relational art

This sets relational art and aesthetics in contrast to its immediate predecessor, Brooklyn Immersionism, a posthumanist art movement which began in the late 1980s and involved dozens of creative groups in a sustained and transformative relationship with a living urban ecosystem. Both systems aesthetics shared some of the features of social practice art and all three had roots in the process art of the 1970s and "web of life" philosophies of Native Americans.

One of the first attempts to analyze and categorize art from the 1990s, the term relational art was developed by Nicolas Bourriaud in 1998 in his book Esthétique relationnelle (Relational Aesthetics). The term was first used in 1996, in the catalogue for the exhibition Traffic curated by Bourriaud at CAPC musée d'art contemporain de Bordeaux. Traffic included the artists that Bourriaud would continue to refer to throughout the 1990s, such as Henry Bond, Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Liam Gillick, Christine Hill, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Miltos Manetas, Jorge Pardo, Philippe Parreno, Gabriel Orozco, Jason Rhoades, Douglas Gordon and Rirkrit Tiravanija. The exhibition took its title and inspiration from Jacques Tati's film Trafic (1971), in which Tati's protagonist is a Parisian automobile designer preparing a new model for an international auto show. In a dénouement that became a fundamental relational aesthetics strategy, particularly for Tiravanija, Tati's entire film is about the designer's journey to the auto show at which he arrives just in time for the show to close.

Bourriaud explores the notion of relational aesthetics through examples of what he calls relational art. According to Bourriaud, relational art encompasses "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." The artwork creates a social environment in which people come together to participate in a shared activity. Bourriaud claims "the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever scale chosen by the artist." Robert Stam, the head of new media and film studies at New York University, coined a term for the shared activity group: witnessing publics. Witnessing publics are "that loose collection of individuals, constituted by and through the media, acting as observers of injustices that might otherwise go unreported or unanswered." The meaning of relational art is created when arts perception is altered while leaving the original artifact intact. In relational art, the audience is envisaged as a community. Rather than the artwork being an encounter between a viewer and an object, relational art produces encounters between people. Through these encounters, meaning is elaborated collectively, rather than in the space of individual consumption.

In 2002, Bourriaud curated an exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute, Touch: Relational Art from the 1990s to Now, "an exploration of the interactive works of a new generation of artists." Exhibited artists included Angela Bulloch, Liam Gillick, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jens Haaning, Philippe Parreno, Gillian Wearing and Andrea Zittel. Critic Chris Cobb suggests that Bourriaud's "snapshot" of 1990s art is a confirmation of the term (and idea) of relational art, while illustrating "different forms of social interaction as art that deal fundamentally with issues regarding public and private space." In 2008, Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector organized an exhibition with most of the artists associated with Relational Aesthetics, but the term itself was shelved in favor of calling the show Theanyspacewhatever. The exhibition included stalwarts Bulloch, Gillick, Gonzalez-Foerster, Höller, Huyghe, and Tiravanija, along with loosely affiliated artists Maurizio Cattelan, Douglas Gordon, Jorge Pardo, and Andrea Zittel. The LUMA Foundation has presented many artists associated with Relational Aesthetics.