Artists and interactivity: Fun or funambulist? Regina Cornwell

In an essay first published four years ago, I expressed my concern about how interactive works by artists seem to come closer and closer to video games, encouraged by our postmodern climate.1 Contemporary art had already begun to move toward fun and entertainment, with the tacit consent of the art community. The interactive computer work aspiring toward art, yet allied to computer games, was seeking respectability and a home, asking to be let in the doors of museums and galleries. Yet, even more than the rest of contemporary art, it seemed a more obvious, even blatant gamester and funster, and often with fewer pretensions, whose very high-tech paraphernalia, could bewilder, overwhelm, and even alter the institutions it sought to woo and infiltrate.

The situation today?

Susan Sontag provides the perfect catalyst for a critical look. Interviewed about her work as a novelist, she spoke of what she called her project: "...to produce food for the mind, for the senses, for the heart. To keep language alive. To keep alive the idea of seriousness. You have to be a member of a capitalist society in the late 20th century to understand that seriousness itself could be in question."2

Pit this against "fun" which, three decades ago meant harmless and innocent pleasure and enjoyment, but now moves through our culture like a non-indigenous weed, strangling the native flora. (Substitute intelligence for flora, and we have reduced the native intelligence needed for seriousness).

I am suggesting that in the USA in the last four years, fun has enlarged its domain, even further stamping out seriousness where and when it can. Education is one place. Here "edutainment" is produced in the form of computer software. Looking at the educational market, The New York Times posed a telling question in its business section recently: "What could it mean when the master salesman of Sonic the Hedgehog [Thomas Kalinske, former president of Sega of America] takes the top job at a company set up to create and buy companies that sell educational technology?"3

Publishing is another. Amid lamentations of a poor summer for book sales, Michael Naumann, new CEO of Henry Holt and Co., made an oddly revealing remark: "'I don't think that the readership is shrinking....There was a time when Le Carré was new or Márquez was new. Where are the Hemingways? What can you say when a No. 1 book is by a basketball player?'"4

Disneyfication is a big part of the picture. Even the makers of Mickey, Minnie, and more recently Pocahontas and The Hunchback of Notre Dame have bought their way into New York City to participate in a sanitized fun-filled Forty-Second Street, a far cry from the sleaze-filled days, now only the theme of "Nostalgia de la boue."5 Television's tendency to make dramas and soap operas out of news events and to trivialize and sentimentalize and cheapen these and others, overburdens us with examples in a world where fun and market-share are bedfellows.

The art world has largely acquiesced to the general postmodern cultural agreement that "lite and eze" is preferred, when not best. More and more, galleries and museums have extended themselves to every manner of installation and spatial transformation, making in recent years the spadework of Marcel Duchamp look very foreign, quite tame at best, rent from its history and raison d'etre. It is difficult not to see certain relatively recent museum and gallery activities as twisted forms of fun aimed to please -- not disturb or bother or displease or cause a middle class audience to think -- or else art world versions of identity searches where solipsism seems to rein.

In an art world where clever and of-the-moment novelty, pastiche, a back bend to incorporate the mundane are part of the fun offering, the serious has very little, if any, room. This is the situation as I see it today, four years after my earlier ruminations. Does interactive work, enforced by the association with the computer game and because it requires some kind of rapport with audiences, fall into a trap and simply aid the cultural climate of fun, somehow automatically operating against seriousness?

In the New York 1995-96 season, interactivity found some presence in three commercial galleries, a public art show, the Guggenheim Museum in SoHo, and even Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, while a number of New York-based institutions have sites on the World Wide Web where artists can display their wares. The exhibitions included numerous monitors with mouse or joy stick companions with predictable scenarios modeled after games, media critiques, pick and choose menus, screen savers, surveillance themes, permutations on design exercises, as well as a virtual reality piece.6

Collectively, the exhibitions summarize what is wrong with this picture. Fun again is even more pertinent: especially when we realize that it seems derived from the Middle English, meaning "to trick." Indeed, one felt tricked, looking at the Guggenheim Museum SoHo with Mediascape (14 June - 15 September 1996) as well as with The Brain Opera, (23 July - 3 August), part of Lincoln Center Festival 96. Both are a measure of the serious problems involved with making and exhibiting such work.

After five months the Guggenheim Museum SoHo reopened its doors with Mediascape, aided by a very generous (amount undisclosed) infusion of funding from Deutsche Telekom for renovation and expansion of its building, as well as for support for this and future art and technology exhibitions.7 As part of the company's public relations strategy in its bid for a share of the American telecommunications market, its infusion was apparently large enough to move the museum to name four of its gallery spaces The Deutsche Telekom Galleries, prompting one reviewer to note that this marks the first time galleries in a major New York art museum have been dedicated to corporate donors.8

This startling observation makes one hesitate and ponder very carefully Guggenheim director Thomas Krens' statement: "The only way museums can consistently develop and present multimedia and high-technology exhibitions is through collaborations with organizations like Deutsche Telekom which have a broad range of resources and expertise."9 Mediascape, also represented the first in a program of cooperative efforts between the Guggenheim and ZKM (Zentrum Für Kunst und Medientechnologie/Center for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe, Germany, with 10 of the 14 works by 10 artists, either owned or produced by the latter. Before the exhibition's opening, speculations abounded on just how state of the art and cutting edge Mediascape might be. Cutting edge, it certainly was not. Finally the show was billed as "comprehensive" of new and existing technologies. Most were video installations, leaving only three interactive pieces, one each by Jeffrey Shaw, Bill Seaman, and Toshio Iwai.

In terms of comprehensiveness, the choices are puzzling. Why a 1969-70 Nauman but not an early Paik? And were there more video installations than interactive computer works created by artists included because they have a longer history? As there were so few interactive works, one still has to ask, why these? There are certainly historical reasons for including Shaw's Legible City, 1988-91. Now nearly a decade old in the short span of artists' involvement with interactivity, Shaw's work, with its use of a bicycle as interface, shunned the standard computer interfaces, striking at the dreaded mind/body split so popular a topic in academic discussions about technology. Can we find historical niches for the other two? It goes without saying that Iwai's Piano -- As Image Media, 1995 pleases crowds of all ages. But instead of this, wouldn't one of his computerized para-cinematic devices have made a significant and thoughtful statement provoking connections between cinema and the computer while still pleasing a diverse audience? With a random word selector at the heart of his Passage Sets/One Pulls Pivots at the Tip of the Tongue, 1994-95, Seaman is engaged with language, in combination with still and moving imagery and sound, for a play with audio-visual poetry. In thinking about popular culture and the struggles of the early cinema, historically one could make an analogy between Seaman's poetic concerns in using the computer today and the way early film borrowed from the novel and 19th century melodrama to give it respectability and the status of art. While I have suggested historical context here in terms of the three artists working with interactivity, Mediascape lacked both history and any sense of context. Perhaps certain works were not owned by ZKM, the partner institution for the show, and the institutional collector/producer of note in this field. Or perhaps comprehensiveness simply meant completeness or thoroughness in terms of ZKM's role.

One felt tricked, let down by Mediascape. Trickery aside, much more significantly, in fact, it was the kind of exhibit that ultimately does more harm than good. Reviewers assigned to cover this type of show may be totally indisposed to such work, moreover even if they are favorably inclined, they may not have enough knowledge to understand the difference between video works and those driven by a computer in which the computer plays an active part in the display process. Looking at computer-driven interactive projects as just an extension of video, profoundly misunderstands the shift which takes place and the radical differences between the two. Aimed at neither substance nor ideas, ruled by arbitrariness and spectacle, devoid of history and context, an exhibit like Mediascape only confuses issues, and those predisposed to dislike it in the first place are only confirmed in their prejudices.

Although Tod Machover's Brain Opera is called an interactive musical event, I include it here because it is also billed as a highly interactive artistic event, has serious intellectual goals and ambitions, and was given its world premiere at another prime New York cultural showcase, Lincoln Center. It premiered in Europe at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, in September 1996, and is slated for venues in South America and the Far East. Brain Opera was produced at the MIT Media Lab with a quoted cost of over $4.5 million from multi-national co-producing sources. To begin, the audience wanders through the visual "Part I: Mind Forest" and plays at hyper-instruments, and some of their input is programmed into a performance of Brain Opera which follows. "We are empowering people to make music," I overheard a Brain Opera staff guide [read: enabler] say as she encouraged her questioner to touch and play in the "Mind Forest" -- also referred to in the program notes as "the giant musical brain." A cliché runs rampant among certain computer types, namely, the belief that to make art involving the computer they must compensate for the machine's logic and mathematics by creating organic forms. Yet it is precisely this which drives Brain Opera. The fun house biomorphism only charges up the already New Age atmosphere. The very elements which are supposed to enrich a diverse public's involvement -- the touch, wave, feel, shout, press interactivity -- are precisely what feed into its low and often already simplistic expectation of what interactivity is. [One music reviewer summed it up: "As a whole, Brain Opera is an early lapse of taste in the enlightened Lincoln Center Festival programming."10 That applies especially to its interactive visual side.] Its intellectual seriousness got lost in the hyper-gear and turned into just more fun.

+++++++

Pausing a moment, and looking back, there are valuable lessons to be absorbed and applied by those involved with interactive art, and the teacher is a surprising one. It is Minimal Art of the 1960s because of its uses of technology and the paradoxes resulting.

The ways in which Minimalism eschewed the emphasis on the artist's hand, the work as one of a kind and therefore unique, are now history. Moving away from the autonomy of the art work, especially the preciousness with which modernist painting was being considered, it favored the series and the serial work. Artists gave buyers plans as a condition of purchase of a piece which could later be refabricated. Fiberglass, aluminum, styrofoam, and other new industrial materials replaced wood, bronze and other tried and true ones. The monumental scale, the industrial look, the theatricality all created shifts in how viewers approached such work. Minimalism involved, as Robert Morris described it, taking relationships "out of the work" to "make them a function of space, light, and the viewer's field of vision.'"11 At the same time that technology allowed Minimalism to critique, dissect and even discard certain traditions, it also and finally brought itself and its work closer to corporate culture, to mass production, and to consumerism.12

If the contradictions are apparent with Minimalism and its uses of industrial technologies, they are blindingly obvious with interactivity and the computer and the pursuit of a place in the art world. Yet, they are not being played through or acted out to any authentic extend as real cultural and economic contradictions the way they were with Minimalism.

The first thing to notice is that art and culture pause long over computer games and are seduced by them. But the computer owes so much of its development to the military -- the inspiration and also sources for large percentages of games -- at the same time the computer became a perfect fit for business, which, as it developed historically, picked up new methods for organizing and more machines with which to do so, the computer the most useful yet.13 If we shift from the fun of games with their overt or covert messages about power, speed, command and control to those same messages delivered for expediency and with urgency by the military and to the efficiency of the office work place and the various heritages in consumer culture, are art and culture ready to squarely face this complex mosaic? Such art must confront both the historical contradictions of its technology's family history and the history of art, while asking questions about what the computer really is, what computer interactivity as art actually is and may become, and what it can do. Can it be programmed to perform as the black sheep?

These crucial contradictions are ignored when art institutions exhibit what is clearly entertainment. Often such entertainment masquerades as critique of games, popular culture, and consumerism, but fails, and simply looks like a poor substitute for what it was intended to take to task.

There are several paths. Yes, art can push aside the computer as much as possible, and suffer the risk of losing touch with culture and becoming marginalized and irrelevant. Or, artists and the art world can continue to see no difference between the computer and tradition-bound media. But if the computer is treated merely like an easier video display or a faster way to create paintings or its interactivity is viewed as a new version of Pavlovian response through the joystick or mouse, then art and culture have misunderstood both the computer and interactivity. In this script, the computer functions as a dumb tool to emulate high art or to move itself further and further to the everyday, to fun, to eradicate its differences from both entertainment and from everyday life. It is this last that we see all too frequently today.

But, isn't it reasonable to expect that the computer will bring about major changes in the ways that art is thought about, made, and experienced? Fine pictures, clever interfaces, don't address the dynamics and complexity of the computer. Interactivity offers the possibility for a new art paradigm. But that can only happen when artists stop and deal with the computer as something other than just an extension of another medium and more than an automobile in automatic drive. Yes, it can be extraordinarily expensive to work with. Yes, it isn't about making unique objects, so that, more than Minimal Art, it forces questions.

Concerning the museum, Rosalind Krauss proposes a dismal answer for the future coming out of her analysis of Minimalism:

And it also does not stretch the imagination too much to realize that this industrialized museum will have much more in common with other industrialized areas of leisure -- Disneyland say -- than it will with the older, preindustrial museum. Thus it will be dealing with mass markets, rather than art markets, and with simulacral experience rather than aesthetic immediacy.14

And she is far from addressing computer-related work here. We see her prediction already unfolding in many art museums. So how and where can this new kind of art be exhibited to engage with the contradictions and not simply acquiesce as the "lite and eze" fun on display?

As for artists, must they be thought of and begin to think of themselves in a different way? How will artists make a living in the expensive economy of such work where there are no longer originals? Who will begin such a dialogue, asking questions, looking at these truly complex issues?

Searching for answers means real changes in the rules of the games. Given the way the art world today holds on to the ordinary, even the mediocre, Duchamp offers a counter-model for artists in the field of interactivity. He was the consummate game player of chess and art for whom time and concentration are keys. Duchamp took time in his art making and demanded amply of the viewers' time in experiencing so much of his work. Time, duration, complexity, concentration are allies of seriousness. To investigate what the computer is and why it is different, to act on these differences, and to face the contradictions inherent in embracing the computer in our culture, while speaking to that culture, is one way of addressing art, ideas and seriousness in the late 20th century. Duchamp was a funambulist -- a tightrope walker -- balancing language and imagery full of puns and irony, a player and a worker. Artists in the interactive field must learn to master the tightrope which computer technology dares them to do in a fun-filled and contentious world in order to keep seriousness alive.



Footnotes (click on number to go back to place in the text)

1. 'Interactive Art and the Video Game: Separating the Siblings' in Videonale 5, Bonner Kunstverein, 1992, pp. 32-44. (Exhibition catalogue. In English with German translation.) Reprinted in Camerawork, Spring/Summer 1993, pp. 10- 13.

2. Leslie Gans, 'Susan Sontag Finds Romance'in The New York Times Magazine, 2 August 1992, p.43. I used this quotation in my earlier article, 'Interactive Art and the Video Game.'

3. Denise Caruso, Technology'in The New York Times, 29 July 1996, p.D5.

4. Doreen Carvajal, 'The Summer of No Reading' in The New York Times, 1 August 1996, p.D7.

5. Herbert Muschamp, 'Nostalgia Tripping in Times Square' The New York Times, Sunday Arts and Leisure, 25 August 1996, p.H36. On the same page, Muschamp writes: 'Where have they gone, the chicken hawks and stiletto knife displays, the peep show shills, pickpockets, coke heads, wines, pimps and tramps? We had a world class gutter here. Must we trade it in for a shopping strip of chain retail outlets?' And further. 'The transformation of Times Square from a notorious vice zone into a year-round 'Babes in Toyland' is shocking, no doubt intentionally so. What better way to signal that the clean-up of the square, Pursued in vain for so many years, is finally coming to fruition? But the pre- Freudian view of childhood now on view is less than fully urban.'

6. For a discussion on an exhibition held last spring at Postmasters Gallery, New York, called Can You Digit?, with a mention of an autumn 1995 show at the Ricco/Maresca Gallery; see my 'Can you Digit?' online at TalkBack!, Issue no.2, located at: http://talkback.lehman.cuny.edu/tb. Also I mention a public art exhibition here in my catalogue essay. It was Art in the Anchorage, held summer 1996. I refer to it here because it involved electronic forms exclusively, including video and work with computers, though only one artist used interactivity.

7. The Italian Electric Company, ENEL, ("the second largest power company in the world for power installed and the third largest in terms of electric power billings" according to its press release, while Deutsche Telekom is "Europe's largest telecommunications company and the third-largest carrier in the world," according to its release. )also opened two modest but "striking" permanent gallery spaces, on the ground floor of the Guggenheim, one housing a VR gallery with ENEL's own productions about art and architecture to be experienced in cybergear, the other, the ENEL Electronic Reading Room equipped with "CD-ROM stations." Each space represents a Roman designer's idea of what high tech should look like; somehow they got crossed between a corporate tradeshow floor and Buck Rogers ready to strike. ENEL, in collaboration with the Guggenheim, will produce CD-ROM's about exhibits and the collection as well supporting artists working in areas of new technology. One CD-ROM on the 1994 exhibition, The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968, was already made in collaboration with ENEL.

8. Roberta Smith, 'Art Review. A Museum's Metamorphosis: The Virtual Arcade' in The New York Times, 18 June 1996, p.C15.

9. Quoted from a joint press release of the Guggenheim Museum and Deutsche Telekom, 10 April 1996, no. 739, pp.1-2.

10. Alex Ross, 'Festival Review/Music Composers Wanted, No Experience Needed', in The New York Times, 25 July 1996, p.Cl6.

11. From 'Notes on Sculpture', in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art, Dutton, New York, 1968, quoted in Rosalind Krauss, 'The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum' in October, no.54 (Fall, 1990), p.8.

12. See Krauss' very helpful discussion of the museum and Minimalism in the issue of October cited above which I use here. And, while there is no room for discussion here, as she points out, Minimalism also quite unintentionally helped prepare the way for the postmodern fragmentation of the subject. (p. 12)

13. See Steven Lobar, InfoCulture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions, Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1993. See the chapter called 'Information Before Computers', pp.285-309, for a discussion of the development of business methodologies and machines leading up to the computer and how predisposed business was to it.

14. Krauss, Ibid pp.16-17.



copyright 1996 Regina Cornwell and Barbican Art Gallery. Do not reproduce without permission.

Originally published in the book: Brown, Carol and Beryl Graham (Eds.) (1996) Serious Games. London: Barbican Art Gallery/Tyne and Wear Museums. ISBN: 0 946372 35 7

copied from: http://www.newmedia.sunderland.ac.uk/serious/other/rcessay.htm

What is netart ;-)? Joachim Blank

The text below is a contribution to an exhibition and
congress called " (History of) Mailart in Eastern Europe" at
the Staatliches Museum Schwerin (Germany) 1996

by Joachim Blank, Internationale Stadt Berlin

------- What is netart ;-)?

The "Internet myth" is the result of a massive
self-referentiality of our media landscape. Unlimited
communication in a yet unknown conglomerate made of
machines, cables and people. The exclusive networld of
cyberpunks, scientists and artists has been superseded by
the thirst for information of the industrialized mass
consumption. Nevertheless, the cultural "stylistic howlers"
of communication in data networks continue to exist not only
in the underground.

Artistic projects, strategy projects, discussion forums and
autonomous network structures within the vast Internet, but
remote from the glossy, dust-free surfaces, show interesting
beginnings for an alternative use of this medium.

--- Netart vs. Art on the Net ---

The art market has discovered the net for the distribution
of art. It uses the net to promote art just like ordinary
companies. Gallerists, museums and other art brokers provide
information about their artists, exhibitions and events. For
them, the net is nothing more than a big telephone book in
which they too want to (have to) be represented.

However, netart differs from art on the net. Art on the net
is mostly nothing more than the documentation of art which
is not created on the net, but rather outside it and, in
terms of content, does not establish any relationship to the
net. Netart functions only on the net and picks out the net
or the "netmyth" as a theme. It often deals with structural
concepts: A group or an individual designs a system that can
be expanded by other people. Along with that is the idea
that the collaboration of a number of people will become the
condition for the development of an overall system. netart
projects without the participation of external persons are
perhaps interesting concepts, but they do not manifest
themselves as a collective creativity in the net (Dieter
Daniels, http://www.hgb-lepzig.de/theorie/mailart.htm). The
idea is fundamental, but dubious without media-specific
translation and without participation of other people. For
all netart projects there is a retraceable starting point,
an author, so to speak. Nevertheless, what develops from one
idea of one single artist with the collaboration of many
others, is incalculable. Like the incentive of gambling,
here too the openness, the curiosity about an imaginary end,
the exciting challenge of taking part in such projects. And
that with a medium like Internet, which makes a direct form
of intervention possible at the same time on different
levels of communication (text, sound, picture, motion
picture, real time).


--- Approaches to a Typology of netart ---

There are different manifestations of netart on the
Internet. Common to them all is the extension of
communications networks, that is to say, logical networks
within the physically existing telecommunications systems.
In the process two different approaches come to light:

1. Context Systems

Context systems like "The Thing", "t0", "Internationale
Stadt " a.o. go back to the idea of developing perceptible
claims for artistic-cultural activities on the net, and to
do this not as an individual, but as a collective group
projects.

Independent structural projects form a context, an art
platform for non-commercial netactivities of the most
diverse kind. Infrastructures of these kinds are mostly in
the hands of the operators themselves, with their own
projects and subject matter; they are users of their own
structure. That is ultimately also the motivation, to invest
a lot of energy in building up of such structures.

The motivation to build up Internet infrastructures goes
back to the interdependent relationship of providers and
sponsors who enable artists access to the net. Parking
oneself at a commercial Internet provider has a high price:

Commercial Internet providers use artists projects to attain
higher viewing figures and use them for advertising.
Moreover, the space for technically creative experiments is
most often limited. For the system administrators make the
final judgement for all netprojects. They decide what is
technically realizable and what is desirable in the
interests of netoperators. For that reason artists opt to
work with their own capital so that they do not have to fall
back on borrowed funds.

The intention of these context systems is the development of
communities. Real as well as virtual communities are
developed only by way of identification with the system
visible in the net and its operator groups, well-knowing
that at the same time every active user can become a
perceptible component. In this sense, viewed hierarchically,
the structure-giver and active users are on the same level.
Of course, comparisons with the relation between curator and
artist, or gallery and artist, or museum and artist come to
mind. In this case the art institutions have little model
function as art brokers, but the net as a free medium of
distribution does. Unlike the mass media, the Internet has
developed its popularity through the awareness of a constant
give and take of its users. The expression of networks,
namely to form a processual platform of communication and
information, can with respect to context systems be summed
up in two short formulas: structure=content and net=art.


Exemplary Projects:

The Thing New York (http://www.thing.net/thingnyc) The Thing
Vienna (http://www.thing.at) International City Federation
(http://www.icf.de) desk.nl (http://www.desk.nl) Obsolete
(http://www.obsolete.com) Public Netbase
(http://www.tO.or.at) Ludmilla (http://www.kud-fp.si) etc.


2. Researchers, Troublemakers, Individual Perpetrators

Unlike context systems, individual netartists or groups in
the net operate without having to take into account the
visitors on the Web sites or the limits of the
medium."Service" is the last thing on their minds. The
Internet as a new medium is the tool of artistic projects.
Often it has less to do with the Internet itself and more
with the desires, hopes and aversions which a networked
world arouses among so many people. Here the permanent
online existence of a future communications society is now
being put to the test. Catchwords like dislocation,
identity, truth, belief, reality, territory which have
become popular by way of the net are being taken up by net
Artists and often radically processed. Here it is not so
much a matter of the clarification of such terms as it is a
matter of artistic interventions leading to confusions among
virtual visitors.

Netart does not have a tight visual language. It behaves
rather like a chameleon. It is caught up in a constant
process, reacting quickly and sensitively to changes. Netart
itself may be short-lived too. For the Internet is a medium
which is continuously in movement. Never before in history
has the way of a medium from the time of implementation to
the massive dissemination been so short as in the case of
the Internet.

If one observes the visual appearance of a lot of
conventional Web sites somewhat more exactly over a longer
period of time one may ascertain a "state of the art" in the
design. What is conspicuous, for example, are the smoothed,
shadowy icons and images. The underlain shadows suggest that
the user is being produced on the monitor by way of the
shadows and that it is the user who is beaming instead of
the monitor. There is a series of other such creative
features that recur on a number of Web sites. One seldom
sees deliberate deviations, for most of the Web sites are
trying to sell products, and exotic interface ideas should
not keep from "clicking." Netartists as researchers of
perception are free enough to look after such phenomena.
Everything that allows an escape from the young, but
tediously styled WWW is experimented with, from the Web
sites in black and white to the complete abandonment of
design. Netartists are investigating the conventions of the
net and its virtual visitors by exceeding them.

Even the hypertext inherent in the WWW is contextualized.
Many dispense with hyperlinks right from the start, others
use them in such an exaggerated way that any orientation is
lost.

So-called "fake" projects are also very popular. Netartists
try to park themselves with them in other art territories
without being exposed. For that they copy creative elements
of a particular communications context and transfer them to
their own projects. Products are offered that can never
possibly exist, services are promised which no one can
possibly keep. Lying is therefore explicitly allowed. In
this way believers, unsuspecting surfers can become a
component of a netart project. Through such projects,
fundamental questions are raised about truth, the
credibility of the exchange of information in a
media-dominated society. Netartists are experimenting with
the belief in the progress of techno culture and are working
with its material - information and communication. They are
using metaphors from the real world, pseudo-individualizing
software and playing with the vanity of their virtual
visitors.

The Internet as a mirror of a neo-liberal capitalism is an
extremely interesting experimental layout, full of
inspiration for artists, hackers and other field reseachers.


Exemplary Projects:

http://www.hgb-leipzig.de/livesource/elive.htm
http://www.jodi.org http://www.irational.org
http://www.icf.de/neonurlaub http://namespace.autono.net


above text is copied from: http://www.irational.org/cern/netart.txt

Sentences on Littoral Art, Bruce Barber

1) Littoral describes the intermediate and shifting zone between the sea and the land and refers metaphorically to cultural projects that are undertaken predominantly outside of the conventional contexts of the institutionalized artworld.
2) Littoral projects are lifeworld affirming as opposed to system reproducing. Littoral Artists work between the private realm and the public sphere.
3) Littoral Artists recognise their position as political subjects and act accordingly.
4) Social actions may (re)produce cultural judgments.
5) Cultural interventions may lead toward social change.
6) Public, community based art is essentially political.
7) The political positions that artists adopt should be followed ethically.
8) Littoral artists acknowledge Marx's injunction in his 11th Thesis on Feuerbach that it is not up to "philosophers (artists) to simply interpret (represent) the world; the point is to change it."
9) In Littoral art projects social interactions should be co-ordinated with less emphasis on egocentric calculations of success for each individual and more through co-operative achievements of understanding among participants.
10) Social and cultural actions can be strategic, exemplary, instrumental or communicative. Communicative actions attempt to lessen provocation and encourage dialogue. They are the result of the conjoining of theory and practice into a political praxis.
11) In Littoral Art projects no one individual should assumed absolute control of the communicative process; rather it should be, in the best sense possible, participatory and democratic.
12) Public art projects are aimed at stimulating dialogue and participation within a specific community to engender (or engineer) conscientization, and possibly, social change.
13) The interaction between marginal groups, and their integration in such projects can lead to extraordinary results in which artistic, social and environmental objectives overlap.
14) Littoral art helps to stimulate dialogue and elevate the standards of conversation between different communities and disciplines whose paths would normally not cross.
15) The littoral artist may use any form and employ any materials, techniques or procedures to reach his/her objectives.
16) Littoralist art is more about giving than taking.
17) Within littoralist art practice, donative art strategies extend the language of the altruistic gift into a more politically efficacious education about the nature of gift giving and reciprocity.
18) Littoral artists acknowledge their debt to history and respond positively to successful models presented by the historical avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes of the more recent past.
19) Littoral art projects can provide a powerful incentive for social integration as opposed to individual competition.
20) Littoral art can provide an alternative to capital accumulation and power as an indicator of success.
21) Political correctness cannot rescue a bad idea. It is difficult to subvert a politically correct position.
22) Littoral projects may become art if they are concerned with art and enter the fields of discourse associated with art theory and criticism.
23) Some successful littoral projects may begin from a position of naivete.
24) Surveillance is a form of control. Observational techniques represent methods of social control.
25) Littoral artists should attempt to understand the affects of their actions and interventions in the public sphere and learn from their mistakes.
26) Artists may perceive the littoralist projects of others to be better than their own, but they should strive to approximate success at every level of their social engagement.
27) Littoral projects may engage directly with an institution.
28) Once the immediate objectives of the project are established, the course of events should be allowed to unfold organically. There may be many side effects that the artist cannot imagine or control. These may be used to stimulate and/or assist the development of new work.
29) The process is social and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.
30) There are many elements involved in a littoralist project. The most important may not be the most obvious.
31) It the artist uses the same methodology in a group of projects but changes the techniques and materials, one would assume that the artist's work privileged the method.
32) Banal ideas cannot be rescued by privileging the aesthetic values that may reside in the work.
33) It is difficult to bungle a good littoral project.
34) When an artist displays his/her craft too well, it may result in the loss of the social importance of the work.
35) These sentences comment on littoral art but are not art.

copied from: http://www.imageandtext.org.nz/bruce_sentences.html

Littoralist Art Practice and Communicative Action, by Bruce Barber

Habermas Seminar Discussion Paper & Khyber Lecture Series
March 20/28 1996


Littoralist Art Practice and Communicative Action(1)

Since the turn to autonomy, art has striven mightily to mirror one basic aesthetic experience, the increasing decentration of subjectivity. It occurs as the subject leaves the spatio-temporal structures of everyday life behind, freeing itself from the conventions of everyday perception, of purposive behaviours, and of the imperatives of work and utility. (Habermas,1990:17)
The theme of the gift, of freedom and obligation in the gift, of generosity and self-interest in giving, reappear in our own society like the resurrection of a dominant motif long forgotten. (Mauss,1924,1967:66)

Within the politically progressive arts of the postmodern era, strategies of taking, quoting, appropriating, have usually assumed greater currency than those of giving, donating and providing. Within the past few years (2) however, the practice of giving seems to have become more readily appreciated as a modus operandi for producing ethical, socially responsive and politically efficacious art. In this essay I will argue that as a specific form of littoral art practice (3) - the art of giving, and its associated `modalities'- conform in many ways to what the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas could acknowledge as forms of communicative action, aimed at the progressive de-colonisation of the life world, and even perhaps, the inauguration of what Habermas idealised as "the good and the true life."

In the first section of this essay, I will discuss several examples of littoralist art practice that have occurred within several international contexts, including Halifax, during the past three years. (4) I will interpolate the discussion with some points on the conditions of giving and the relationships between this form of cultural work, social commitment, engaged art practice and tendency, or tendenzkunst, the implicit ground for the critical negotiation of this kind of art as normative, and not therefore, radical political practice. These are terms with an extensive intellectual legacy that have challenged many artists, philosophers, art theorists and critics, beginning with Marx and Engel's famous critiques in The Holy Family (1845, of Ferdinand de Lasalle's historical drama Franz von Sickingen (1859) and Eugene Sue's The Mysteries of Paris. (5) Acknowledging the political problematics of some of these art works, I will attempt to establish a claim for considering them as practical examples of Habermas' theory of communicative action, in action. I hope that this brief discussion of littoralist art practice and its theoretical implications will contribute to the various inter-related topics of the Habermas Seminar and the Khyber Lecture series: criticism, the public sphere, communicative action, the decolonisation of the life world, education, postmodernity, reason, morality, ethics and democracy.

***

From his earliest essays of the 1960's and early 1970's, Jurgen Habermas' views on the role of art in the transformation of society have remained somewhat opaque, yet not, I will argue, underdeveloped. He affirmed that art, along with philosophy, law, politics and economics, is an important terrain for mediation, communicative rationality and pragmatic action, yet he is somewhat ambivalent about the extent to which this can occur in an institution which the forces of an increasingly technocratic and bureaucratic modernity have rendered into increasing autonomy from the life world. As a Kantian, he has remained somewhat resolute in his defence of the separation of pure and practical reason from aesthetic judgement.

In modern societies, the spheres of science, morality, and law have crystalized around these forms of argumentation (instrumental reason). The corresponding cultural systems of action administer problem solving capacities in a way similar to that in which the enterprises of art and literature administer capacities for world disclosure. (Habermas,1987:207)

It is clear from this statement, which he employed in his extended critique of Derrida's purported collapsing of the genre distinction between literature and philosophy, that while Habermas views art and culture generally as an important locus for theoretical attention, he maintains a boundary between the forms of communicative action which can operate within the spheres of political, legal or philosophical discourse, and those that can occur within the fields of art and literature. For Habermas art remains at the level of representation, distanced from the material reality and "spatio-temporal structures" of the life world, and as such, can not be considered as ideal a site as is language - or rather speech - for the deployment of communicative action.

I believe that the origins of Habermas's somewhat ambivalent position on the function of art in the transformation of society can be found in his essay "Consciousness-Raising or Redemptive criticism - the Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin", which appeared before the publication in 1973 of his famous Legitimation Crisis (Legitimationsprobleme im Spatkapitalismus). In this essay, Habermas counterposes the differing aesthetic positions of Herbert Marcuse and Walter Benjamin, two of his intellectual mentors, in what he suggested, somewhat later, was an attempt to revise the theoretical assumptions within critical theory; an attempt to link a contemporary theory of communication based upon a Gadamerian hermeneutic philosophy with historical materialism, and this, in order to provide a truly comprehensive theory of society and the process(es) of societal evolution. In his Benjamin essay, published in German in 1972, and subsequently in English as a contribution to a special New German Critique issue on Benjamin (No 17: Spring 1979), he traces and contrasts the theoretical positions of these two important members (6) of the Franfurt School, brilliantly articulating the differences between Marcuse's activist and Benjamin's redemptive criticism. In Benjamin he finds (or projects) an endorsement of his own mistrust of conventional Marxist political categories and processes - class, class struggle, the labour theory of value, and the function of revolution in order to achieve social change - and an early affirmation of the possibilities of commmunicative action grounded in critical reason. But with the historical knowledge of the Second World War and the Holocaust, which was denied to Benjamin, Habermas is forced to contemplate the limitations of trust in mutual understanding and consensus formation between individuals, social groups and nation states.

A theory of linguistic communication that wants to reclaim Benjamin's insights for a materialist theory of social evolution would have to consider together two Benjaminian propositions. I am thinking of the assertion: "that there is a sphere of human agreement that is non-violent to the extent that it is wholly inaccesssible to violence: the true sphere of `mutual understanding',language. (R:289) And I am thinking of the warning that belongs here: "Pessimism all along the line. Absolutely.... but above all mistrust, mistrust and again mistrust in all mutual understanding reached between classes, nations, individuals. And unlimited trust only in I.G. Farben and the peaceful perfection of the Luftwaffe" (R., 191). (Habermas: 1972:59) (7)

Taking from one of his key intellectual mentors these somewhat contradictory cues, and others less contradictory, from Adorno -"after Auschwitz, poetry is impossible" - Habermas recognised, at this early stage in the development of his communication theory, the inherent problematic of a communicative action that did not offer the possibility of its own (dialectical) transformation. And though his Frankfurt School inspired system/lifeworld paradigm could adequately describe the instrumental logic behind the progressive development of administrative bureaucratisation and the economic forces driving the conflict(s) between the system and the lifeworld (8), communicative actions, wrongly used, could have, as Benjamin himself understood, wholly undesirable consequences.

With Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse, Habermas does see an important place for art as a critical mediating agent in the decolonising process; however, how art could, or should mediate is less clear. If Science, philosophy and art are thoroughly institutionalised and subjected to increasing ideological incursion by the legitimating practices of the state, how can any one `sphere' become the privileged site for communicative action? The issue now, he writes in 1983 "is how to overcome the isolation of science, morals and art and their respective expert cultures" (1983,90:19), and return them to the pubic sphere. By the early 1980's it seemed as if Habermas is beginning to heed Marx's injunction in his 11th thesis on Feuerbach - that it was not up to philsophers "to simply interpret the world - the point is to change it." By this time Habermas had fully articulated the restrictions wrought upon life world activities by the hegemony of expert cultures and their rarefied exclusive esoteric languages. However his own work as a philosopher still remained somewhat distanced from that very life world which he so wished to protect.

I agree, somewhat, with Terry Eagleton's opinion, that as an academic Habermas is "aloofly remote from the sphere of political action" but that his work as an intellectual represents a "political strike for the life-world against administrative rationality." Eagleton also generously admits that:

...art itself is for Habermas one crucial place where the jeopardized resources of moral and affective life may be crystalized; and in the critical discussion of such art, a kind of shadowy public sphere may be re-established, and so mediating between the separate Kantian spheres of the cognitive, moral and aesthetic. (Eagleton, 1990:4020.
This essay represents an attempt to match Habermas's theory of communicative action with some "crystalized" examples of littoralist art practice.

My first example of littoralist art practice as communicative action, is presented in the collaborative work of an Austrian based group of artists, whose activities to date have been identified by titles that simply represent the length of time they spend working on each project, for example, 6, 8 or 11 Wochen Klausure (6, 8 or 11 Weeks of Enclosure). Encouraged in the summer of 1993 by project co-ordinator Austrian art critic Wolfgang Zinggl, a group of eight artists (9) used the existing social infra-structure of the Wiener Secession, a famous exhibition hall for contemporary art in Vienna, "to work on the problem of homelessness." (10) Through a series of informal discussions with individuals and various groups, including homeless people, representatives from government and social agencies, they discovered that a major problem for the Viennese homeless was that they did not have access to medical care, the result of not being officially registered for health insurance. Over the course of several days of round table discussions, the artists decided to raise funds to purchase a bus that was remodeled into a multi-purpose ambulance. The group also lobbied the local government to provide a physician to work with the bus and subsequently the overall management of the ambulance was taken over by the Caritas organisation. Since its inception the medical health service has provided medical aid for more than 500 homeless people a month, people who previously had no access whatsoever to health care. The group also discovered from their discussions with the homeless that they had no place to store or protect their personal belongings. As a response the group of artists arranged for some 200 lockers to be provided at various shelters throughout the city. Through ongoing dialogue with various government and social agencies the 11 Wochen Klausur group also developed a communication system which would prevent unfair evictions of tenants from their rental accommodations. They have since established a pilot system for two Viennese districts.

In Switzerland eight months later, at the Zurich Shedhalle, an exhibition gallery for contemporary art, the group, with a few new members, tackled a another social topic - the city's drug problem, reputed to be one of the worst in Europe, and a source of growing embarrassment for the Swiss government. After several months of intense research into the issues they realised that the problem was exacerbated by what they called "the highly superficial, meaningless and politically overburdened discussion of the issue." (11) Their response was to arrange daily "boat talks" which took place over several hours on Zurich Lake. Small groups of four specialists each representing the spheres of business, politics, human rights organisations, medicine social work, including some of the drug addicts themselves, met over the course of eight weeks (8 Wochen Klausur). Each of the groups discussed various aspects of the drug problem. Away from their various institutional and administrative contexts, minute takers, file systems, and in a genial context with coffee, fresh air and a view, the groups were able to have relatively open discussions about the drug problem and how best to respond to it. According to members of the 8 Wochen Klausur group, the atmosphere on the boat trips encouraged the `specialists' to articulate positions that would have been difficult or impossible to communicate within their highly administered institutional environments. In this new context they could minimise, or erase the conflicts which had developed between their various institutions and expert communities, and challenge prevailing attitudes, bothin a reasonable and ethically responsible manner. Over the course of several weeks some sixty representatives from various political and business constituencies met, including the chairmen of all the Swiss political parties, two senior prosecutors, police superintendents from several Swiss regions, members of privately and publicly funded relief organisations, business, church groups, social volunteers, and the chief editors of the Swiss print media.

The discussions on the boat lead to the formation of an enhanced needle exchange initiative, and resulted in a lessening of spectacular news coverage and the "othering" of drug addicts which typically takes place in the media on a regular basis. The discussions also resulted in a plan to institute a boarding house for drug addicted prostitutes and other long term initiatives. In a short time the artists' group realised the raising of 100.000 for the boarding house, but when they attempted to integrate it into a neighbourhood, a demonstration lead to a withdrawal of the plan. According to Katharina Lenz, one of the members of the group, the next round of discussions will involve more inviduals from the projected neighbourhood site for the boarding house.

A third project in Italy involved a small village 90 km north of Rome. After consulting the local newspapers from the previous ten years, consulting with municipal authorities and different groups of village inhabitants, one third of whom were over 65, they decided to focus upon the development of a recreational facility for seniors. Using a novel method of fund raising the group provided a centre with some basic equipment, bar with refrigeration, dishwasher, etc. They started a photographic event which had people pay a nominal fee to be photographed in front of a large painting of the town. Through this action the local population indirectly financed the bar. In addition the group arranged for the recuperation of a "centrally located but incorrectly constructed and therefore abandoned boccia field." The recuperation of this important facet of rural Italian social life was obtained through the development of a contract with a large scale wine producer, the initiation of export connections and sales within Austria which netted a small net profit that was then channeled into the reconstruction of the boccia court.

How do these `art' actions conform to Habermas' theory of communicative action? Habermas distinguishes between strategic, instrumental and communicative actions. The distinction he says between actions that are oriented toward success and those toward understanding is crucial.

I speak of communicative actions when social interactions are co-ordinated not through the egocentric calculations of success of every individual but through co-operative achievements of understanding among participants. (Habermas in Thompson and Held 1982:264)
and elsewhere he writes,
Whereas in strategic action one actor seeks to influence the behaviour of another by means of the threat of sanctions or the prospect of gratification in order to cause the interaction to continue as the first actor desires, in communicative action one actor seeks rationally to motivate another by relying on the illocutionary binding/bonding effect (Bindungseffekt) of the offer contained in the speech act (Habermas, 1990:58)
In this and other collaborative projects undertaken by the Austrian group Habermas's pre-requisites for communicative action, as opposed to strategic action, were respected. For instance at the outset in this and other projects, no agendas or goals were established, neither were outcomes predicted by any members of the group, including the group facilitator, Wolfgang Zinggl. Rather, the group employed a method of on-going dialogue with provisional consensus taking at appropriate points in the process, in order to exercise a modicum of control over the resulting plans and initiatives. (12) No one individual assumed control of the process; rather i was, in the best sense possible, participatory and democratic.

Co-operations, the International Program of Art & The Environment based in Luxembourg has had some extraordinary success in developing new modes of communication between expert communities. Their programme encourages the development of multifaceted interdisciplinary projects in which artists, social workers, psychologists, landscape architects and members of marginal groups - the mentally and physically challenged - have co-operated to create new ways of responding to the environment. "The interaction with marginal groups, and their integration in such projects has led to extraordinary results in which artistic, social and environmental `objectives' overlap"(Brochure 1995). One of Cooperations most successful projects has been the redesign and building of an extraordinary garden in Wiltz.

Similarly, the Argentinian artist group Ala Plastica, an NGO (non-government organisation) established in 1991, has promoted various environmental projects, recycling programs and educational initiatives. These include the recuperation of degraded spaces in La Plata Zoo and the transformation of these into public spaces for the environmental education of school children. Since their founding, Ala Plastica have used collaborative methods to develop proposals for improving the life quality of municipal provincial and "cultural organisms", education, and urban waste management. Members of the group are represented on the Environmental Advisory Council of Buenos Aires State and La Plata City hall. They have also established co-operative agreements on environmental education with La Plata National University.

Over a decade ago Peter Dunn and Lorraine Leeson formed the Art of Change group in London as a visual arts and design organisation concerned with issues of relating to the transformation of the urban environment. They have spent the last decade working with communities in London's east end. West meets East was realised as a collaboration with a class of Bengali girls in an east London school. Working with the girls, the artists explored themes relating cultural difference in a large photo textile mural containing both English and Bengali text and images.

Art Link, formed in 1992 and based in Donegal, Ireland, works collaboratively on public art projects of various kinds aimed at stimulating dialogue and participation within the community. They have worked with the Buncrana Environmental group (BEG) and the Donegal Clean Waters Association on issues relating to environmental education, air and water conservation. An English group, Platform founded in 1983 has been working on year long community projects involving performances in peoples' private homes. They construct forums for the discussion of radical social ideas such as their recent quest to find and reopen some of London's historic 18th century waterways, now obliterated by roads and buildings. They maintain links with labour groups and various organisations such as Greenpeace, Common Ground and the Free International University.

The Hirsch Farm Project is probably the purist example of communicative action in action. Based in a rural context in Northbrook Illinois, the HFP is described as "an arts based think tank concerned with public art, the environment and community" that brings together individuals from a wide range of disciplines to meet in camera for a period of a week to discuss specific topics and sub-topics. Their project titled "Non-spectacle and the Limitations of Popular Opinion" expanded upon results obtained from a 1991 (MUD) and 1992 Pressure on the Public programmes which examined "the dynamics of how artists and other professionals communicate with a specified audience or community, and how these intentions are received" (13) Each participant in HFP `focus groups' develops a proposal or essay that reflects or responds to the conversations generated during the week long discussion sessions, and this results in a publication that is distributed to individuals and organisations in the arts, sciences and humanities. According to Laurie Winter, a co-ordinator the goals of HFP are to "stimulate dialogue and elevate the standards of conversation between different communities and disciplines whose paths would normally not cross."

Other littoral artists and artists groups include Fine Rats International, Dogs of Heaven, Cultural Transmissions Network, Prgetto Cuspide (Venice), Locus+ (Newcastle), Ocean Earth (NYC), protoplast (Basel), Projects environment (Lancashire), Synapse, Sydney Australia, Whaur extremes meet (Scotland), Suzanne lacy, Group Material, Conrad Atkinson, Karl Beveridge and Carole Conde, Helen and Newton Harrison. These are just a few of the many groups and individuals outside of Halifax who are producing what can be called littoralist art.

The next examples of littoralist art are from Halifax, the first an exhibition entitled, appropriately enough for these economically depressed times, Food Bank. This exhibition by Nova Scotia artist, Kelly Lycan, was installed during the first two weeks of December 1994, at the newly founded artist run Khyber Arts Centre in Halifax. As the title suggests Food Bank was "an exhibition with the function of gathering and offering food." Several weeks before the exhibit a notice was sent out to members of the Halifax community with instructions on how to participate in the exhibition together with a number of blank card tags. Participants were requested to write a favourite recipe or two on the cards and to describe their occupation in the space provided. The artist offered to pick up the recipe tags and participants' donations for the Metro Halifax Food Bank. The food donations and recipes could also be deposited by December 1st in a drop box in the vestibule of Kelly Lycan's apartment building on Morris Street. The announcement card stated that the recipes would be placed on the gallery wall for others to see and exchange. People were invited to bring food to the exhibition and to choose a recipe from the rear wall display to take home with them. Lycan's intention was to initiate what she called "a circular gift." People who took the recipes could cook them for friends, thus passing on what the artist referred to as "the gift of food." At the gallery the packaged food items were arranged in a square on the floor, bounded by an elegant gold line. On the wall adjacent, the recipe cards were hung on hooks, and on the other adjoining wall, a service line control ticket tape machine, such as those found in super markets or government agencies, provided numbers for the participants. A notice informed the participants that the number which they received from the ticket tape machine corresponded with a recipe card which they could take home. At the conclusion of the exhibit the collected food was delivered to the Metro Food Bank and distributed to its users.

Lycan's Food Bank engages a number of critical issues relating to the value of art, productive labour, the politics of reciprocity and what we can term the political economy of giving. (14) Many of the participants identified humbly with the actual needs of food bank users by providing cheap and easy to produce recipes. The reciprocal and participatory form of the work which obliged gallery goers to give food and take a ticket in order to collect a recipe, encouraged the donors' identification of themselves as potential food bank users. They were not encouraged to choose any recipe which they desired. Instead, they were required to donate food and then take a ticket and line up as they would for the food bank itself. Some donors recognised that their privileged status as food donor rather than food bank recipient (or `client' as some bureaucratic agencies emphemistically call them) was transitory, thus reinforcing sociological studies which reveal that the majority of givers are often barely able to make ends meet, and occasionally have been aid recipients themselves. Many donors took the opportunity to produce their best recipe for exhibition which they decorated artfully on the card. Others presented their favourite creative alterations of famous staple/comfort foods for the impoverished such as macaroni dinner and tomato soup. Many realised upon entering the exhibit, that they had engaged in a collaborative process, in which they too became exhibitors, where donors became recipients and where exhibition value was transformed conveniently into use value. Discussions about the meaning and value of the work took place informally both inside and outside of the gallery context throughout the two week exhibit.

The end result of Lycan's exhibition was not simply the donation of food to the local food bank, although, this to be sure was one important aim, but also the critical engagement of the Food Bank participants into various aspects of the labour process, including the acknowledgment of the important ideological relationships between social class (here indicated by occupation), and cultural consumption. Food Bank encouraged the negotiation of the conditions of the purchase of food items, of cooking, creating recipes, exchanging and consuming food as forms of "cultural capital" (Bourdieu, 1977, 1984). Lycan's project questioned the terms of market value, exchange versus giving, altruism and giving as a necessary and obligatory component of receiving. Her exhibition reinforced the reciprocal nature of giving and the critique of capitalism so eloquently expressed in French sociologist Marcel Mauss' seminal study The Gift (1924),that since its publication, has become the foundation for many subsequent studies on the socio-cultural characteristics of giving by Mauss's followers and critics, among them Claude Levi Strauss and more recently, Pierre Bourdieu. Forty years before the introduction of the computer and the inauguration of the so-called "information age", and now, the putative, "age without work", Mauss wrote:

It is only our Western societies that quite recently turned man into an economic animal. But we are not yet all animals of the same species. In both lower and upper classes pure irrational expenditure is in current practice. Homo oeconomicus is not behind us, but before (us), like the moral man, the man of duty, the scientific man and the reasonable man. For a long time man was something quite different; and it is not so long now since he became a machine - a calculating machine.(Mauss, 1924:74)
With the exception of the negative gloss on reason, these are probably sentiments with which Habermas himself could identify.
In her discussion of Food Bank Lycan refers to Mauss and one of his more recent disciples, Lewis Hyde, whose book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, she acknowledges, has provided some of the key theoretical underpinnings of her work, such as her negotiation of the complex relationships between the gift and capital. She agrees with Mauss and Hyde that the "gift should move" and moreover - an important point- that givers should not capitalise upon their giving. Hyde interprets the `spirit' of gift exchange as an "erotic commerce" (xiv). In this he acknowledges the influence of anthropologist Marshall Sahlin's Stone Age Economics (1972), a rereading and insertion of Mauss's interpretation of the potlatch, prestation, and various other forms of reciprocal giving and exchange into the context of a political philsophy, liberal humanism. Hyde argues that various models of creative giving, and the gift itself, are not only a means toward critically renegotiating property and capital, but also of formally renouncing the profit motive, acquisitiveness and selfishness as the primary motors of social life within capitalist society. Yet, he acknowledges also the implicit refutation of his humanism, and suggests as a possible antidote to his positive pronouncements on the social panacea of giving, the somewhat more pessimistic essays by Garrett Hardin (1968) and Millard Schumaker (1980), who discuss the limits of altruism and the problem of giving, obligation and reciprocity in an increasingly secular, individualistic, administered and technological society.

Lycan's work does not employ democratic discussion as a key element in her project as in the Austrian work and that of others discussed above.I would argue however, that it also conforms to Habermas' prescription for communicative action by privileging the use of critical reason and the bonding/binding of participants throughout.

The next examples initiate a similar critical negotiation of the political economy of giving, the socio-cultural significance and politics of food distribution, and, implicity, international aid. The Empty Bowls project initiated by ceramists Lisa Blackburn and John Hartom of Franklin, Michigan, began in 1990 with a simple idea; ceramic artists, teachers, students and others would make some bowls, then invite some friends for a meal of soup and bread (or rice or ice cream), convivial discussion and possibly music. In exchange for the bowl and the meal, the guest was asked (but not expected) to donate $10.00 or more to a hunger organisation chosen by the sponsors of the meal. Their promotional material provides details on three primary objectives for the Empty Bowls project; the first, "to raise as much money as possible to feed hungry people in the U.S. and abroad"; second, to engage people in hunger awareness and education, and third, art education. "The language of art", they suggest in a romantic passage, "circumvents the boundaries of all other languages to touch our souls. We feel through creativity we can create positive social change." (Blackburn and Hartom 1990:2)

According to their literature, the original Empty Bowl project was timed to coincide with International Food Day, October 16th 1991, an annual event based upon the founding on that date in 1945 of FAO, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. Blackburn and Hartom encouraged what they called "a high level of integrity for the project." In order to achieve this ideal, they wrote, Empty Bowls is a project of inclusion, cutting across social, political, racial, religious, age and any other perceived boundaries to join us all in working towards a common goal"(1990:2). Since their project was initiated many groups throughout the U.S. and further afield (as far away as New Zealand), have used this model to successfully plan and undertake fund raisers and education programmes for local food banks and non-governmental world hunger relief organisations.

Using the successful model established by Hartom and Blackburn, a group in Halifax last year established their own Empty Bowl initiative, renaming it the Hungry Bowls Project. Members of a Ceramics tableware class at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design lead by instructor Walter Ostrom of NSCAD negotiated with several restaurants in the Halifax metropolitan area to donate tureens of soup to the NSCAD Cafeteria venue. Participants purchased tickets for $12.00 each and two days before the event they were sold out. A ticket provided the bearer with a bowl of gourmet soup and several helpings of bread. In addition they could take home the hand crafted bowl which had been created for this purpose by students and faculty of the Ceramics Department. The event raised over $2400 for the local Metro Food Bank and garnered much media attention. The organisers structured a similar event this year and plan to make this an annual event.

Hungry Bowls is more of a do good, feel good project than the Lycan example discussed earlier, and it is certainly no frontal assault on the socially constructed and reproduced inequities within capitalist society. And yet its aim is similar, extending the language of the altruistic gift into a more politically efficacious education - communicative action - programme of the type endorsed by Blackburn and Hartom. Only upscale restaurants, where a bowl of soup would typically cost in the $5.00-$10.00 range, were requested to donate. The event was promoted in the press and on air as a focus for Food Bank donations from the general public and at the conclusion of the event, money rather than food was sent to the Food Bank, thus assisting it to reinforce its bulk purchasing capacity.

The next example is an international relief aid project developed by NSCAD Design Communications professor Michael LeBlanc, graduate student Sara-Marie Loupe, and TUNS (Technical University of Nova Scotia) Professor Michael Smedley. Last year the three developed a proposal to use digital photography to construct a computer database to reunite refugee families in Bosnia and Rwanda, both countries devastated by their recent and continuing conflicts, resulting in Rwanda, in the murder of hundreds of thousands, principally members of the Tutsi minority and Hutu intelligentia.

Titled loosely the Refugee Family Relocation Project, it began with Sara-Marie Loupe's concern for the plight of approximately 100,000 Rwandan refugee children separated from their families. After some preliminary work the Halifax group began collaborating on line with individuals at the California State Polytech at Pomona and a few NGO's in the U.S. Loupe pioneered the concept to develop a database which can be used in the field by those working directly with refugee populations. With the assistance of LeBlanc she developed the interface and graphics while Smedley used the designs for implementation on a Macintosh Powerbook. Sara-Marie Loupe was subsequently invited to Washington D.C. to meet with Joseph Mutabuba, the Rwandan Ambassador to the U.S., and was offered the opportunity to show the team's demonstration models to non-government aid agencies. Mutabuba reportedly said "If I had a database sitting on my desk right now, I could be getting families back together...I have people calling me every day looking for their families." (15) A Salt Lake City organisation dedicated to tracking unaccompanied children recently gave the group a grant to continue their research. The project organisers expect the system to be fully operational within one year. Given the continuing strife and dislocation of people in Rwanda this could not be too soon. Sara-Marie Loupe recently took her database model to Rwanda to undertake some field tests.

The next example is titled simply Giving part of an end of year Intermedia Area exhibition (Intermedia General (December 13-17, 1994),that final year BFA students arranged for NSCAD's Anna Leonowens Gallery. Gallery window posters and other promotion tools informed gallery visitors that during the duration of the exhibition and at certain times of the day, they could take advantage of the following free services: bicycle repairs, button sewing, telephone calls, letter writing, kids' crafts, hair cuts, "Alice's thoughts", and a reading. During the week of the exhibit many individuals took advantage of the free services, particularly the haircuts and bicycle repairs. The hair cutting service provided by Leah Miller, a graduating student specialising in tattoo art, was a major hit among the many cash strapped students who attended the exhibition. Upon graduating with her BFA in December 1994 Miller returned to her home town with the intention of continuing her artwork, and making a regular income at the same time, by starting a professional tattooing practice from a room in her parents' home. Toward the conclusion of the Giving exhibit, Andrew Mclaren, a professional cycle smith, a local competitive cyclist as well as a full-time art student, repaired Leah's bicycle in exchange for a haircut. Similar deals were struck throughout the week with non `exhibitors', thus mirroring in some senses the informal student economy as well as the extensive labour and services exchange (bartering)that characterise the informal economy in Cape Breton, one of the poorest regions within the province of Nova Scotia, with one of the highest unemployment rates (up to 50% in some areas), in Canada. While it is not unusual for students to exchange services as part of their "common culture" (Willis, 1992) it is somewhat unusual for them to provide services freely to anyone in a public gallery context as a performed art. This exhibition circumscribed the process of giving as an informal service economy - one that can benefit both giver and recipient - raising for discussion the socio-political issues of altruism, reciprocity and exchange. This exhibition demonstrated world disclosure at its best.

The final example, by young Halifax based artist Stephen Ellwood, bypassed the obligation, reciprocity problem altogether to give money directly to the needy. As part of an OO Gallery sponsored project, Ellwood sought and received donations from various individuals and sponsor groups and exchanged this money into nickels, some $300.00 worth. At an appointed time he then threw these into an awaiting crowd from the top of a building on Barrington Street, one of the main thoroughfares of downtown Halifax. This work encouraged much media attention and Ellwood even received criticism from a Reform Member of Parliament who feared that government (taxpayers') money, used to subsidise OO Gallery and other artist run centres, was being used irresponsibly.

Each of these examples encourage critical reflection upon the nature of community, the market economy, the underground or informal economy, the commodity status of the work of art, giving, obligation and reciprocity. The final example, Ellwood's action (16), could be described in conventional avant-garde terms as a blague, or more charitably perhaps as a type of a Scrooge action with its object the public renouncing or expiation of miserly guilt. Ellwood could also be the exemplary Robin Hood who extracts alms from the rich to distribute to the poor. Like Lycan's example, this work tests the meaning of altruism and questions the limits of giving (and taking) within late capitalist economy.

There are many theoretical implications for an engaged or committed cultural practice in each of these `artworks'. It is strange to even nominate them as art works when each engages some form of performed, participatory /communicative activity and there are no final objects - commodities -save the documentation of the event, to place in a permanent gallery context. In most of the examples and on one of more levels, labour is freely given and no compensation is expected or anticipated, except perhaps, for the cynic, art world cultural capital from essays such as this. It could be argued that one of the `works' - the Refugee project - exists outside of the art legitimating context altogether, and would thus have some difficulty assuming any conventional art label. The Rwandan Relief Project, is a computer design and international relief project rather than an artwork, even recognising the fact that two of its producers are designer/artists. To different degrees each of the examples described exist as cultural services. Within specialised art world discourse they could be framed within the so-called live art, performance art genres but perhaps they are better appreciated and understood as artist initiated examples of collaborative, operative, engaged or interventionist cultural practice, and, as I have attempted to suggest, examples of communicative action in action.

I would now like to shift register here somewhat to discuss further the theoretical and critical implications of giving in all of these projects. Giving is never a neutral or value free activity. There are always conditions, expectations, obligations attached, for both the giver and the recipient. To the most cynical, self-less giving, altruism - the regard for others as the ethical precondition for action - and philanthropy, do not exist. There are, it is presumed, always benefits which can be conferred upon the giver. To those cynics, the Christian axiom "it is better to give than receive," is often that - better! More benefits accrue to the giver than the recipient of the gift. Moreover, the gift implies that the giver has engaged in some virtuous activity which has some sort of redemptive value. In more secular terms, the gift promotes the elevation of self-esteem; sub-consciously, the giver thinks, "I want you to think better of me, to love and respect me for what I have given you." (17) The Christian gift - the offering - encourages members of a congregation to offer money as a propitiation of God, through the expiation of sin - the accumulation of wealth, usury. Like Max Weber's arguments concerning labour itself, this public act of atonement secures redemption for the faithful.

In Marxian terms altruism and philanthropy, within a capitalist economy, reproduces the moral superiority of those who have the power to give. Giving becomes a means toward assuming or reinforcing social power and existent hierarchies. However, there exists also within Marxism the contradictory nature of the gift that conflates needs and desires into a politically acceptable form. In Marx's writings the gift is subsumed materialistically under the acceptable socialist maxim "from each according to his/her ability...to each according to his/her need."

Conservatives are likely to argue that the various conventional types of giving, including welfare and foreign aid keeps the political order intact and the poor impoverished, that it reaffirms their poverty by sapping the recipients' initiative and will to develop. Giving, in these terms, promotes dependency and subordination. The whole business of giving in welfare and in forms of foreign aid have come under attack in recent years. Critics argue that welfare recipients should work for their money. Workfare programs now operate in many areas in the U.S. and are being contemplated in Alberta, Ontario and other Canadian provinces. Critics of international aid programmes argue that aid to third world countries reinforces under-development and responds merely to the symptoms of poverty and not the underlying cause. Aid to third world countries does not encourage the establishment of the necessary infra-structure to develop indigenous industries, neither does it promote community or national self-sufficiency. Development workers are cautioned with the examples of aid agency giving which has gone wrong - the water pump that was sent to irrigate the arid plain without the necessary back-ups for repair; the rubber thong factory which managed at full capacity to put cheap shoes on everyone's feet while it put the local shoemakers and repairers out of business.

Conservatives and even many leftists argue that without the altruistic concerns of liberal do-gooders, philanthropists, Christians, the Welfare State itself - members of the underclass, the lumpen proletariat - and whole populations of third world countries would be at the throats of their bourgeois and first world oppressors. In contrast to these somewhat jaundiced views however, there are many ways in which the art of giving can be said to represent politically efficacious practice, that is, socially responsive, ethically responsible activities, that achieve in small measure, their largely unstated claim to effect real change. This is especially the case, I believe, if each giving project is considered as part of a general process of education, or communicative action. I would argue that the `target' groups for each of the giving exhibits are different; that for the student Giving exhibit, giving was a service rendered implicitly for a service in kind; telephone someone and they may return your call, write someone a letter and they may reply, repair someone's bicycle and they may be able to give you a haircut in return. Ironically the student's giving and exchanging demonstrated the actual survival strategies that they may have to adopt upon graduation, particularly in this era of diminished expectations. The students giving strategies may have their corollary in the arenas of international aid. Despite many problems relating to the neo-colonial and imperialistic adventures of donor governments, the history of international aid projects demonstrates how the work of various agencies and institutions can provide the basic requirements for the building of international trust and co-operation, which are the cornerstones of development and self-sufficiency.

On a microcosmic scale, Ellwood's anarchic action argues for the redistribution of wealth in society, but warns also of the feeding frenzy when the containers of wealth are opened. His view of human nature is somewhat Hobbesian; that is, given the right opportunity greed will always assert itself. The money he threw disappeared in a matter of minutes, even when he pre-empted his own noon hour deadline by some thirty minutes. Some would say he had cold feet but the enraged members of the media who gathered at the appointed time to capitalise on the spectacle of people groveling for money, added another layer of meaning to his public intervention.

Some will argue that each example of the art of giving discussed above can be framed as either liberal altruism, or as leftist tendenzkunst, and perhaps both. The tendency argument would insist that while evidencing the `correct political tendency' the work remains at the level of representation, acting out the forms of cultural politics without providing the important political substance that would engender real change. Armed with the legacy of Marx, Engels, Walter Benjamin, Georg Lukacs, many on the left would argue that the artist /intellectual should align him/herself with the appropriate progressive or revolutionary forces within society and their representative social groups and political parties. Like Marx and Engel's critiques of Ferdinand Lasalle, each giving example could be criticised for evidencing the correct political tendency but lacking the correct engagement with its object of concern, which would necessitate an adoption of the approriate (time honoured) and normative political strategies for social change.

I believe however, that the most important strategic element of each project is the artists' insistence upon working with social reality itself rather than indirectly through various forms of representation, and this mitigates against a strong endorsement of the tendenzkunst conclusion. Lycan's exhibition is not simply another form of compassionate victim art masquerading empathetically with the disenfranchised proletariat. On the contrary, Lycan problematises the very conditions of giving as a reciprocal process within a structured economy that privileges taking, individual ownership, the profit motive and conspicuous consumption. She understands that the political economy of altruistic giving, like the corporate identity of some national and international aid organisations, churches and food banks, conforms to a "logic of practice" to use Pierre Bourdieu's description of the social habitus - "a system of structured (and) structuring dispositions, [the habitus] which is constituted in practice and is always oriented towards practical functions" (Bourdieu, 1990:53). Her Food Bank example insists that giving can be used `strategically' to further a number of identifiable life world and humanitarian goals, as well as provide some critical intervention into the ideological fabric of our culture.

Claude Levi Strauss has argued "The automatic laws of the cycle of reciprocity are the unconscious principle of the obligation to give, the obligation to return a gift and the obligation to receive" (1987:43). However, as Bourdieu argues in his critique of Levi-Strauss's structural logic of the (Maussian) law of reciprocity, in reality "the gift may remain unreciprocated." (98) For the Austrian artists, Lycan, Ellwood and to a certain extent the ceramists, the Refugee Project people and the student givers, this realisation would necessitate that the givers themselves become the first targets of conscientization. 11 Wochen Klausur, Lycan's Food Bank, The Giving Show, Ellwood's Free Money engage a logic of practice which permits an infinite variety of exchanges or gifts, challenges, ripostes and reciprocations to occur. These examples of the littoralist art are exemplary in the manner in which they creatively engage their public in conscientization and provide service of some social and cultural value. But in accordance with Bourdieu's wry observation on the politics of giving and receiving, these examples also acknowledge:

The simple possibility that things might proceed otherwise than as laid down by the `mechanical laws' of of the `cycle of reciprocity' (and that this) is sufficient to change the whole experience of practice and, by the same token its logic.(99)
In contrast to Mauss and Levi-Strauss' insistence on laws and structure in the cycle of reciprocity, of obligation and exchange, Bourdieu's logic of practice privileges individual agency, in all its unpredictability and contrariness, as the primary component of a generative model of giving (and understanding). Perhaps this logic of practice, like that promoted by Habermas himself "provides an alternative to money and power as a basis for societal integration." (Calhoun 1992:31) And without this acknowledgement of individual agency, of potential for contrariety, giving, the gift of labour, the gift of blood, and of life itself, would seem valueless.



Works Cited:

Baxandall, Lee, and Stefan Morawski (eds.), Marx and Engels on Literature and Art St Louis and Milwaukee: Telos Press, 1973.

Blackburn, Lisa and Hartom, John, Empty Bowls Project Franklin, Michigan: (self-published pamphlet), 1990.

Bourdieu, Pierre, The Logic of Practice Standford, CA: Standford University Press, 1990.

Calhoun, C. (ed) Habermas and the Public Sphere Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.

Eagleton, T. The Ideology of the Aesthetic Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

Hardin, Garrett. The limits of Altruism: An Ecologists View of Survival Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977.

Habermas, J."Consciousness raising or redemptive Criticism - the Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin" New German Critique Special Issue on Benjamin No 17, Spring 1979.

Habermas, J. Legitimation Crisis Trans. T, McCarthy, Boston: Beacon, 1979.

Habermas, J. The Theory of Communicative Action Boston: Beacon, 1984.

Habermas, J., The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity:Twelve Lectures Trans. Frederick Lawrence Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1989.

Habermas, J. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action Trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen with introduction by Thomas McCarthy, Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1990.

Hyde, Lewis, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property New York: Random House, 1983.

Mauss, Marcel The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies New York, London: Norton, 1967.

Sahlins, Marshall Stone Age Economics Chicago: Adline Publishing Co, 1972.

Thompson, J.B and Held , D., (eds) Habermas Critical Debates (including a reply to my critics by Jurgen Habermas) Cambridge Mass: MIT Press, 1982.

Willis, Paul Common Culture Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1990



1. This essay is a longer version of The Art of Giving published in Fuse Magazine, volume 19, no. 2, Winter 1996.

2. There are many historical prototypes in evidence both within western modernism and cross culturally throughout various epochs.

3. Littoral describes the intermediate and shifting zone between the sea and the land (coastal) and refers metaphorically to projects which are undertaken predominantly outside of the conventional contexts of the institutionalised artworld -lifeworld affirming as opposed to system. The first Littoral: New Zones for Critical Art Practice symposium was organised by Ian Hunter and Celia Larner of Projects Environment in Manchester England in September of 1994 and attracted artists from over 20 countries. The second Littoral symposium Chimera was organised by Neil Berecry and Adrian Hall, members of the Australian group Synapse.

4. Within the international field of Littoral art practice there are many examples including artist groups that work with people with disabilities (Co-Operations in Luxembourg), children (Projects Environment, Manchester), the environment, Ala Plastica Foundation in Argentina, ArtLink in Ireland, and as a think tank Hirsch farm project in the U.S.

5. In their individual correspondence with Lasalle regarding his drama, Marx and Engles criticised him for schillern, a propensity in his text to "Avoid... the real material issues (content) of the Revolution, which was its subject" - in other words to focus on the aesthetic form of the work at the expense of its political potential. Schillern is both a pun on the German word for describing, and the name of the writer Friedrich von Schiller, who tended to proivilege aesthetic form and the plight of the tragic individual over the collective tragedy. Both Marx and Engels suggested that Lasalle's tragedy would have been more realistic and therefore more politically efficacious had he taken Shakespeare as his model and not Schiller.( Rose, M.,1984:94) Marx's critique of Eugene Sue was more pointed: comparing Sue to a bad painter who must label his painting to say what it represents, Marx accused him of producing the "most wretched offal of socialist literature." Baxandall and Morawksi: 1973:119)

6. (and also, implicitly, Adorno's)

7. The Benjamin quotations in Habermas' essay are from Reflections ed. Peter Demetz N.Y. (1978)

8. As Habermas argued in Legitimation Crisis (1975) the system has penetrated deeply into the lifeworld, progressively reorganising its practices in accord with its own rationalising, systematising and bureaucratic logic. The instrumentalising of human activity, he posited, destroys the possibilities of democratic participation in social interaction and political decision making.

9. Frederike Klotz, Martina Chmelarz, Anne Schneider, Gudrun Wagner, Marion Holy, Christoph Kaltenbrunner and Wolfgang Zinggl.

10. Presentation by Katherina Lenz, Littoral Conference,

Manchester Septemebre 1994

11. Pamphlet "Art and Social Intervention" September 1994

12. Katharina Lenz, Presentation, Manchester September 1994

13. Littoral Symposium booklet (1995)

14. 14.An earlier Lycan exhibit employed a similar participation process, this time used to gather house plant cuttings from London, Ontario residents for exhibition in a local gallery.

15. The Mail Star, Halifax, February 4 1995

16. Within the history of modernist art there are many works which employ money as a medium, enough in fact to construct a genre which would include its own canoninical examples such as Marcel Duchamp's Janzc Cheque ( ) a work in payment for some dental work, Robert Morris's U.S. Dollar Covered Brain ( )and Gerald Ferguson's One Million Pennies ( ).

17. A Booleian keyword search which I undertook at the Dalhousie University library while writing this paper, turned up 334 items with Giving in the title, with about a third of these texts related to the Christian ideals of self-less giving - focusing upon the Biblical maxim "give and ye shall receive."

copied from: http://www.imageandtext.org.nz/bruce_work_squat_essays.html

Relational Aesthetics

The term 'relational aesthetics' was coined in 1996 by French theorist and curator Nicolas Bourriaud to characterize artistic practice in the 1990s. In his book of the same title, Bourriaud aims to identify and characterise what is distinctive in contemporary European art in the 1990s, as compared to that of previous decades.

Bourriaud wishes to approach art in a way that ceases ‘to take shelter behind Sixties art history’, and instead seeks to offer different criteria by which to analyse the often opaque and open-ended works of art of the 1990s. To achieve this, Bourriaud imports the language of the 1990s internet boom, using terminology such as ‘user-friendliness’, ‘interactivity’ and ‘do-it-yourself’. Indeed, in Postproduction (2000), Bourriaud describes Relational Aesthetics as a book addressing works that take as their point of departure the changing mental space opened by the internet.

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." [3]
A relational artist might, for example, convert a gallery space into a temporary stand for serving coffee, with the addition of background music, suitable lighting, books to read, and comfortable chairs. The artwork here consists of creating 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."

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 intersubjective encounters. Through these encounters, meaning is elaborated collectively, rather than in the space of individual consumption. Bourriaud believes this collective encounter can be both democratic and microtopian. These intersubjective encounters may literally take place – in the artist’s production of the work, or in the viewer’s reception of it – or exist hypothetically, as a potential outcome of our encounter with a given piece.

Bourriaud contrasts relational art with art that asserts an independent and private symbolic space’. Relational art is thus conceived as the inverse of the privatised space of modernism as articulated differently by Clement Greenberg and Rosalind Krauss: rather than a discrete, portable, autonomous work of art that transcends its context, relational art beholden to the contingencies of its environment and audience. In some manifestations of this art, such as the performance-installations of Rirkrit Tiravanija, viewers are addressed as a social entity, and are even given the wherewithal to form a new community, however provisional or utopian.

the above is copied from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relational_Aesthetics

For a sample text by Bourriaud see:

http://www.creativityandcognition.com/blogs/legart/wp-content/uploads/2006/07/Borriaud.pdf.

Installation art

Installation art uses sculptural materials and other media to modify the way we experience a particular space. Installation art is not necessarily confined to gallery spaces and can be any material intervention in everyday public or private spaces.
Installation art incorporates almost any media to create an experience in a particular environment. Materials used in contemporary installation art range from everyday and natural materials to new media such as video, sound, performance, computers and the internet. Some installations are site-specific in that they are designed to only exist in the space for which they were created.

This genre of contemporary art came to prominence in the 1970s. Many trace the roots of this form of art to earlier artists such as Marcel Duchamp and his use of the readymade or to Kurt Schwitters' Merz art objects, rather than more traditional craft based sculpture. The intention of the artist is paramount in much later installation art whose roots lie in the conceptual art of the 1960s. This again is a departure from traditional sculpture which places its focus on form. Early non-Western installation art includes events staged by the Gutai group in Japan starting in 1954, which influenced American installation pioneers like Allan Kaprow.

Installation as nomenclature for a specific form of art came into use fairly recently; its first use as documented by the OED was in 1969. It was coined in this context in reference to a form of art that had arguably existed since prehistory but was not regarded as a discrete category until the mid-twentieth century. Allan Kaprow used the term “Environment” in 1958 to describe his transformed indoor spaces; this later joined such terms as “project art” and “temporary art.”

Essentially, installation/environmental art takes into account the viewer’s entire sensory experience, rather than floating framed points of focus on a “neutral” wall or displaying isolated objects (literally) on a pedestal. This leaves space and time as its only dimensional constants. This implies dissolution of the line between art and life; Kaprow noted that “if we bypass ‘art’ and take nature itself as a model or point of departure, we may be able to devise a different kind of art… out of the sensory stuff of ordinary life”

Interactive installation is a branch off the installation arts category. Usually, an interactive installation will often involve the audience acting on it or the piece responding to the user’s activity. There are several kinds of interactive installations produced, these include web-based installations, gallery based installations, digital based installations, electronic based installations, etc. Interactive installations are mostly seen from the 1990s, when artists are more interested in the participation of the audiences where the meaning of the installation is generated.

With the improvement of technology over the years, artists are more able to explore out of the boundaries that were never be able to explore by artists in the past. The media used are more experimental and bold; they are also usually cross media and may involve sensors, which plays on the reaction to the audiences’ movement when looking at the installations. By using virtual Reality as a medium, immersive art is probably the most deeply interactive form of art. At the turn of a new century, there is a trend of interactive installations using video, film, sound and sculpture.

the above copied from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Installation_art

for more information see:

http://www.installationart.net/

http://www.inside-installations.org/project/index.php

http://www.artandculture.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/ACLive.woa/wa/movement?id=1024

http://thinkingpractices.wordpress.com/theory/1-the-shifting-roles-of-artist-and-audience/11-installation-art-beyond-the-object/

Land and Environmental Art

The term Environmental art is used in two different senses.

The term can be used generally to refer to art dealing with ecological issues and/or the natural environment, by
raising awareness of the fragility of nature (includes landscape-based photography, painting, drawing, book-works and site-specific art) investigating natural phenomena (includes scientific illustration as well as interdisciplinary art practices)
using natural materials gathered outdoors (such as twigs, leaves, stones, soil, feathers; which is often called Nature Art)
not contributing to environmental degradation (includes ‘green’ work made from bio-degradable or recycled materials; & ‘Eco sculpture’ which is sensitively integrated into a natural habitat) The term is also used to refer variously to Site-specific art or to Environmental sculpture, which are often used to create work which is 'environmental' in the former sense, but can also relate to other aspects of their 'environment', such as the formal, the political, the historical, or the social context.
It is possible to trace the growth of environmental art as a 'movement', beginning in the late 1960s or the 1970s. In its early phases it was most associated with sculpture — especially Site-specific art, Land art and Arte povera — having arisen out of mounting criticism of traditional sculptural forms and practices which were increasingly seen as outmoded and potentially out of harmony with the natural environment. The category now encompasses many media

In identifying Environmental art a crucial cut needs to be made between artists who damage the environment, and those who intend to cause no harm to nature, indeed, their work might involve restoring the immediate landscape to a natural state. For example, despite its aesthetic merits, the American artist Robert Smithson’s celebrated sculpture Spiral Jetty (1969) involved inflicting considerable permanent damage upon the landscape he worked with. The landscape became a form of wasteground, Smithson using a bulldozer to scrape and cut the land, impinging upon the lake. Art was effectively a form of pollution inflicted on the environment. This Environmental Art also raised awareness of the importance in recycling materials.
The sacredness of nature and the natural environment is often evident in the work of Environmental Artists. Chris Drury instituted a work entitled "Medicine Wheel" which was the fruit and result of a daily meditative walk, once a day, for a calendar year. The deliverable of this work was a mandala of mosaiced found objects: nature art as process art.

Indeed, such criticism was raised against the European sculptor Christo when he temporarily wrapped the coastline at Little Bay, south of Sydney, Australia, in 1969. Local conservationists staged a protest, arguing that the work was ecologically irresponsible and adversely affecting the local environment, especially the birds that nested in the wrapped cliffs. Complaints were only heightened when several penguins and a seal became trapped under the fabric and had to be cut out. Conservationists' comments attracted international attention in environmental circles, and lead contemporary artists in the region to re-think the inclinations of Land art and Site-specific art.

In comparison, a committed Environmental artist such as the British sculptor Richard Long has for several decades made temporary outdoor sculptural work by rearranging natural materials found on the site, such as rocks, mud and branches, and which will therefore have no lingering detrimental affect. While leading Environmental artists such as the Dutch sculptor Herman de Vries, the Australian sculptor John Davis and the British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy similarly leave the landscape they have worked with unharmed, and in some cases have in the process of making their work revegetated with appropriate indigenous flora land that had been damaged by human use. In this way the work of art arises out of a sensitivity towards habitat.

Alan Sonfist, with his first historical Time Landscape sculpture, proposed to New York City in 1965, visible to this day at the corner of Houston and LaGuardia in New York City’s Greenwich Village, introduced the key environmentalist idea of bringing nature back into the urban environment. Today Sonfist is joining forces with the broad enthusiasm for environmental and green issues among public authorities and private citizens to propose a network of such sites across the metropolitan area, which will raise consciousness of the key role that nature will play in the challenges of the 21st century.

Probably the most celebrated instance of Environmental art in the late 20th century was 7000 Oaks, an ecological protest staged at Documenta during 1982 by Joseph Beuys, in which the artist and his assistants highlighted the condition of the local environment by attempting to reafforest polluted and damaged land with 7000 oak trees. In the last two decades significant environmentally-concerned work has also been made by Rosalie Gascoigne, who fashioned her serene sculptures from rubbish and junk she found discarded in rural areas, Patrice Stellest, who created big installations with junk, but also pertinent items collected around the world and solar energy mechanisms, and John Wolseley, who hikes through remote regions, gathering visual and scientific data, then incorporates visual and other information into complex wall-scale works on paper. Environmental art or Green art by Washington, DC based glass sculptor Erwin Timmers incorporates some of the least recycled building materials; window glass.

above copied from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_art

for more information see:

http://greenmuseum.org/what_is_ea.php

http://www.studiotara.net/ecoart/

http://www.daringdesigns.com/earthworks.htm