[spectre] NEW RELATION-ALITIES: Seminar at Iaspis 25.2

[Bettina Pehrsson]

NEW RELATION-ALITIES
- a  seminar about the crux concerning relational and interactive art
 
Saturday 25 February 2006
  2-7 pm
Iaspis, Project Studio
Jakobsgatan 27, 4th floor
 
A seminar about art focussing on social relations and working from a 
critical and theoretical perspective in order to decode and understand 
what types of relations with the viewer an artwork produces. What are 
the relations created between art, institutions and the public? What 
linguistic means of expressions are obtainable when trying to find 
adequate terms for all of these forms of relations? Participants: 
Gardar Eide Einarsson, artist (Oslo/New York), Alex Farquharson, critic 
and curator (London) and Nina Möntmann, critic and curator (Hamburg).
 
One of the recent decades most influential– and disputed – trends in 
contemporary art is the so called relational aesthetics. In the book 
Esthétique relationelle (1998), the curator and critic Nicolas 
Bourriaud defines certain contemporary artworks as „an attempt to 
create relationships between people over and above institutionalised 
relational forms“, something that has been widely discussed, recently 
in a delayed, but intense reception in the UK and US. Despite the fact 
that the notion of relational aesthetics was originally coined to 
discuss works by certain artists, it has become a catch phrase 
carelessly used for any artwork with an interactive and/or socially 
related dimension. Recent years’ relational tendencies, which often 
depart from the model Bourriaud advanced, include interventionist and 
off-site projects, discursive and pedagogical models, neo-activist 
strategies, and increasingly functionalist approaches (e.g. 
art/architecture collaborative groups).
 
The seminar aims at comparing and discussing several relational and 
participatory approaches, methods commonly used in the arts in Sweden 
as well as the rest of Scandinavia. What are the similarities? Where do 
they diverge? Is it perhaps necessary to come up with new, more 
appropriate, terms in order to be able to discuss a wide variety of 
practices, which nevertheless are related to one another? How can an 
analysis of these approaches serve for the art created today? How is 
the relationality of artworks and art institutions to their publics 
affected by the increasing corporatisation of art institutions, with 
the demand for populist programming and visitor figures as the prior 
measurement for success?
 
 
RSVP: at at iaspis.com
For more information please contact Ann Traber, at at iaspis.com , +46 
(0)8 402 35 76 or visit our website www.iaspis.com