ABSTRACT
Relational aesthetics, proposes a revaluation of artworks founded in their connection to, and creation and manifestation of, human interactions in a given social context. With Nicolas Bourriaud and Ridout, artist historian, critic, and curator of Double Agent Claire Bishop agrees that there exists a ‘long tradition of viewer participation and activated spectatorship in works of art across many media’. Linking participatory art and performance, both Double Agent and theanyspacewhatever promote exhibition-based practices that look beyond traditional forms of visual arts display precisely by investing in social engagement and drawing on adjoining disciplinary tropes and paradigms. Stressing, quite judiciously, the necessity of critiquing artistic practice according to criteria appropriate to the moment of its construction, Bourriaud reminds his readers of a traditional conception of the artwork as ‘situated in a transcendent world’. In Bourriaud’s rendering, relational artworks operate through the ephemeral moment and the productive object.
