Great text! Something to start the week withL
A Very Short Critique of Relational Aesthetics by Radical Culture Research Collective (RCRC)
http://transform.eipcp.net/correspondence/11963408…
excerpt:
It’s not that experiments in forms and models of sociability are not needed today – they certainly are. But to be politically relevant and effective, such experiments need to be grounded in (or at least actively linked to) social movements and struggles. (And there is no social progress without contestation and struggle: this for us is a basic materialist truth that makes any blanket refusal of “conflict” problematic.) As a gallery-based game, relational practices are cut off by an institutional divide from those who could use them. Who are the consumers of relational art? The cultural élite of the dominant classes, primarily, supplemented by the socially ambitious layers of a de-classed general public – the “culture vultures” and would-be cultural élite who form the crowds passing through the big biennials and exhibitions. (And this is a very different demographic from those marginalized communities whose members are sometimes enlisted for roles in relational works, such as those by Superflex or Marjetica Potrc.) In general, this audience does not tend to overlap with the people actively attempting to generate pressure for deep social change. There are exceptions, we know. But this is how the disruptive utopian energies that do exist in relational art are managed and kept within tolerable limits: the social separations, stratifications and (self-)selections of the art system enact a liberalization – that is, a de-radicalization – of social desire.
