Public Relations - Nicolas Bourriaud - Interview

ArtForum, April, 2001 by Bennett Simpson

NB: Relational aesthetics tries to decode or understand the type of relations to the viewer produced by the work of art. Minimalism addressed the question of the viewer's participation in phenomenological terms. The art of the '90s addresses it in terms of use. Tiravanija once quoted this sentence from Wittgenstein: "Don't look for the meaning of things, look for their use." One is not in front of an object anymore but included in the process of its construction.

BS: When you first began to write about relational aesthetics in 1995, you were looking at a group of artists that had been responding to a very depressed market and to a field quite open, if painfully so, to self-examination and self-critique. A lot has changed since then in terms of the market, the economy, and the commercialization of culture. How has your project evolved in response to these changes?

NB: The fact is that the early-'90s crisis in the art market was in many ways a stroke of good luck. Galleries and institutions opened up to unsalable and immaterial kinds of art practice, to projects they would not have considered five years before. Of course, one fears that these artists may have transformed themselves under the pressure of the market into a kind of merchandising of relations and experience. The question we might raise today is, Connecting people, creating interactive, communicative experience: What for? What does the new kind of contact produce? If you forget the "what for?" I'm afraid you're left with simple Nokia art--producing interpersonal relations for their own sake and never addressing their political aspects.

BS: It's easy to be cynical about the idea of relationality and connectivity because we heard it so often in the rhetoric of the dot-coms. Do you really think '90s artists had an answer to the "What for?"?

NB: Because many artists in the '90s dealt with or used some of the crasser aspects of capitalism--Maurizio Cattelan renting his space at the '93 Venice Biennale, Jason Rhoades working from a Ferrari--the question of motivation is confusing. But I think that there's no point in trying to hide behind a romantic or heroic notion of the artist. In my upcoming book Post-Production, the idea is that art has definitively reached the tertiary sector--the service industry--and that art's current function is to deal with things that were created elsewhere, to recycle and duplicate culture. Art production now indexes the service industry and immaterial economy more than heavy industry (as it did with Minimalism). Artists provide access to certain regions of the visible, and the objects they make become more and more secondary. They don't really "create" anymore, they reorganize. There are two dominant figures in today's culture: the DJ and the programmer. Both deal with things that are already produced. The common poin t between relational aesthetics and Post-Production is this idea that to communicate or have relations with other people, you need tools. Culture is this box of tools.