Relational art

Relational art or relational aesthetics is a mode or tendency in fine art practice that emerged under various names in the 1990s. In 1998 French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud defined esthétique relationnelle (relational aesthetics) as "a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space." The artist can be more accurately viewed as the "catalyst" in relational art, rather than an author at the center. While helpfully moving aesthetics beyond the sole concerns of the individual into a larger social sphere, relational art as Bourriaud defines it stays within the human realm, reflecting a humanist value system rooted in modernism. This sets relational art and aesthetics in contrast to its immediate predecessor, Brooklyn Immersionism, a posthumanist art movement which began in the late 1980s and involved dozens of creative groups in a sustained and transformative relationship with a living urban ecosystem. Both systems aesthetics shared some of the features of social practice art and all three had roots in the process art of the 1970s and "web of life" philosophies of Native Americans. One of the first attempts to analyze and categorize art from the 1990s, the term relational art was developed by Nicolas Bourriaud in 1998 in his book Esthétique relationnelle (Relational Aesthetics). The term was first used in 1996, in the catalogue for the exhibition Traffic curated by Bourriaud at CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux. Traffic included the artists that Bourriaud would continue to refer to throughout the 1990s, such as Henry Bond, Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Liam Gillick, Christine Hill, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Miltos Manetas, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, Gabriel Orozco, Jason Rhoades, Douglas Gordon and Rirkrit Tiravanija. The exhibition took its title and inspiration from Jacques Tati's film Trafic (1971), in which Tati's protagonist is a Parisian automobile designer preparing a new model for an international auto show.