing the “white cube” model of contemporary art exhibition and re-staging the art studio as an experimental “laboratory.”  This ideology takes shape in Bourriaud’s notion of “relational aesthetics,” which celebrates art that engages in “the realm of social interaction and content.”

A more socially engaged form of contemporary art?  Okay, I can work with that. But wait.  Critics like Bishop are actually criticizing current discourse about “relational” practices such as socially engaged, community-based, experimental, participatory, or research-based forms of art.  I really like William Kentridge’s tapestries, for which the artist collaborated with a Johannesburg-based weaving art studio.  Kentridge was recently honored with a Kyoto Prize awarded individuals who make “significant contributions to the betterment of humankind.”  Mel Chin was the winner of the biennial Fritschy Culture award, which is given to artists who “give shape to cultural diversity and make world citizenship the subject of their art.”  These are outstanding developments which place artists on a world stage, not solely within certain art circles.

Bishop points to a shift that occurred during the 1990s, when art critics were replaced by curators as the people who can make or break an artist’s career.  In an interview, she notes that although curatorial work is often “concerned with fair mediation (between artists, audiences and institutions), it is perhaps unsurprising that curatorial writing is oriented toward ethical questions.”  Bishop also highlights a “post-political” trend that emerged in the ’90s and “submits art and politics to moral judgments bearing on the validity of their principles and the consequences of their practices.”  In his book, Bourriaud pushes back against the “elitist attitudes of certain people in art circles” who loathe the public place and spirit of artistic collaboration.  This is evidenced in the recent criticism of the Brooklyn Museum.

The aura of artworks has shifted towards their public. — N. Bourriaud

Bourriaud writes about contemporary art and artists, such as Andrea Zittel who encompass in their working process the “presence of the micro-community which will accommodate it,” or Gabriel Orozco, whose conceptual works are inspired by his political engagement.  William Kentridge worked with a South African tapestry studio, which was featured in the recent Art21 film.  Mel Chin’s The Fundred Dollar Bill Project invites students of all ages to participate in art and collective creative action. In Zittel’s latest project, the Group Formerly Known as Smockshop (GFKAS) creates products that begin with artist-modified “panels” that have the capacity to contract, expand, or morph from single surfaces to fully functional objects.

Hotly contested debates regarding relational aesthetics aside, I found the informal and museum lectures of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer compelling for several reasons.  This artist, who was interviewed for this blog this past September, visited my class to discuss the “relational” aspects of his art which are actually different from Bourriaud’s examples and more or less similar to Bishop’s.  He did not argue for or defend a particular stance and instead wanted to talk about a larger platform of artists who are working successfully with new media.  Lozano-Hemmer creates art for two types of venues: the ephemeral, intervention in public space and the institutional space.  One of the major questions we have been exploring in my class is the status of digital art, or digital media art in galleries, museums, and collections.  The electronic, performative, and interactive features of Lozano-Hemmer’s work qualify him more as an digital artist.  However, his work also communicates to observers or participants using a fluent visual language.

Lozano-Hemmer is a Mexican-Canadian artist who is interested in the empirical, or experimental side of materialized critical theories.  He is inspired by theorists such as Brian Massumi as well as artists such as Krzysztof Wodiczko. In my class, he talked about Voz Alta from his Relational Architecture series, which memorialized the 1968 massacre of students in Mexico City by inviting participants to speak into a megaphone which translated into light flashes in the Secretariat of Foreign Affairs.  Anyone within a 10-mile radius of the square could watch the flashes and tune into a radio station (96.1 FM) to hear the recorded, corresponding voices.

Two qualities of Lozano-Hemmer’s work that resonate with my research take into account several related methodologies, materialities, alternate realities, and agencies.  His artistic practice prescribes a relationship between virtuality and viractuality — concepts which begin with what digital artist/theorist Joseph Nechvatal calls an understanding that “every new technology disrupts previous rhythms of consciousness.”  Viractual objects — as products of anti-modern communication and production — are subject to “constant semiosis, including resonances, or affinities between formal and conceptual opposites.”  Nechvatal refers to Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the virtual as a “surface effect produced by actual causal interactions which occur at the material level.”  Lozano-Hemmer’s notion of virtuality involves amplifying and augmenting art forms in various physical or natural sites.  The point is to create and examine specific elements of art in order to discover what is connected to them.  These connections are not always political and are often technological, scientific, or literary in their formation.

In the informal talk, Lozano-Hemmer shared other projects he has done, specifically with bitforms gallery in Chelsea, NYC.  He says that the platforms in which he installs his work are outside of his control.  This is a counterpoint to issues he feels are problematic, such as the site-specific category of art, based on prevailing studies of grand narratives in particular structures or spaces.  He is less interested in this type of work and more involved in establishing temporary relationships that are based on a social experience, as well as the social juxtapositions of disparate realities within sites.  Another distinction he emphasizes in his work is the participatory (relationship-specific) aspect.

[youtube:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hfnQU_3Bb4]

Lozano-Hemmer explicates three facets of relationality in his work.  The first is a type of objectivity that translates the experiences of Brazilian avant-gardes that produced work which could be manually manipulated and constructed.  These relational, environmental structures made use of materials that had agency and encouraged public participation.  Another side is inspired by Barbara Liskov‘s object-oriented programming that allowed for a dynamic system of classification and taxonomy (between databases) for relational connectivity.  The third aspect, “Autopoiesis,” is a term coined by Chilean neurobiologists, that inspired a recent project of the same name about which the artist writes,

When people look at themselves in this small mirror they see the word “Autopoiesis” projected on their forehead. The concept of self-creation described by Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela is an inspiration for all art that depends on participation to exist.

Literally meaning “self production,” autopoiesis refers to the way in which “living beings are seen as systems that produce themselves, or regenerate, in a ceaseless way.”  Lozano-Hemmer works from within a dynamic, transnational framework in which the public becomes the nature of the art.  The relational, virtual, and viractual aspects of this type of art reflect current knowledge or technological contexts and cultures of which many people all over the world are part.  The work resonates with sociopolitical issues such as surveillance and privacy and biopolitics.  Regarding relational aesthetics Bourriaud writes,

Contemporary art thus introduces a radical shift in relation to modern art, insomuch as it does not turn its back on the aura of the work of art, but rather moves its origin and effect.

In my opinion, contemporary artists such as Lozano-Hammer and others (mentioned here and elsewhere) thrive off of positive feedback loops —here positive refers to the direction of change rather than the desirability of the outcome. This is contrary to the kinds of self-fulfilling effects that plague some conventional forms. Materiality, virtuality, viractuality, agency, participatory, and unfinished-ness are all are aspects of a relational aesthetic that engages an active public.  This is what I think distinguishes the nature of emerging forms from what Lozano-Hemmer calls “alien art” (new is no longer a criterion).  Alien artistic and cultural practices support Bourriaud’s assertion that the “aura of contemporary art is free association” and that is something I can work with.