Overview
This talk given by Dr Bill Roberts will return to the work of a loose, international group of artists that emerged in the 1990s in connection with curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of ‘relational aesthetics’. Encountering a diverse range of sculptures, installations and exhibitions produced during and since that decade by Jorge Pardo, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Liam Gillick and Rirkrit Tiravanija, the talk will explore the contested relationship between these artists’ practices and Bourriaud’s ideas.In particular, the talk will take issue with Bourriaud’s assertion (as well as the assumption of some of his critics) that the significance of this work is principally determined by the kinds of social relations that it variously ‘produces or prompts’ on the part of its spectators. Instead, we will explore the nuances of the artists’ engagements with design – especially with architecture and interior design – in order to suggest that a more subtle understanding of the politics of art, and an altogether more uncertain sense of art’s critical agency, lies at the heart of their practices.