Sunday, June 15, 2008

Relational Aesthetics: a response to The Common Viewer

With every post on cooperreviewed.blogspot.com I sit down with Microsoft word and write a page or two, but then discard them having decided that my thinking is pretentious and/or grandiose. I often write a clipped, shortened version that misses whatever it was that got me excited in the first place, but at least I look like slightly less of a douchebag, right? One way or the other, I always feel ill-at-ease copy and pasting 2-3 Microsoft word pages worth of thoughts into a roughly 2.5x3 inch comment text field. It becomes painfully obvious (and very embarrassing to me) how far I tend to let my thoughts run away with me, 'but damn the torpedoes!' I say (this time):

 

The distinction between the common reader/viewer and the un-common(?) one seems vague to me. I understand that quite a few people read (and write) in order to correct the opinions of others, but it's important not to forget, too, that this activity is its own sort of pleasure and is its own way of creating for one's self 'a portrait of a man, a sketch of an age' or 'a theory of the art of writing.' In the same way I would say that even the most critically engaged (non-common[?]) viewer has pleasure at the root of his or her desire to look at art. I would even go as far as to say that a vast majority of those who view art do so for the same kind of pleasure, though the pleasure is exercised and manifested in different ways.

 

You're right that museums are spaces removed from the everyday (olafur eliasson's 'take your time' at ps1 and moma comments on this by transplanting naturally-occurring phenomena like waterfalls and rainbows into the 'un-natural' modernist setting that the white cube of museum/gallery spaces is); it is this schism that is imposed between the viewer and the space one must enter in order to view art that encourages the pleasure in imparting and correcting, I think.

 

In my second year of high school I had a humanities professor (whose teaching style was not unlike litia perta's, actually, now that I think of it) who said she was only teaching the class and me the things she did so that we would be 'interesting at dinner parties,' and, though I generally dismiss the sentiment of her statement, the social attributes of learning/art shouldn't be underestimated either. I tend to side with Nicolas Bourriaud when he posits 'the work of art as social interstice' in his book 'relational aesthetics;' this social 'linking' function (as he calls it) of art combined with its spatial inaccessibility (when it's in a museum or gallery) lends support to the indisputably most common art experience in tourism: the viewing of things in order to add such experiences to a resume-like personal history cache, often with photographic documentation (which also often features the tourist in question, verifying for others a proximity they had to the work of art pictured). I think that the inaccessibility of museums—that a special trip or tourist journey/pilgrimage is necessary to enter them—in this way makes the vast majority of art experiences an exercise in preparing one's self to converse with others, 'impart information,' 'correct their opinions' and glean the pleasure of each from these activities.

 

In looking back over what I've written now, I see that I've mentioned a museum show I've been to ('take your time') and a book I've read ('relational aesthetics') and, though I did receive some enjoyment solely from the localized elements of both experiences, I think that it would be critically irresponsible to exclude the prospective pleasure of talking to others about them later from my decision to read the book and see the show. The theory of tourism that I'm laying out here and implicating myself in comes as a failure on the part of the viewer (and me), but I think that it is a failure facilitated by what it is to go somewhere to look at art. It might even be an inescapable failure, but I should be careful of applying my personal failures to the rest of humanity (as I'm certainly doing here).

 

I guess I would conclude that an art experience can't or shouldn't be forced into the binary of enjoying experience or experiencing academically and, even if I don't excitedly chat up someone at a museum, I've never been alone in one.

 

 

joshua

 

(p.s. I highly recommend 'take your time' if it's still up and you're in the city)

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