In a convulsing world with dwindling digital spaces for connection, can Relational Art offer lessons on building community and meaning?
Relational Aesthetics
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An Art Wedding Full of Strangers
CHICAGO — A passerby looking through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Conaway Center in Chicago’s South Loop last Friday night would have assumed she was witnessing a wedding.
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Philippe Parreno, Relational Puppetmaster
PARIS — My long encounter with Philippe Parreno’s vast but fey exposition Anywhere, Anywhere, Out Of The World was anything but otherworldly.
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Art for Ordinary People?
BRIGHTON, UK — Under normal circumstances, art doesn’t come with a manual. But at a new show in Southwark, London, visitors soon find circumstances are not so normal.
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Feeling Unengaged at Carsten Höller’s New Museum Playground
There has been a fair amount of buzz surrounding Carsten Höller. His “mid-career” retrospective/whole building takeover of the New Museum opened last week. Determined to see for myself, I wandered into the space last Friday with a relatively open mind. My only previous knowledge of the artist was from his installation of slides in the massive turbine hall at the Tate Modern in London a couple of years ago. His installation there was pretty well received. Though I never saw it in person, it is easy to imagine how the installation fits into the Tate’s turbine hall shtick. Like Olafur Eliasson’s sun, or Ai Weiwei’s field of sunflower seeds, Höller’s slides were engaging and dramatic. They served as an anti-pretentious pallet cleanser, a preparatory shot of courage before heading into the art-soaked wilderness of that museum.
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Can Art Replace Therapy?
Welcome to New York City’s newest treatment center. You pay fifteen dollars to enter a desolate concrete basement filled with men and women in lab coats. They hand you pillows to sit on and advise you to close your eyes and visualize your problems, to later be treated by an assortment of self-improvement exercises. Mexican artist Pedro Reyes is the Gestalt and Marxist-influenced mastermind behind this mental ward, and he’s here to solve all your city-induced psychological stress.
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Absence as Food Art
Last Wednesday April 6, Hyperallergic LABS Tumblr editor Janelle Grace and I attended a press preview for a collaboration between artist Paul Ramirez-Jonas and Park Avenue Spring chef Kevin Lasko called Plus One, hosted at the restaurant and presented by Creative Time Consulting. The resulting event was a mix of inspiring flavor combinations, symbolic food choices and a dash of relational aesthetics engagement with dining as experience. Delicious, but also aesthetically thought provoking. Here are both of our takes on the event, plus a photo essay. Bon appetit!
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WTF is… Relational Aesthetics?
The standard cliché summary of modern (and contemporary) art is that now, anything is art. Jackson Pollock threw paint around. Duchamp strung up a shovel, upended a bike wheel into a stool, put a urinal on a pedestal and called the resulting three “sculptures” art of the highest order. After so long, we’ve started to run out of things to suddenly deem “art.” But relational aesthetics, or the posing of an artist-constructed social experiences as art making, is the latest step in this process of turning everything into art.