Nicolas Bourriaud's Concept Of Relational Aesthetics

The term ‘Relational aesthetics’ was first mentioned in the catalog for Traffic, an exhibition curated by Nicolas Bourriaud that took place at the CAPC contemporary museum, Bordeaux in 1995. The exhibition however, was not well received amongst many critics who did not either understand or agree with Bourriards concept of Relational aesthetics, seeing it as quite a vague concept. Writer and Curator Carl Freedman 's article for frieze magazine was less than complimentary towards Bourriaud 's exhibition stating ‘’Traffic’ and Bourriaud’s concept of ‘relationality’ were just too unspecific to be capable of defining a new art, especially when so many of the works did little to support the exhibition’s premise. This was an ambitiously funded exhibition

Becoming widely known through the publishing of his book Relational Aesthetics in 1998, Bourriaud defines the concept 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. (pg. 113)’ that is to say that relational aesthetic works tended to be a break from the traditional social and physical space of the gallery and the artists secluded workshop or studio. Relational aesthetics uses life as it lived and the social environment in its entirety as the subject, rather than an attempt to represent an object that has been removed from daily life to an independent space, much like a ‘Dutch Baroque still life’, for instance. Differing from earlier aesthetic models that seek to recreate human culture in its entirety, directed by ‘aesthetic ideals’ (a romanticised view seeming to have persisted much in postmodern theory) relational aesthetics refers to ‘learning to inhabit the world in a better way’ in contrast to commonly ‘escaping’ the social structure that shapes our lives, the artists are to work with the ‘given real’ and within ‘the realm of human interaction and its social context’. In Bourriaud’s text he states relational art “strives to achieve modest connections, open up (one or two) obstructed passages, and connect

To some readers such ‘relational aesthetics’will sound like a truly final end of art, to be celebrated or decried. For others it will seem to aestheticize the nicer procedures of our service economy (‘invitations, casting sessions, meetings, convivial and user-friendly areas, appointments’). There is the further suspicion that, for all its discursivity, ‘relational aesthetics’ might be sucked up in the general movement for a ‘post-critical’ culture – an art and architecture, cinema and literature ‘after