Relational aesthetics: Critical culture

What is the nature of social critique in art that has been associated with Relational Aesthetics? This paper will consider the work of artists such as Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Hirschorn against the backdrop of Nicholas Bourriaud's theories. These cultural producers articulate a specific "generational" attitude towards art and criticism that dispenses with models offered by an older generation of left-wing thinking propagated by groups like the Frankfurt School. Instead, these artists and thinkers begin with Debord's "Society of the Spectacle" and depend on a poststructuralist generation of theorists such as Deleuze and his relational paradigms. In this context, it is of interest to assess what kind of social criticality emerges from this art and discourse, and how effective it is given the nature of the corporate global market and its well established career paths.

Mark Pennings, Visual Arts, Queensland University of Technology