Aesthetic Autonomy and Interdisciplinarity: A Response to Bourriaud’s ‘Relational Aesthetic.’

“Whatever might be the specific type of economic circuits they lie within, artistic practices are not ‘exceptions’ to other practices. They represent and reconfigure the distribution of these activities.” (Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 2004)

As a response to Nicolas Bourriaud’s theory of relational aesthetics, this paper follows three paths. First, it will trace how previous aesthetic philosophies, both Kantian and Marxist, inform the theory of art ventured in the text Relational Aesthetics. Second, Bourriaud’s claim that a relational aesthetic nurtures properly democratic social bonds will be analysed from a critical perspective. This bears on one of Bourriaud’s central propositions, that there has been a turn in art since the 1990s towards the invention of alternative “models of sociability” to those mandated by the media spectacle and informational networks of post-industrial capitalism. The final section of the paper will address Mark Dion’s work, Tate Thames Dig (1999), commissioned by what is now the Tate Britain Gallery. While Bourriaud situates Dion’s interdisciplinary practice within a relational aesthetic, I will argue that it departs from his account of the political significance of this trend in contemporary art.

Toni Ross, School of Art History and Theory, College of Fine Arts UNSW