Relational Aesthetics - Bourriaud

"An overwhelming majority of critics and philosophers are reluctant to come to grips with contemporary practices. So these remain essentially unreadable, as their originality and their relevance cannot be perceived by analysing them on the basis of problems either solved or unresolved by previous generations. The oh-so-painful fact has to be accepted that certain issues are no longer being raised, and it is, by extension, important to identify those that are being raised these days by artists" (p7)

Artistic activity is a game, whose forms, patterns and functions develop and evolve according to periods and social contexts; it is not an immutable essence. It is the critic's task to study this activity in the present. A certain aspect of the programme of modernity has been fairly wound up (and not, let us hasten to emphasize in these bourgeois times, the spirit informing it). This completion has drained the criteria of aesthetic judgment we are heir to of the substance, but we go on applying them to present-day artistic practices. The new is no longer a criterion, except among latter-day detractors of modern art who ... cling solely to the things that their traditionalists culture has taught them to loathe in yesterdays art." (p11)

"The ambition of artists who include their practice within the slipstream of historical modernity is to repeat neither its forms nor its claims, and even less assign to art the same functions as it. Their task is akin t the one that Jean-Fracois Lyotard allocated to post-modern architecture, which 'is condemned to create a series of minor modifications in a space whose modernity it inherits, and abandon an overall reconstruction of that space inhabited by humankind'
...
"learning to inhabit a world in a better way', instead of trying to construct it based n a preconceived idea of historical evolution. Otherwise put, the role of the artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but o actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real." (p13)

"It is no longer possible to regard the contemporary work as a space to be walked through (the "owner's tour" is akin to the collector's). It is henceforth presented as a period of time to be lived through, like an opening t unlimited discussion. (p15)

"Inter-subjectivity, and which takes being-together as a central theme, the "encounter" between beholder and picture, and the collective elaboration of meaning" (p15)

"flags, logos, icons, signs all produce empathy and sharing and all generate bond. Art (practices stemmng from painitng and sculpture which come across in the form of an exhibition) {and sound and music too! ed.} turns out to beparticu;larly suitable when it comes to expressing this hands-on civilistaion, because it tightens the space of relations, unlike TV and literature which refer each individual person to his or her space of private consumption, and unlike theatre and cinema which bring small groups together before specific, unmistakable images. (pp15-16)

"What do we mean by form? [...] If one of these atoms swerves off course, it "causes an encounter with the next atom and from encounter to encounter a pile-up, and borth of the world" ... This is how forms come into being, from the "deviation" and random encounter between two hitherto parallel elements." (p 19)

"Art keeps together moments of subjectivity associated with singular experiences, be it Cezanne's apples or Buren's striped structures. The composition of the bonding agent, whereby encountering atoms manage to form a word is, needless to say, dependent on the historical context. What today's informed public understands by "keeping together" is not the same thing that this public imagined back in the 19th century. Today, the "glue" is less obvious, as our visual experience has become more complex, enriched by a century of photographic images, then cinematography (introduction of the sequence shot as a new dynamic unity), enabling us to recognize as a "world" a collection of disparate element (installation, for instance) that no unifying matter, no bronze, links. (p20)

The Work of Art as Partial Object. "The work of art is only of interest to Guatarri insomuch as it is not a matter of a "passively represented image", otherwise put, a product. The work gives a material quality to existential territories, within which the images takes on the role of subjectivization vector or "shifter", capable of deterring our perception before "hooking it up again" to other possibilities: that of an "operator of junction in subjectivity" (p99)

"... the fluid nature of subjectivity, whose component parts operate, as we have seen, by temporarily clinging to heterogeneous "existential territories". The work of art doesn't halt the eye. It's the spellbinding, para-hypnotic process of the aesthetic way of looking that crystallizes around it the different ingredients of subjectivity, and redistributes them towards new vanishing points" (p100)

"Here, the aesthetic object acquires the status of a "partial enunciator", whose assumption of autonomy makes it possible to "foster new fields of reference". The definition embraces the development of art forms in a very fruitful way: the theory of the aesthetic partial object as "semiotic segment" separate from collective subjective production so as to strt "working on ts own behalf" perfectly describes the most widespread artistic production methods today" sampling of pictures and data, recycling now socialised and historicised forms, invention of collective identities." (p 100)