Arty Party

Hal Foster

• Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud, translated by Matthew Copeland
  Les Presses du réel, 128 pp, €9.00, March 2002, ISBN 2 84066 060 1
• Postproduction by Nicolas Bourriaud, translated by Jeanine Herman
  Lukas and Sternberg, 88 pp, US $19.00, October 2001, ISBN 0 9711193 0 9
• Interviews: Volume I by Hans Ulrich Obrist
  Charta, 967 pp, US $60.00, June 2003, ISBN 88 8158 431 X

In an art gallery over the last decade you might have happened on one of the following. A room empty except for a stack of identical sheets of paper – white, sky-blue, or printed with a simple image of an unmade bed or birds in flight – or a mound of identical sweets wrapped in brilliant coloured foil, the sweets, like the paper, free for the taking. Or a space where office contents were dumped in the exhibition area, and a couple of pots of Thai food were on offer to visitors puzzled enough to linger, eat and talk. Or a scattering of bulletin boards, drawing tables and discussion platforms, some dotted with information about a famous person from the past (Erasmus Darwin or Robert McNamara), as though a documentary script were in the making or a history seminar had just finished. Or, finally, a kiosk cobbled together from plastic and plywood, and filled, like a homemade study-shrine, with images and texts devoted to a particular artist, writer or philosopher (Léger, Carver or Deleuze). Such works, which fall somewhere between a public installation, an obscure performance and a private archive, can also be found outside art galleries, rendering them even more difficult to decipher in aesthetic terms. They can nonetheless be taken to indicate a distinctive turn in recent art. In play in the first two examples – works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres and by Rirkrit Tiravanija – is a notion of art as an ephemeral offering, a precarious gift (as opposed to an accredited painting or sculpture); and in the second two instances (by Liam Gillick and by Thomas Hirschhorn), a notion of art as an informal probing into a specific figure or event in history or politics, fiction or philosophy. Although each type of work can be tagged with a theoretical pedigree (in the first case, ‘the gift’ as seen by Marcel Mauss, say, or in the second ‘discursive practice’ according to Michel Foucault), the abstract concept is transformed into a literal space of operations, a pragmatic way of making and showing, talking and being.

Vol. 25 No. 23 · 4 December 2003 » Hal Foster » Arty Party (print version)
Pages 21-22 | 2670 words