Public Relations - Nicolas Bourriaud - Interview

ArtForum, April, 2001 by Bennett Simpson

BS: "Culture as communication" is a long-standing idea from social anthropology, cybernetics, and semiotics. Culture is always a mediating set of relations. Are these artists doing anything besides pushing at an open door? How is the model of the DJ any different from the familiar models of postmodern pastiche or the tired avant-gardisms of the bricoleur?

NB: I think quotation is no longer an operative value. Quotation only submits one's work to the authority of History and its "masters." A DJ doesn't "quote," per se. He or she wanders into History and uses previous works according to his or her own needs. This method might be similar to past ones, but the set of values that organizes it has changed: Nobody cares anymore about signatures as authority markers, we now live in a cultural space of increasingly fluid circulations of signs.

BS: If art relies on the same rhetoric of interactive experience and connectivity as commercial culture, can it expect to be received any differently? Does it forfeit its capacity to be distinct? One wants to maintain some specificity.

NB: Commerce, trading, the market, is a much more important metaphor for art than we like to believe. For my part, I tend to think well of metaphors of commerce and trading. In early civilization, the trader or the merchant was always bringing things from outside culture, from other cultures, into the market at the center of the city. Traders disrupted things, they brought disharmony, difference, new objects and ideas. It's no coincidence that art is dealing with this complex at this point. We have a global culture, dominated by exchange. The problem arises when the market becomes abstract, when you feel that you can have no control over it. This abstraction of the market is something that artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija and Sylvie Fleury and Gabriel Orozco address in very specific ways.

BS: Of course, the '90s also saw the rise of new media and digital art. Do you see a relationship between this and the more "traditional" kinds of interactive art practice you mention above? Does the former make the latter seem anachronistic?

NB: The indirectness of this correspondence is very important to consider when you think about art's relation to technology. Think about the beginnings of photography. Photography started as something very documentary and academic when it tried to be artistic. The first photographs were still lifes or portraits. This new technique of representation only began to get interesting with the advent of Impressionism. Photography allowed Impressionism to exist, but totally indirectly, by creating a new frame of thought: Suddenly, it was possible to use light, luminous impact, to define forms and represent reality. Today, the way that the Internet changes our frame of mind is not only felt on the Web. Most Internet art is superacademic at this point. At the same time, indirectly, this new technology is what has allowed a Rirkrit Tiravanija to think the way he does.

Bennett Simpson is a writer based in New York.