imomus | Bourriaud x Curtis

Yesterday I bought a copy of Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics. It's specifically about art in the 1990s, but I note that the curators of my most recent art activities in New York and London (Philippe Vergne and Mathieu Copeland) are both key figures in Relational Aesthetics -- Mathieu helped translate the book, and Philippe was one of the first curators to recognize Rirkrit Tiravanija. Bourriaud himself went on to institutionalize his ideas in a "space of encounter": the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

Relational Aesthetics isn't yet old hat. Despite Jerry Saltz's declaration that it has entered a "mannerist" phase, the movement is still very much at the centre of contemporary art, spreading to a "second generation" of artists and designers like Anneka Eriksson and Carolina Caycedo, Alex Rich and Jan Family. It's also become a "look" involving boxes, tables, books, catalogues and magazines, potted plants, rubber matting, temporary plyboard walkways, platforms, bean bags, camping gas, conviviality. Take the 2006 Rirkrit Tiravanija installation on the cover of the book, for instance. What do we see there? An informal, friendly space, a sort of cafe in an art gallery. A place where people can read art books, hang out, drink beer, chat, relate.

I read the first couple of chapters of Relational Aesthetics in a cafe yesterday, and scribbled some notes in the page margins. But maybe it's not interesting enough to just give you my Bourriaud notes. I'd like to broaden things by bouncing those notes off another set I made later in the day, maybe producing an unexpected third text through the juxtaposition. Adam Curtis, the television essayist, last week sent me DVDs of his new BBC 2 documentary The Trap. So I'm bouncing the Bourriaud notes off the Curtis ones. The bits in bold are me finding a third text in the parallels between what they're saying.

Bourriaud: Relational Aesthetics connects with Marxism via de-reification: a making-visible of the relationships between people that are hidden, in a consumer society, in relationships we have with objects. So, in art, finished objects lose their sovereignty, and the focus shifts to relationships. The opening upstages the artworks.

Curtis: Attempts, post-WW2, to liberate us from the "dead hand" of bureaucracy have led, instead of freedom, to a trap: a world in which a reduced view of human beings as self-interested, suspicious mechanisms leads to a dark world of numerical calculation, targets, rollbacks of legal rights in the face of terrorism, a collapse in social mobility, and the return of privilege and power.

Bourriaud: Art makes "minor modifications" rather than re-shaping the whole field of social relations. It can nevertheless be a dolce utopia.

So art is opening up fluid social relations at precisely the time wider society is closing them down. Is art an experiment, a research into social alternatives, or a compensation and reparation for lacks and failings in the big world?

Curtis: During the Cold War, scientists at the Rand Corporation turned to game theory to model the likely responses of the Soviet Union. The basic model was "fuck you, buddy" -- cold, hard self-interest, suspicion, and the idea that whenever your partner can betray you, he will. In economics, at around the same time, Friedrich von Hayek was promoting a similar idea: that only cold rationality and self-interest (rather than, say, altruism, patriotism, duty, generosity or community-mindedness) could guarantee social stability.

Bourriaud: Developments in the 1990s facilitated Relational Aesthetics: globalization, networks, flexibility, density.

Was the liberating free-flowing openness of the 90s something that happened because of right wing ideas in the 80s, or despite them? Would those ideas have been okay if we had been able to sustain that and widen it globally, rather than swinging into neo-imperialism in the 21st century?

Curtis: John Nash won a Nobel Prize for his Game Theory work at the Rand Corporation. But it was basically paranoid, assuming that your opponent is hostile and bent on your destruction. The problem is, this doesn't correlate to how people behave in the real world -- co-operation, hospitality, love and so on.

Bourriaud: Modernity has two conflicting (or mutually-producing?) sides -- an Enlightenment project of increasing rationality, but also things like Surrealism and Dada, which celebrate the irrational. The sleep of Reason breeds monsters, perhaps?

Curtis: There was an odd harmony between the right's conception of self-interested individuals and the counterculture's mistrust of the establishment. Both attacked public servants' supposed disinterest. R.D. Laing saw love as nothing but selfishness, a struggle for control and power. The modern family was a dark arena of selfish games. "The so-called normal family is like walking into a carbon-monoxide gas chamber."

Actually, this is something Curtis' previous documentary Century of the Self was really strong on -- the way the counterculture played into Thatcherism and Reaganism. The way the creative culture with its emphasis on self-actualisation could be turned easily into an entrepreneurial model.

Bourriaud: There can be interstices, non-profit spaces within for-profit systems. "When an artist shows us something, he uses a transitive ethic which places his work between the look-at-me and the look-at-that."

Curtis: Quantification, checklists, targets arrived in the 80s as business managers were given the opportunity to restructure public institutions as metaphors, simulations of the ideal free market situation. The NHS got an "internal market". Democracy itself was dismantled, seen as a weak marker of public desire. Instead, we got "market democracy", John Major's Citizens' Charter, and New Labour's nightmare of rankings, indices of quality of life, efficiency targets and incentives. Managers seemed to be set free to be entrepreneurs, to meet the targets any way they liked, to "own" their own targets. But many cheated the system, which ended up decreasing social mobility (for instance, because schools were rated and ranked, affluent parents moved to where the good schools were, increasing social polarization).

Bourriaud: Relational Aesthetics is what we do when machines take over. "The general mechanization of social processes gradually reduces the relational space." So art has to increase it again.

When game theory leads to mechanization of social processes, play is all that's left to us.

Curtis: The Rand Corporation's John Nash spent ten years in an asylum as a paranoid schizophrenic. Now he has had an "enlightenment". The model of "the human as businessman" has little relationship with actual human behaviour,

he says. His Game Theory work over-emphasized self-interest and rationality. Humans are much more complex. Over the last five years, Nobel Prizes have gone to economists who have shown there's no inherent equilibrium in markets, no "hidden hand". New research shows that only two groups of people behave in a rational, self-interested way: economists themselves, and psychopaths.

It's fine for Jerry Saltz to want to declare Relational Aesthetics over, even before most people are aware it's begun. Art is always going to be a marginal, compensatory activity. But, before we do that, I think it's very important for people to realize that the kind of mentality Adam Curtis is describing -- the selfish, mechanistic view of human nature that emerged out of Game Theory and has infiltrated all our social processes in the West (not so much Japan -- they might still be able to leapfrog this whole foolishness) -- is no longer credible. There's lots of mileage left in the games suggested by Relational Aesthetics, but none left in the kind of paranoid gamesmanship John Nash used to advocate. That's over, played, and needs to be terminated in all areas with very little mercy or regret.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

purveyorofchaos.livejournal.com

I found "Century of the Self" fascinating. Had no idea that guy did other stuff, but he must have, no?

You juxtapositions make for good late night reading here in Texas.

From:

caoilte.livejournal.com

Pandora's Box is also very very very very good. That and Century of the Self changed the way I think about Public Relations and Engineering respectively. The Trap is "okay".

From:

zenicurean.livejournal.com

Mr Curtis is clearly neither an economic, social or political historian and I find it rather overwhelming that he attempts to play at being one. I could forgive the non sequiturs and the crass simplifications, I suppose, but only if they were funny.

From:

realrealgone.livejournal.com

R.D. Laing saw love as nothing but selfishness, a struggle for control and power.

it annoys me immensely to hear, in 'The Trap' (and in commentaries on 'The Trap', the repeated conflation of R.D.Laing's insights into intra-familial power politics with the ideas of the social engineers of the right. True, both may be observing the same thing - but there is a fundamental difference, I would argue, in their reaction. The right saw (sees) this selfish struggle as an inevitable pre-destined state of being to be accepted and cynically exploited to maintain social equilibrium, whereas Laing was attempting to release individuals from the grip of such psychiatrically-damaged societal structures. Just because he saw what is commonly known as 'love' as all-to-often manipulative and damaging, did not mean that he thought it always had to be that way.

It was interesting, however, to see how Nash (for one) appears to have come to some sort of realisation of the narrow, paranoid nature of his theories. Identifying dynamics is a dangerous business - the realisation can liberate us, but it can also reinforce those very dynamics as immutable realities.

that is all.

From:

imomus.livejournal.com

Curtis does say that Laing's intentions and the effects of his insights were very different things. I think this is one of the things his films are strongest on, because it's counter-intuitive -- the way we're in the pickle we're in today because both left and right have brought us here. Selfishness and self-interest were the effect of the Me Generation counterculture, and identity politics, as much as of right wing economists like Hayek. The corollary of this is also interesting -- there's something true radicals might share with true blue conservatives of the old school: an interest in the kind of "moral sentiments" the marketplace can never provide. Curtis says that in fact, even in the golden age of laissez faire, the self-interest of the market place was distinguished from moral sentiments -- things like sympathy and understanding for others. These, according to Adam Smith, could not be dispensed with.

As for R.D. Laing, he actually discovered Game Theory when he visited Palo Alto, and applied it to family research, making checklists of all the strategies people used in family situations. This is what allowed him to come up with ideas like the "double bind", and it is strikingly similar to Cold War gamesmanship. He concluded that when we talk about "love" we are often talking instead about power, and about imposing impossible demands on people.

Like the right wing, the libertarian hippy counterculture concluded that none of the institutions of postwar life could be trusted, and that altruism didn't exist. They, as much as Thatcher, tore down the UK's Keynsian institutions in the name of "freedom".

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